OCTOBER 31, 2025 | FEATURES | By Michaela Ocko and Sydney McGarr
No ramen, no life. These were the words printed on the bottom of Sydney’s bowl at JINYA Ramen Bar. And you best believe we both got to the bottom.
We stumbled into JINYA on a windy Monday afternoon, hungry and exhausted after an hour-long session at Orangetheory (we’re currently fighting over whether we should get memberships to CorePower or Orangetheory, or if we should just use the gym at school because we’re broke. Result to be determined).
This did mean we were slightly underdressed given the hip, millennial vibe of the restaurant. Our sweatshirts and sweatpants post-workout weren’t quite up to par—but I think we were the only ones that really noticed, so it’s okay.
It was 5 p.m. (we’ve been on a grandma’s schedule lately) and the restaurant wasn’t desolate, to our surprise. There were quite a few tables filled with early diners such as ourselves.
JINYA Ramen Bar opened its doors to the Colorado Springs community on June 16, 2025. The rather large building holds around 200 tables and seats about 365 people, according to our lovely waitress Gaylene.
After our last dinner for review went less than ideally, we thought maybe we were just bound to review only bad restaurants. Readers, we are pleased to announce that we’ve been proven wrong. JINYA was everything we had hoped for.
After Gaylene gave us a delightful tour of the entire menu, we decided to order two appetizers and ramen as a main course. Previous readers know we are both long-time pescetarians, so we were slightly disappointed to find out that they were completely out of the Impossible meat option, rendering about five of the vegetarian options unorderable. Yet we persevered.
Michaela brilliantly and quickly rerouted to the seaweed salad order when Gaylene informed us about the lack of Impossible meat. Good, quick thinking, Michaela. The seaweed salad was also shockingly small, but had an impressively good flavor. We would recommend, but if you’re dining with a group larger than two, prepare to order multiple. 9/10, if you prefer a numerical ranking.
Tempura brussels sprouts and seaweed salad it was. After googling “tempura” at the table, we confirmed our opinion that the ones we were served weren’t exactly tempura. But they were delicious, fried and perfectly garlicky. We rate them at 8.3/10, with a few points taken off for the small serving size and the lack of full fried coverage.
On to the main course, the titular menu item: ramen. Specifically, we both ordered the Spicy Creamy V Ramen. The ramen was pretty close to perfect: blocks of silken tofu submerged in a perfectly spicy, vegan cream broth. Sydney particularly enjoyed the noodle-to-broth ratio, as they usually get it wrong at her local spot in Nashville. The noodles were the perfect density and a lovely curly shape.
It’s worth noting that there were vegetarian hot sauce and gyoza sauce options on the table from when we arrived. We decided the ramen was perfectly spicy by itself, not enough to deter you from eating, but enough that our noses were running a little.
While we did enjoy most of the ramen, there were way too many onions floating around in the broth that appeared to be raw or very lightly cooked. We left almost all of them in our basically empty ramen bowls after demolishing the rest of them.
Our stomachs unfortunately could not handle dessert, but the mochi ice cream and matcha tiramisu looked absolutely divine. Someone really should go try it and let us know.
Our final note is that the playlist was a 10/10. We love Dua Lipa in our household, and heard plenty of her while we slurped down our meals.
JINYA Ramen Bar was a great addition to the Colorado Springs restaurant scene, and we recommend you go try their food. As it says in neon lights on the wall of the restaurant, ramen is all the craze these days.