Antcicada

Antcicada is a cricket ramen specialty spot, and I eat here once a week. Having been a local in Akihabara for over 4 years, I have eaten here over 100+ times. My usual is just the cricket ramen + a cricket soysauce marinated egg topping. It is located near Akihabara, maybe around a 10 minute walk from the station. The entrance is quite literally a hole in the wall. While the menu is a little pricier than most places, I am a lover of small businesses. Not only that, but I think that the owner has put a lot of thought and effort into his menu. Every dish he has made is high quality, and I would consider the price reasonable if we account for the quality of the food.

コオロギラーメン

Ramen soup is composed of 3 main parts: broth (dashi), oil (abura), and sauce (tare). The cricket ramen's broth has a taste that you will not find anywhere else in Tokyo, it's very earthy and has a strong umami taste. The broth is created by a very large tub of commercially available food grade crickets. The oil and sauce I believe has also been infused with crickets. All 3 parts of the soup has crickets infused in it, which creates a very distinctive and clear cricket taste to it. I can ensure that anyone will be able to enjoy the taste of this bowl of ramen, as I have eaten it over 100+ times and still haven't gotten tired of it.

具

The toppings are a high quality fried cricket (you will get 1 of 2 types, a large dark brown one or a small light brown one), slice of naruto, 2 pieces of bamboo shoot, 1 sheet of seaweed, a bundle of deep green vegetable, and some slices of chashu. The seasoned egg is an additional topping that costs extra (200 yen). While I think that the toppings could be improved, the main star of the dish is actually the soup and also the fried cricket. The fried cricket is home grown by the owner, and he feeds the crickets high quality feed, making the taste of the cricket really good. It tastes like an earthy shrimp, if that makes any sense. Not only the crickets are high quality, I can tell that the owner knows how to fry the cricket well. Having eaten this cricket topping a lot, there has been atleast 3 cases where the cricket could have been fried a little longer. Maybe it's because the bigger ones are harder to time? I am not sure. But I wish that this 1 cricket topping was a dish of it's own, it's that good.

Seasonal Items

This place has seasonal dishes, as well as 1 day limited dishes. For the 1 day limited dishes, I will create a 2nd post about that. In the near future, I will probably create an album/gallery and link it here as well.

During the summer, we have a chilled soba dish. It contains a little bit of sansho pepper, which has a numbing effect in your mouth. But I do not think it's spicy at all in my opinion. The peppers are visible in the image below, tiny green spheres, and they are also pickled and edible. So I recommend trying them out along with the rest of the dish. The green strips are chopped shiso leaves, they complement well with the chashu and noodles during the humid heat of Japan. Noodle type is also different than the usual, they are straight and smooth. It might be a little oilier than the usual cricket ramen, but I think it helps balance out the flavor of the cricket. As cold broth has a less potent flavor than hot broth. Overall, I think this dish has a lot of thought put into it, as making a cold dish taste this good is incredibly difficult.

In the winter, the silkworm tonkotsu ramen will usually appear.

This restaurant has several other items.

Tsukudani.

Drinks.