The Six-Seat Breakfast Ramen Counter You Set an Alarm For
Rasheeda Purdie's six-seat East Village counter built its breakfast on shoyu ramen with bacon-egg-cheese folded in. It is temporarily closed as of 18 September 2026, with no reopening date confirmed.
The bowl arrives filled to the rim — a shoyu broth the color of weak tea, a soy-cured yolk sitting on top of maple-shoyu sausage, noodles pulled taut underneath. It is ten in the morning. Chef Rasheeda Purdie ladles every bowl herself from three feet away, because there is no back-of-house here to hide anyone. Six seats. One chef. Ramen for breakfast.
Purdie built Ramen By Ra from a 2021 meal-kit service into a pop-up, then a four-or-five-seat counter tucked inside Bowery Market that closed in March 2025, and now this — a permanent six-seat East Village room at 70 E 1st Street. It is the first Black woman-owned ramen shop in America and the first place in New York serving asa-style (morning) ramen as its whole reason for existing. That framing matters. This isn't a late-night tonkotsu joint pivoting to brunch. It's built the other way around.
Editorial Deep
The concept — New York breakfast flavors dropped into a classical shoyu foundation — could read as gimmick on paper. It doesn't in the bowl. The Bacon, Egg and Cheese Ramen is the one to order: apple-smoked bacon, a fried egg, Parmesan folded into a mazemen format that reads coherent rather than clever. The Steak and Egg Ramen and the Everything Egg Drop are the other two orders that make the case for what Purdie is doing here.
Six seats along the counter at 70 E 1st Street, guests facing the chef, no separation between prep and eating. The Bowery Market original ran four; the East Village room added two and a permanent address. Crystal bowls, tea service, and a quiet that reads more tea house than ramen shop.
Purdie prepares and serves every bowl herself. Service at a six-seat counter run by the chef is a different thing from service anywhere else — there's no pacing question, no runner confusion, no reading the room from across a dining room. She's three feet away. It works the way any well-run counter works when the person cooking is also the person watching you eat.
You are paying counter-time and chef-attention pricing for a single bowl, not a full meal. Whether that math works depends on what you came for. If you're here to eat the concept — asa ramen, from the chef who invented the New York version of it, ladled at arm's length — the money makes sense. If you came hungry and expecting the value proposition of a Midtown ramen chain, it won't compute.
Yes, on the right terms. Not as a weekly rotation — the seat count and the drop calendar make that fantasy for anyone without a standing 9am alarm on the 1st and 15th. But as a two-or-three-times-a-year counter visit, when the menu shifts and a new bowl lands, it holds up. The takeout window is the more repeatable relationship.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Bacon, Egg and Cheese Ramen; Steak and Egg Ramen
“The most New York thing to happen to ramen in years — if you can get the seat.”
Book at 9am sharp on the 1st or 15th. If you miss the drop, the takeout window sells the same broth and breakfast bao without a reservation — that's the honest value play.
The Verdict
