The past is always over and the future never comes.

And yet we spend so much time living in the fictive worlds inside our heads, anxious about tomorrow while pining for some simpler sepia-toned past — before social media timelines, Netflix queues and news tickers without end.

At least hunger always demands our attention, forcing us back to the present despite other distractions.

Did you know that momentarily quelling your existential morass can be as simple as slurping some springy noodles? You can’t check your phone when you’ve got a pair of chopsticks in one hand and a soup spoon in the other, a big bowl of flavorful broth steaming your pores open.

That’s the conceit behind Ima (“ee-ma”), the scrappy Corktown udon noodle sensation that recently unveiled a more fully realized version of itself in Madison Heights, where udon is augmented by creative ramen riffs and rice bowls you could eat every day for a healthier, happier, overall better life. (I can attest: As of this writing, my last three meals have all been from Ima.)

“Ima in Japanese kanji means ‘now’, as in ‘in the moment,’ ” chef-owner Michael Ransom says of his hit restaurant's name.

“My philosophy behind the ‘now’ thing is that food is an escape. When you’re sitting down at a table with great food and great people … nothing else matters. It’s kind of an escape from reality a little bit. It’s that break in the middle of your day or night that really does allow time to stand still.”

With Ima, Ransom has seized the larger culinary moment as well.

Recipe:

Make Ima's Sake Steamed Clams at home

Both locations contain all the hallmarks of a trendy, chef-driven spot, where each dish is carefully sourced, thoughtfully constructed and colorfully presented by friendly staff in a minimalist space blaring electronic music; where French techniques underpin au courant Japanese and Korean flavors and ingredients that the classically trained chef grew up on.

But fine-dining Ima decidedly is not, instead riding the current wave of fast-casual service that’s almost necessary to turn a profit in a mid-priced restaurant where two people can enjoy apps, entrees and drinks for less than $50. Food of this gourmet quality is rarely this affordable.

And by design Ima offers plenty of options for the numerous restrictive diets Americans increasingly follow, a nod to the chef’s own vegetarian past.

Ransom has organically grown his focused concept into two popular locations by concentrating on quality, value and consistency, all approached with a light hand that encourages repeat visits from rabid devotees.

Ima may mean now, but it also paints a properly executed vision of our counter-service hereafter — a model for how to make this broken industry work for everyone. It is both a representation of our dining future done right and a remarkable distillation of the current culinary zeitgeist.

That’s why Ima,with locations in Corktown and Madison Heights, is the 2019 Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Restaurant of the Year.

The long road to Corktown

Ima wasn’t supposed to happen. At least not the way it did.

Ransom, 42, had originally been in talks more than a decade ago to open a restaurant in Detroit with a sushi chef friend.

“Believe it or not, it was going to be an eel restaurant and probably would not have done very well,” Ransom concedes with a chuckle. “We decided that we weren't ready to open a restaurant, which is probably a blessing in disguise.”

Instead, like so many ambitious cooks of his generation, Ransom left his home state of Michigan, seeking wider horizons and opportunity out west.

Born outside of Traverse City to back-to-the-land hippies and raised partially on a commune in Tennessee, Ransom spent his early years foraging for mushrooms in Michigan forests and eating a miso and tofu-heavy diet passed down by his vegetarian folks. After the family moved to East Lansing, he spent his teenage years washing dishes at an Italian restaurant before a promotion to cooking.

But Ransom’s true passion was electronic music, and the underground warehouse party scene of 1990s Detroit that he and his friends were driving to every weekend pulled him to move to the city in 1999.

By 2006, the part-time DJ and full-time cook started experiencing painful ringing in his ears and other hearing problems. It was time to pivot.

When the eel restaurant fell through, Ransom doubled-down on his professional growth by enrolling in culinary school at Chicago’s Kendall College.

“I was a little bit depressed because I couldn't focus on the music anymore,” Ransom recalls. “And that was kind of the easiest way to deal with it — to remove myself from it and focus my energy somewhere else.”

By that point, he’d been cooking most of his adult life to support his musical ambitions. And, as with music, cooking meant employing creativity and technique to bring something into the world that didn’t already exist.

Ransom left Detroit for culinary school fully intending to return a couple years later, but it would be a decade before his homecoming.

After Chicago, he spent four years in San Francisco running kitchens for boutique hotels. In 2014, Kimpton, the group he worked for at the time, transferred him to Baltimore. Kimpton bounced him from property to property, constantly pulling in another direction just as things had started to gel.

“Working for boutique hotel groups is very transient because you end up being like a mercenary,” he says. “I was there to open restaurants and rebrand them and then move to another one and I felt like a pawn in a way. And I knew that I didn't have control over my destiny. I knew I would have a job, but I didn't really have a place that I could dig in and call home.”

