The best things we ate this week

Every time it rains, I crave a big ‘ole bowl of soup. This week’s was the Akamaru Modern Ramen from Havertown’s Momoyama Ramen & Hawaiian BBQ II, the second location of the popular Willow Grove restaurant. This ramen is a touch too spicy to be slurpable: A heap of homemade chili paste is swirled into a bowl of rich tonkotsu broth that is then topped with all the best accoutrements — barbecued pork belly, soft boiled eggs, earthy wood ear mushrooms, and clusters of bamboo shoots. But what this soup lacks in slurp-ability it makes up for in dimension of flavor. The heat from the chili paste dulls the inherent meatiness of tonokotsu — a creamy pork bone broth — which allows the pork belly to really shine. It’s so tender that it falls a part as hangs from your chopsticks. This ramen is best eaten slowly and, perhaps, with a can of sweet UCC melon cream soda to wash it down. Momoyama Ramen & Hawaiian BBQ II, 2305 Darby Rd. II, Havertown, 610-881-5300, momoyamaramen.com

— Beatrice Forman

If there was ever any question that downtown Ardmore is the most interesting place to eat on the Main Line, dining at Eshkol erased any doubt. This cozy year-old restaurant from chef Chaltu Merga and her husband Tesh Gebremedhin serves excellent renditions of traditional Ethiopian home cooking, with various fragrant meat stews and spiced vegetable purees served over platter-sized rounds of spongy injera. It’s an experience not unlike those you can find at several of my personal favorites in West Philadelphia, including Amsale Cafe and Buna Cafe. But Eshkol is one of the few suburban Ethiopian restaurants.

I am especially fond of Merga’s silky orange shiro puree of spiced chickpeas, her gingery gomen collards, and tenderly stewed chicken doro wot. They are just some of the dishes included in combo platters that focus on either meats or vegetables — or a mix of the two, which we chose. Eshkol’s kitfo — a mitmita-spiced dish of raw beef — is also so good it’s worth ordering as its own side, especially with the tangy crumbles of cheese.

What’s most notable here is that Eshkol’s vegetarian offerings are also vegan, since the kitchen uses a non-dairy butter for many of its preparations. Eshkol is also one of the few local Ethiopian restaurants that makes its fermented injera bread from pure teff, rather than combining it with wheat flour, so its flatbreads are also gluten-free. One final boost: Eshkol’s potent and flavorful Ethiopian coffee, roasted fresh from green beans and poured steaming hot tableside into tiny cups from a traditional jebena clay pot. It’s well worth the evening caffeine rush. Eshkol, 36 E. Lancaster Ave., Ardmore, 484-412-8044, eshkolcuisine.com

— Craig LaBan

This past Sunday, I took my friends from New York to visit the ever-so charming and artsy main drag of New Hope for a day of shopping and eating. We craved brunch food immediately upon arrival, so we beelined for the sun-soaked Ferry Market to explore the small maze of food stalls. We settled on a ‘Breakfast Any Time’ as one of our brunch treats, which combines a mozzarella and parmesan cheese blend with garlicky chive mashed potatoes, bacon, and rosemary. It all gets topped with a runny egg that lands smack in the center of the pie.

Though I was initially a skeptic, I found this Frankenstein of a pizza delicious. The foundation was a wonderfully crisp crust that didn’t sag under the weight of its almost-too-many toppings. The ratio of the rest of the ingredients was also just right, the salty bits of bacon blending in with pockets of creamy mashed potatoes to create something that really did taste like breafast on a pizza. Now I feel bad for ever doubting the process. Market Pizza, 32 S. Main St., New Hope, 609-664-7521, marketpizzamenu.com

— Julia Duarte