With several ramen-focused restaurants already opened or scheduled to do so in the coming months, 2016 is shaping up to be St. Louis’ year of ramen. This week, I visit a spot where the Japanese noodle soup is one of many dishes and another where it’s the sole focus.

Robata ★★

Robata’s ramen brims with so many additions you might think the cook dumped another dish on top of your soup. There are tender slices of char-siu pork, of course, and the two halves of a soft-boiled egg. Chopped scallions bob alongside bamboo shoots and a tangle of bean sprouts. There is nori, wood-ear mushroom and, the final garnish, what look like saffron threads but are actually strands of red ginger.

I surveyed this impressive spread in my bowl of tonkotsu ramen ($8.95) and then ignored it and went straight for the glossy, milky broth.

The broth, made from pork bones boiled for 15 hours, slicks the springy noodles and tastes deeply, purely of pork. (Robata currently imports its noodles from Japan but will soon also offer noodles from St. Louis’ own Midwest Pasta.) This might not be life-changing ramen, but it is satisfying. If this weren’t the year of ramen in St. Louis, its presence on this 5-month-old Maplewood restaurant’s menu of sushi, yakitori and other Japanese fare might have qualified as a surprise. Instead, I ordered it on my first visit here.

The real surprise is how many different dishes Robata is able to serve out of its cramped galley kitchen. If I didn’t tell you now, you probably could have guessed that it occupies a former fast-food restaurant — specifically, a Church’s Chicken. The building’s design and small footprint are obvious clues. If you call in a to-go order, you can pick it up from the old drive-thru window.

Thom Chantharasy, who owns Robata with his wife, Emily, previously operated the Tower Grove East sushi restaurant Sekisui, and about half of Robata’s menu is dedicated to nigiri, sashimi and rolls. My order of nigiri displayed some sloppy knife work — though the chef did at least err on the side of portioning the fish generously — but each fish’s flavor was clean and true, and the rice was properly seasoned. Of the elaborate rolls, I liked the Alli ($9.50): a mix of spicy tuna, crawfish, avocado and tempura bits inside; shrimp, hot sauce and jalapeño on top. Its chile heat is even more ferocious than those components might suggest.

It might be best to consider Robata a sort of izakaya and build a shared snacking meal from a little of this sushi and a little of that fried fare from the extensive appetizer selection. I’d go for the kara-age, tender, crisp fried chicken morsels topped with teriyaki sauce ($4.99). The fried squid legs ($5.99) are appealingly plump, but my order was too chewy.

Definitely include a few skewers from the yakitori menu. Yakitori technically refers only to chicken, though here and many other places it’s used for skewers in general: beef, pork, seafood and vegetables. At any rate, chicken thigh with green onion ($2.75) is a fine introduction to Robata’s yakitori. Cooked on a modified gas grill rather than over the traditional charcoal, it delivers just the right note of char whether you choose the simple shiro (salt and pepper) seasoning or a tare marinade. Even better is the beef tongue ($3.95), which delivers the pleasant, juicy chew and intensely beefy flavor of a hanger steak or similar “lesser” cut.

If the year of ramen has already exhausted your appetite for tonkotsu ramen, opt instead for the miso ($8.95), a golden, umami-rich chicken broth that still manages to be relatively light on the palate. Its accompaniments are the same as, and just as impressive as, the tonkotsu’s.

Where Robata, 7260 Manchester Road, Maplewood • Two stars out of four • More info 314-899-9595; robatamaplewood.com • Menu Sushi, yakitori, ramen and more Japanese fare • Hours Dinner Monday-Saturday

Nami Ramen ★

Clearly, a great deal of planning went into Nami Ramen, which opened in January in Clayton. The restaurant’s design is sleek, an attractive, brightly lighted box with blond-wood tables. Its logo and wall-mounted menu is as precisely branded as your favorite fast-casual restaurant — and, in fact, Nami does follow the fast-casual model.

More interestingly, owner Jason Jan, who also founded the FroYo frozen-yogurt chain, spent two months in Yokohama, Japan, to further his ramen studies, and with the exception of a few rice bowls and appetizers (bao, gyoza, kara age), ramen is the sole focus of this, his first restaurant.

That intensity of focus, paired with not-inexpensive prices, is why I found my visits here especially vexing. The Nami Signature Tonkotsu Ramen ($13.80) looks the part: a big bowl of steaming, cloudy pork broth with char-siu pork, nori, a soft-boiled egg, bamboo shoots, scallions, wood-ear mushroom and corn. A lot of corn. Now, corn isn’t an unheard-of addition to ramen — Robata offers it, too — but here its dull, buttery sweetness overwhelmed the dish, as if the kitchen had poured the liquid from a can of corn into the broth.

Jan told me he likes to add corn to ramen for the vibrancy it brings to the soup’s color. But in the chicken katsu ramen ($14), as with the signature tonkotsu, the corn’s flavor wallpapered over the broth’s chicken essence. The chicken katsu itself (a breaded, fried cutlet) is served on the side.

The ramen improves somewhat with flavored oils or chiles. The Roasted Black Garlic Tonkotsu ($14.10) doses the pork broth with sharply flavored, lingering mayu (black-garlic oil). Chile heat and a hint of lemon spark the Jigoku Ramen ($14.50), though the umami richness promised by the inclusion of red miso was absent.

The Seafood Ramen ($16.80) brings you to Japan by way of Italy by way of San Francisco: a roasted-tomato broth with shreds of crab meat and accents of garlic and lemon zest. That the most complete ramen here is also the least ramen-like is certainly a surprise, if not necessarily one that owner or diner would welcome.

Where Nami Ramen, 46 North Central Avenue, Clayton • One star out of four • More info 314-833-6264; namiramen.com • Menu Several variations on ramen • Hours Lunch and dinner daily

★ Fair ★★ Good ★★★ Excellent ★★★★ Extraordinary

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