Ransom finally quit Kimpton and moved back to Detroit in 2016 with the intent of opening an izakaya, the Japanese-style gastropub that’s suddenly all the rage around town. He’d written a business plan and via the Motor City Match program had been paired with a developer who had a location for him near McNichols and Livernois.

Then the space hit development delays. Having quit his well-paying management-level job for a dream, Ransom instead found himself unemployed in Detroit, crashing at a married buddy’s house while his izakaya plans slowly slipped away.

“I started freaking out, essentially, and started talking to some real estate agents around town,” he says.

As Ransom tells it, the owner of Rubbed sandwich shop saw him talking to a real estate agent he knew and approached him afterward, offering up the recently shuttered 900-square-foot space on Michigan Avenue. Eager to do something — anything! — Ransom bit.

At a third of the size of the planned izakaya, the space dictated some necessary conceptual changes. Goodbye hibachi grill, goodbye fryers and sushi and ramen and most everything else.

“When we lost the original location, my dad would say that ‘it doesn't matter what we have, we just need a window for you to throw noodles out of. It doesn't have to be fancy,’” Ransom says. “And he was always telling me to keep things lean and to be frugal and to not get too grandiose in my desires and equipment needs. So Corktown was definitely a beta, and it allowed things to evolve.”

Ima debuted during the final quiet days of 2016 with a tight menu of udon noodles, a couple appetizers and a few rice bowls (including one with Ransom’s prized barbecue eel).

It was supposed to be a quiet opening. And maybe it was for a couple of days. But it didn’t take long for word to get out about the happening new noodle bar that blasted electronic music and served toothsome udon aloft in some of the best broths around.

A beta blows up

I had my first taste of Ima on January 11, 2017, just two weeks after it opened for dinner-only service sans liquor license with room for 30 diners at mostly communal seating. To put it plainly: It was something of a hole-in-the-wall, diners slurping noodles elbow-to-elbow.

I ordered the spicy pork udon, which to this day remains the Corktown location’s best seller, its bright red broth forever burned in the memory of anyone who’s had it.

The dish gets its name from its main protein, a nitrate-free, naturally smoked pork loin that soaks up the poultry-based broth full of miso and roasted garlic oil.

It’s not the type of pork you’d generally see at a more traditional Japanese noodle bar, but Ransom isn’t trying to be traditional at Ima, instead filtering flavors through his New American lens while maintaining their integrity. His aim is to honor, not upend.

And in a 60-seat spot that can serve 500 bowls on a busy day, consistency is paramount.

"I don’t want to add something to the menu if it can’t be replicable and enjoyed the same way every time,” he says, explaining why he eschews the more common chashu-style pork belly, which can have varying fat levels. “And mostly I don’t want to have my staff deal with that many variables. I really like to have things dialed in and be able to know it’s going to be the same for the guest every time. And also I don’t necessarily think people need all that fat.”

But broth is the soul of noodle soups, and that soul is what really sets Ima apart.

Like a true ramen hero, Ransom closely guards the secrets to his stocks, which are all pork-free and thus both lighter and healthier than the more ubiquitous pork tonkatsu variety.

“I went through a lot of points in my career where I embraced a lot of heavy meat preparations,” he says. “But I feel like it made more sense to go with a little lighter approach at Ima. And I think more than anything it’s because this is the food I want to eat every day. If it was a tonkatsu pork broth, I probably wouldn’t feel great at the end of the week. But I also wanted to respect the fact that a lot of vegetarians and people who don’t eat pork don’t have a lot of options when they go to a Japanese or Asian restaurant.”

His favorite class in culinary school was the one called Soups and Stocks, and he obviously paid close attention, noting that part of his secret is knowing when and in what order to add aromatics.

One not so closely guarded secret: The poultry-based broths at Ima combine a traditional Japanese dashi and chicken stock boosted by collagen-rich chicken feet.

“Collagen gives the broth body and mouthfeel and richness but it’s also a vehicle for all the aromatics that we use, for all the mushrooms and bonito and onion and seaweed,” he says. “All that stuff gets encapsulated in all those molecules of collagen, which end up being a vehicle. It helps coat your tongue. It slows down the distribution. And it also is really satisfying. It gives you that comfy richness, but it’s also really good for you.”

The end result is like a dressed-up chicken noodle soup with a more unctuous mouthfeel.

Ransom’s vegan varieties — a vegan pho and a dish called forest udon — are no slouches either, each receiving a healthy dose of umami from extra seaweed and a carefully selected blend of mushrooms.

