Ramen Weather at Toki Underground

It’s a snowy morning in Baltimore as flurries drift down from a grey sky and melt gracefully into the not-yet-cold enough surfaces. I enter into the warmth of Toki Underground and am greeted by owner Jeff Jetton. “This is perfect ramen weather,” he says as we look out the steam-covered windows. Greenmount Avenue bustles with morning traffic.

I spot an off-leash dog wandering in front of the liquor store across the street, the only other business on this block. The Harwood Community Garden, typically active in warmer weather, sits vacant this morning. The stretch from 27th to 28th Street is mostly residential, which begs the question, why did the well-known DC restaurant pick such an obscure location for its second shop?

Two big pots of ramen broth boil on the stovetop in the open kitchen and release mouthfuls of steam into the restaurant. Executive Chef Olivier Caillabet shares that the broth never stops cooking with ingredients added to each pot throughout the day as needed. It’s a continuous cycle. Toki Underground’s tonkotsu, or pork-based broth, consumes 300 lbs of pig feet weekly. The secret to the unctuous broth is breaking down the collagen in a slow and steady boil, a process that takes between 10-12 hours.

“I took all our ramen and moved to a salt base instead of soy,” Caillabet says. A former wildlife conservationist turned chef, his approach to food is mindful and inclusive. The ramen restaurant has soy-free, gluten-free, and vegan options, and they are all done well. Caillabet recently reworked the vegan shio broth after a visit to Thailand with his wife last year. He describes the preparation in detail while I sip it in delight.

“It’s charred carrot and onion base,” Caillabet explains the construction of the vegan mushroom broth in his Irish accent. “We add sofrito, stewed pear, onion, garlic, and then we add in the toum.” Toum, a new ingredient for me, is a Lebanese whipped garlic spread that gives the broth an incredibly luscious mouthfeel. “So, the whipped garlic, then mushroom salt, and a little oil, chili oil, and sesame oil,” he says proudly of the newly vegan and soy-free broth.

To finish, they add braised and fortified mushrooms that have a juicy and meaty texture. “It’s the best vegan ramen around these parts,” he claims.

We shifted over to this kind of izekaya-ramen hybrid concept as a way to attract more people, provide more opportunities for vegetarians, and add a little bit more seasonality as well.

Chef Olivier Caillabet

Caillabet, an Ireland native, honed his culinary skills in his father’s French restaurant before going to Trinity College and Oxford to study wildlife preservation. Years of policy work with the World Wildlife Federation led him to southeast Asia where he monitored the exotic animal trade. “I had a budget for food and there were lots of animals I could have eaten [but] I could never eat tiger. It’s supposedly not that good anyways,” he jokes.

He joined Toki Underground in 2015, four years after the ramen restaurant was credited with kicking off the ramen explosion in DC. During his tenure he worked his way up from line cook to partner and executive chef.

Toki Underground, founded by Taiwanese American chef Erik Bruner-Yang, boasted a simple menu with five ramen dishes, steam buns, dumplings, and pickles. “There was a lot more interest in vegetarian dishes, vegan dishes, and non-pork dishes. We shifted over to this kind of izakaya-ramen hybrid concept as a way to attract more people, provide more opportunities for vegetarians, and add a little bit more seasonality as well,” Caillabet shares of his menu after Burner-Yang’s departure from the project in 2016.

“I bought an old boat, like a shell of a boat,” Jetton says. “I have been meaning to restore it, but I needed a place to store it, [and] I ended up storing it next door to here,” he shares of their journey from DC to Baltimore. Bottoms Up Bagels had recently vacated the Greenmount Ave restaurant space, and the owners were looking for a new tenant.

“I was pretty familiar with this area,” Jetton says. “We must have 20 friends who live within a four-block radius of here.” The Harwood neighborhood spans a few city blocks and is sandwiched between more well-known neighbors Waverly, Better Waverly, Abell, and Charles Village.

“It’s sort of smack in the middle of the city. It was a good opportunity, and we really liked the space,” Jetton says, explaining their decision to expand into a second location. “We quickly discovered that the layout of a bagel shop and the layout of a ramen restaurant are different. We had to do some significant rearrangement and redesign.”

He says their biggest challenge in the DC location has always been its capacity. “We have a 26-seat restaurant and there are significant challenges with having a restaurant that small,” he says. At the start, the Baltimore location only offered 28 seats with its current configuration, disqualifying the restaurant from a Class B liquor license which requires a minimum of 75 seats. They needed to radically think about how to redesign the space to add seats, or the plan to expand would never work.

The solution took some creativity from designer and partner Christophe Richard. “We brought Christophe in as the designer [on another project] and it was so good that we thought, we got to make this guy an offer he can’t refuse to become a partner,” Jetton shares. “He lived in Japan for three years. He’s a ramen expert. I mean, there was just all this synergy,” Jetton continues.

Richard, son of world-renowned French chef Michel Richard, is the visionary designer behind Toki Underground and The Dugout, Peabody Heights’ newly opened arcade. It was Richard’s idea to expand the restaurant seating into the alley outside. “It was just a breezeway, I guess it’s called, or an alley. We worked with the landlord to cover that and create a new indoor space,” Jetton states. The expansion includes covered interior space and an outdoor seating element effectively creating a 100-seat restaurant when all seating is available.

