Isshoku Kitchen

When one door closes in the restaurant world, another opens, and that was certainly true at Maji Curry – the lone U.S. outpost of a niche Japanese curry shop specializing in cheese-topped, deep-fried pork cutlets that didn’t really take off here. Three years after Maji opened in Irvine, its franchisee decided to pivot to a different Japanese concept, Isshoku Kitchen, with “isshoku” meaning “one meal.” Mostly focused on noodles, Isshoku also offers a couple of katsu items and a handful of appetizers, as well as Momofuku-style buns that weren’t yet available as of our early October 2026 visit.

Isshoku Kitchen preserves the layout and most fixtures from the old Maji shop, replacing a tiled Maji sign wall with an illuminated wooden panel, and mounting framed, AI-generated posters on the walls. Table and counter seating still accommodate around 20 people, and the space remains clean and brightly lit. Extra-tall one-page menus use one side to spotlight Isshoku’s craft soup-making, claiming that its noodles are made fresh in-house daily, and chicken broth is “simmered in our own kitchen.” The other side offers 10 appetizers (each $10 or less), the “coming soon” buns ($8 to $14 for two), five ramen variants ($15 to $17) plus extra toppings, two katsu and tempura plates ($16 to $18) with Japanese curry as a $3 option. There are also two udon ($13 to $15) bowls, each with “make it a set” alternatives that add katsu, shrimp tempura, or karaage for $5 to $8 above the noodle prices.

We began our meal by ordering two of the inexpensive appetizers: the crispy broccolini ($8) and agedashi tofu ($7), each individually delicious, but quite small in portion size. Isshoku’s broccolini paired a few sprigs of bushy, soy-brushed, broiled thin veggies with cooked garlic and lemon, collectively delivering punchy flavors and complex textures that ended far too quickly when shared by two people. The agedashi tofu arrived as only two cubes of crispy battered tofu in a bowl of really delicious dashi-based tsuyu broth; these cubes were each good for three small bites, and disappeared almost instantly.

To try Isshoku’s specialties, we ordered two of the ramens: the “spicy citrus” Isshoku 03 ($16), a chicken broth-based ramen that arrived with thin ramen noodles by default, and the “black garlic” Isshoku 04 ($16), a pork tonkotsu broth ramen instead served with medium-thickness noodles. Each also included a few thick slices of kakuni pork, a seasoned half-egg, a little broccolini, sliced menma, a dollop of black mushrooms, and a piece of nori.