“I always try to make vegetarian dishes more bold than the rest because vegetarians often get the short end of the stick,” says Ransom, who himself was vegetarian until his first restaurant job at 15. “If you cook vegetarian food that meat eaters can eat, then the vegetarians just go crazy over it.”

Ima’s forest udon is vegan and is among the best, most flavorful vegan dishes I’ve ever had, its rich veggie broth holding the deep flavors of seaweed and shiitake with the scent of earthy porcini. Pan-roasted smoked trumpet mushrooms are a meaty alternative to animal protein but they also bring some fat to the dish from the hot oil they’re cooked in. The bowl is finished with fried rosemary fronds that momentarily transport you to the Michigan pine forests of Ransom’s youth.

I knew from my first few bites that Ransom was a star on the rise. At barely a month old, Ima was included in my Best New Restaurants list of 2017.

“It's been a strong start for Ransom and his crew,” I wrote back then. “But when Ima really finds its legs, it just might become the runaway hit of the pack.”

That initial inkling was confirmed some six months later, when Ransom was tasked with creating a special multi-course menu for a Free Press Top 10 Takeover dinner event at Ima. One of his dishes from that dinner proved so popular it is now on the daily menu at both locations.

I’m referring to the lobster udon, Ima’s richest, most opulent dish. It begins with New England lobster tails that are cleaned and de-shelled, the meat gently poached slow in whole butter while the shells sautee as a base for the broth. When the shells turn bright red they’re hit with some sake and green onion, celery, makrut lime leaves and some of that house-made chicken stock. When the broth is done, it’s poured over Ima’s thick, chewy udon noodles and the lobster meat. It's served with menma, bok choy and beech mushrooms sauteed in butter. There’s a slight pinch from a garnish of chili oil and a few strands of smoky ancho chili threads, but the overall sensation is one of buttery decadence, cut through with the clean lemongrass-like flavor of makrut.

At $24, it’s the most expensive item on the menu by a full $8. (The spicy tuna rice bowl and eel bowl are both $16.)

Organic, sustainable growth

When he first opened in Corktown there wasn’t enough room to store more than a day’s worth of noodles.

“I had a little Honda Civic that’d be full, trunk and the front seat sometimes,” he recalls. “Back and forth to Madison Heights to 168 Market sometimes twice a day if I forgot something.”

Six months after opening, Ima earned enough money to fund the construction of a walk-in cooler. Lunch service was soon introduced. A liquor license followed. Eventually, an all-weather patio was built, effectively doubling the number of seats to 60.

And through those daily trips to Madison Heights, Ransom began to familiarize himself with the landscape of the heavily Asian Oakland County suburb, plotting his next step.

There’s no shortage of Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants dotting the strip malls along John R road between 11 Mile and Maple. But while many claim Asian descent, there’s little in the way of Japanese offerings.

Here, Ransom saw opportunity and, sustained by the success of Corktown, was able to fund a second location that opened last November in an old Mexican restaurant in the shadow of his beloved 168 Market, Michigan’s largest Asian grocery store.

The new location maintains Corktown's minimalism and blonde wood, but with a little more legroom and easier traffic flow, crammed communal tables traded for high- and low-top tables. Corktown's table-side order has also been replaced with fast-casual counter service. You order, take a number and choose your seat.

The new location also comes with a prep kitchen — a luxury Ima Corktown never had. The larger physical space allowed Ransom to add ramen to the menu, which quickly eclipsed udon sales.

“I never wanted Ima to be a destination restaurant, and I always imagined it as a neighborhood spot that was somewhere you could just go and have a great meal and hang out and have some sake and beer and not have it be a to-do or have it be somewhere where you had to plan on being,” Ransom explains.

But a large percentage of his customers weren’t from the Corktown neighborhood or nearby. They were driving down from the Oakland County suburbs. A second location close to them made sense.

Still, it takes chutzpah to come to an Asian-populated neighborhood as a non-Asian cooking that style of cuisine.

For its part, the city rolled out the proverbial red carpet and the neighborhood quickly embraced him, perhaps feeling the genuine spirit of the earnest chef’s approach.

“More than anything I've always been told to do what feels right and to cook what you love and cook from the heart and that's kind of why I went this direction,” Ransom says. “But even in high school and prior to high school, we were always eating — as funny as it sounds — ramen noodles out of the pack."

Ima’s food is what Ransom grew up on, cheffed up and filtered through two decades of experience running kitchens.

“Technically speaking it is my comfort food because my parents raised me on a (vegetarian) diet as a child,” he says. “Miso soup and tofu and these ingredients are what I grew up on. It took me a while to figure out that my comfort food may not necessarily be what people consider comfort food.”

