Oh Man! Ramen Off and Running With Encino Lunch Pop-Up

Though lunch has officially started for the long-awaited Oh Man! Ramen in Encino, you shouldn’t expect a regular dinner service any time soon. The restaurant itself is still very much under construction, with an arrival time pegged for sometime in the next month or so.

In the meantime, folks looking for a taste of what’s to come from Luke Reyes’ ramen operation have been heading into Scratch Bar, the sister restaurant next door from partner Phillip Frankland Lee. The menu so far includes everything from a fried chicken sandwich to a couple of bowls of signature ramen, with some pork belly buns and octopus rice bowls thrown in for good measure. The opening lunch menu is below.

Looks like yesterday’s first official day went rather smoothly for Reyes and company, though at one point chef Jacob Kear — he of the Amular Project pop-up who at one point was pegged to come onboard Japanese dining temple Shibumi before that fell apart — stopped by himself and found the menu for the place a little lacking. Like, the literal menu, which was riddled with more than a few early typos that Kear didn’t take kindly to, posting a less-than-nice missive on Facebook about the whole thing that also took shots at chef Luke Reyes himself.

Naturally Reyes took to Instagram to reply directly, calling out Kear’s nasty use of Facebook instead of contacting any member of staff directly. Reyes also says:

As a chef, I would think you’d be someone who should understand what hard work it is to open a restaurant, even if it is a pop-up lunch

Yikes. Who knows where things will go from here, but Reyes says the misspellings on the menu have been fixed, and he "will be here continuing to work and learn and trying to give a great experience to our guests." So it goes.

Your live lunch look-in at Oh Man! Ramen is running weekdays only at the moment, from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. out of the Scratch Bar space, with a full opening in their own space sometime by the end of the year. Just don’t comment on the menu.