Leading up to September's Best of Dallas® 2017 issue, we're sharing (in no particular order) our 100 Favorite Dishes, the Dallas entrées, appetizers and desserts that really stuck with us this year.
When it arrives in the table, it already feels like a treat: a steamy bowl of color and texture, yellow corn and bright green scallions and the rich orange of a runny egg yolk, all of it set against a dark, rich liquid swirling with puddles of black garlic oil.
The tonkotsu kuro ramen at Ichiro Ramen Shop on Maple is a bowl of pure umami, a soul-warming exploration of comfort. Sweet corn, napa cabbage, green onion, seaweed and half a soft-boiled egg swim in the magical broth alongside fatty pork belly, but it's the addition of black garlic oil drizzled on top that really makes this dish sing. The menu at Ichiro is small, which is all the better; we've been back three times and have yet to stray from the tonkotsu kuro, and that's not likely to change on our next three visits, either.