Growing up vegetarian in the ‘70s meant eating a lot of Japanese ingredients. Instead of mac ‘n’ cheese or meatloaf, his father’s most regular dish was miso stew — a blend of whatever was in the fridge in a salty broth made from the real-deal co-op miso, served with toasted garlic bread.

From his mother, Ransom picked up how to treat tofu as a canvas for flavor.

“My mom used to do barbecue tofu when I was a kid and it was the best thing I ever had,” he says. “She had these steps to make it taste like meat that included a freezing process.”

Nothing like a chef who grew up on tofu to make it taste good.

“If you handle tofu in certain ways, you can change the proteins so they’re not powdery. You can turn it into like a meat-fiber strand,” he explains, careful not to reveal the secret of Ima’s tofu, which contains little pockets of congealed broth.

Looking back, Ima almost seems inevitable for the heartfelt chef who cooks the food that reminds him of childhood. Ima is now, but it’s also the culmination of every moment leading up to it.

The future looks bright, too, especially considering Ransom's nurturing attitude toward his staff.

“People talk about sustainability and that was a big tagline, whether it was talking about produce or meats or food products in general," he says. "I always like to think about sustainability also being something that was related to your labor and your workforce and what you can physically put into a project and the retention of staff and the happiness of the staff."

Indeed, against a backdrop of rising labor costs in an industry where bright stars burn out fast, Ransom is setting Ima up for the long haul. Both restaurants are open seven days a week, but none of his staff members work more than five days a week. His salaried managers also work five days a week and receive paid vacation and access to a primary care physician.

But more than that in Ransom they have a leader who himself knows the cost of giving the industry too much. Ima is his intentional slowing down, a return to balance not available in the hallowed halls of fine dining.

“It’s pretty humbling to know that we put in the time that we did in the last two years and we are where we are right now,” Ransom says, beaming with pride for his staff of 50. “We all work hard. It’s not an easy job. There’s not much downtime. But that’s the beauty of it. The synergy of having people there working together and you’re getting that direct response from guests. That’s what keeps you going. That’s why I love food in general. What you put into it is directly proportional to what you get back from the guests. It’s a direct thing and it’s immediate.”

Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the style of pork belly common in ramen as "char siu," a Cantonese barbecue technique that Japanese chashu derived from.

IMA

2015 Michigan, Detroit. 313-502-5959.

32203 John R, Madison Heights. 248-781-0131

imanoodles.com

Cuisine: Creative, customizable riffs on Japanese-style noodles and rice bowls

Format: Casual table-side service in Corktown, fast-casual counter service in Madison Heights

Prices: Starters ($4-$11), most noodle bowls ($12-$13), rice bowls ($12-$16)

Drinks: Beer, wine, sake and sochu, plus extensive list of soft drinks, teas and other non-alcoholic beverages

Hours: Lunch and dinner daily.

Special features: Large parking lot in Madison Heights.

Reservations: Reservations accepted for parties of 6 or more in Corktown; walk-ins only in Madison Heights.

How Restaurant of the Year is Decided

The winners of Restaurant of the Year and Best New Restaurants are chosen by Restaurant Critic Mark Kurlyandchik, in consultation with editors. He eats out for the Free Press approximately 200 times a year to inform his choices. The Free Press pays for all meals.

Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers sponsor the Restaurant of the Year and Best New Restaurants program, but have no say in Kurlyandchik's choices or coverage.

Past Restaurant of the Year winners

This year marks the 20th year the Free Press has named a Restaurant of the Year. Here's a look back at the past winners:

2018: Chef's Table at the Foundation Hotel, Detroit

2017: Mabel Gray, Hazel Park

2016: Chartreuse, Midtown Detroit

2015: Selden Standard, Midtown Detroit

2014: Torino, Ferndale (closed 2015)

2013: Bacco Ristorante, Southfield

2012: The Root Restaurant & Bar, White Lake Township

2011: Union Woodshop, Clarkston

2010: Forest Grill, Birmingham (closed and reopened as Forest, 2015)

2009: Michael Symon's Roast, Westin Book Cadillac, Detroit

2008: SaltWater, MGM Grand Detroit (closed 2012)

2007: Beverly Hills Grill, Beverly Hills

2006: Seldom Blues, Detroit (closed 2010)

2005: Five Lakes Grill, Milford (closed 2009)

2004: Jeremy Restaurant & Bar, Keego Harbor (closed 2014)

2003: The Grill, Ritz-Carlton Dearborn (hotel closed, 2010)

2002: Cuisine, Detroit

2001: The Hill, Grosse Pointe Farms

2000: Tribute, Farmington Hills (Closed 2009)



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