“The challenge has been signage,” Jetton laments. Baltimore City signage rules prohibit rooftop signage on certain zoned buildings. Jetton engaged with the community at the Waverly Planning Committee and worked with Councilperson Odette Ramos to draft an appeal to the Zoning Committee that was denied. The duo settled for hanging the sign on the adjacent building facing southbound traffic on Greenmount Ave. “The day that we put it up, people started coming in because they saw this. That was validation of everything we’ve been saying,” Jetton says.

What we did from the start was engage local artists and local craftspeople. This place is built locally.

Jeff Jetton

Jetton is a designer with a hospitality, finance, and advertising background and describes himself as a “thought leader.” He maintains a role as Chief Creative Officer at Oxcart Assembly, a digital content collective, and was excited to incorporate local artists into the design at Toki Underground. “What we did from the start was engage local artists and local craftspeople. This place is built locally,” he boasts a roster of 45 local artisans. “We just hired as many people as we could to create. This is a little bit of an art museum in here, and it started to build a kind of community,” he shares.

Chef Loren Rodriguez hurries by with a pan of fresh smoked pork belly just pulled from the smoker in the alley. The mesquite-smoked pork rolls, gracefully bound in butcher’s twine, will become chasu for the Toki Classic and Mala Garlic Tonkotsu Ramen. The Berkshire pork is rubbed in a sansho-salt cure and smoked before being thinly sliced and added on top of ramen or used in cocktail service. A hand-torched slice of chasu is added as a fun addition to the Toki Monster cocktail, their take on an old-fashioned with fat-washed Japanese whiskey and wasabi syrup for spice.

“Ramen is one of the few Japanese foods that isn’t as restricted by tradition and culture as others. There’s a lot more room for a variety or variations,” Caillabet shares. Ramen, one of Japan’s national dishes, evolved from the Chinese dish Shina soba and was heavily influenced by both Chinese immigrants to Japan and the US occupation following World War II.

In George Solt’s book The Untold History of Ramen, he explores the root causes that created the dish’s popularity boom, including post-war rations, black market commerce, and American propaganda. “The rise in the availability of ramen was an emblematic part of a broad and drastic shift toward American foodstuffs (wheat, meat, and dairy) among people in Japan…The increased availability of wheat flour-based foods was largely the result of American efforts to export Oregonian wheat to Japan and Japanese bureaucrats’ efforts to absorb the wheat by spreading American nutritional science to Japanese housewives.”

More wheat and less rice combined with industrialization, occupation, and the need for “stamina-foods” created an amalgam of cultures all clamoring for an affordable and filling bowl of ramen from stalls and yatai, or pushcart vendors. In post-war Japan, allotted ration packs were under 1100 calories a day. Undernourishment created a need to source supplemental calories from black markets around the country where ramen was often served illegally. Accounts of hungry citizens being arrested in black markets under the US occupation tell the complexity of ramen’s history and showcase its influence as a staple in the Japanese diet.

Building community has been equally important to the Toki Underground team as serving and perfecting ramen.

Nani Ferreira-Mathews

Toki Underground’s ramen offerings span the globe of flavors and spice mixtures from Lebanon (toum garlic spread), China (mala Szechuan pepper blend), and India (curry). The touch of international influence also seeps into other parts of the Toki menu. The pickle plate, a trio of pickled vegetables, showcases three pickling styles from Japan and Mexico, an addition incorporated by Mexican-born Chef Loren.

The menu is playful and delivers Japanese classics. The Cloud Shrimp is a simple tempura preparation served with Kewpie mayonnaise. The Okonomiyaki Brussel Sprouts pay homage to takoyaki. They replace the traditional octopus-filled donuts, but the toppings are the same: bonito flakes, seaweed, barbeque sauce, and mayonnaise. Each bite is a cloud of seaweed, deliciously complex with sweetness, umami, and vegetal goodness that makes you feel okay eating spoonfuls of mayonnaise.

The Tokyo Curry Chicken Ramen is my favorite. The broth is simple, rich, and feels like eating an elevated packet of instant ramen with chicken nuggets. The curry adds depth that reminds you that you’re an adult, while still feeling the playfulness and nostalgia for simple childhood pleasures.

Building community has been equally important to the Toki Underground team as serving and perfecting ramen. Collaborations with other businesses are hefty and include Peabody Heights, Wet City, Sagamore Rye, and Grey Wolf Distillery. Their recent beer collaborations with Peabody Heights include a yuzu gose with matcha and ginger and an upcoming persimmon soba session IPA.

The crew is made up of locals and they work with Redesigning Minds, a local psychiatric rehabilitation program, to assist with youth job placement. The night I eat there, their tenured GM Brendan moves advertently through the rooms. A dog brushes against my chair. People come and go, draping jackets over chairs and sitting close. Chef Loren works in her 4×4 square foot area with precision. Ramen noodles drip from their baskets to bowls. Drinks go on the pass and get picked up behind us on a winter evening. The flow of service moves like the breath and gives abundant space for guests to connect unencumbered by flash or exhibition.

Since opening in 2023, Jetton and Caillabet have both moved to Baltimore permanently. They have become active members of Harwood Community Association meetings and commissioned four large-scale murals in the neighborhood. Caillabet invites me to his wife’s upcoming studio opening, artist Emon Surakitkoson, in Greektown. Jetton shares a harrowing story of being mugged near his new home in Fells Point earlier that week. The two are fully invested in Baltimore, which warms as much as the ramen they serve.