NAKA

NAKA is a ramen house that also shucks oysters. The bowls are its centre of gravity — pork, chicken, and mushroom broths layered with chashu, naruto, and nori — but the menu keeps widening past them, into beef tataki, takoyaki, gyoza, and short ribs, until a table is eating something closer to a full izakaya dinner than a quick bowl. That reach is deliberate. On a stretch of Hunter Street West better known for cafés, NAKA is where you go when one bowl was never going to be enough.

The ramen itself carries real range. Onomichi leans regional, with pork broth, bamboo shoot, bonito, naruto, and nori; Tori-Paitan and Banchu work the chicken side, one broth rich and creamy, the other clean and soy-forward; and deeper cuts like Tonkotsu and Tantan give the pork lane somewhere to go. The vegetable bowls are not an afterthought either — the Shio Vegetable runs on mushroom broth with fried tofu, bok choy, beansprouts, and corn, with miso and garlic versions alongside it, so a table split between meat-eaters and vegetarians can order without anyone settling. Curry Katsu and Sapporo bowls round out the deeper end of the list, and a mushroom udon waits for anyone stepping off ramen entirely.

Around the noodles sits the izakaya half of the menu, and it is where the kitchen loosens up. Beef tataki arrives as sliced ribeye with ponzu, garlic aioli, and taro chips; there is a wasabi-octopus salad, pork gyoza, shrimp tempura, pork-belly lettuce wraps, and bulgogi short ribs plated with rice and kimchi. Lighter and stranger snacks — takoyaki, agedashi tofu, loaded fries, a karaage chicken sandwich — fill in the corners. Dessert holds its own: Japanese donuts under cinnamon sugar with yuzu cream and toasted coconut, a strawberry-matcha sundae on wafer cookies and brown-sugar syrup, and a matcha cheesecake mousse. The sweets lean Japanese on purpose — yuzu, matcha, brown sugar — so the meal ends in the same register it started.

Put together, the menu reads as a decision rather than a grab bag. A restaurant that only wanted to move ramen would not bother shucking oysters or running a Japanese cocktail program — yuzu whiskey sours, a matcha-lychee fizz, sake and whisky by the glass, tasting flights across both. NAKA is after the whole evening: a first drink, a spread of shared plates, a bowl for each person, something matcha to close. The hours reinforce it. Open Tuesday through Saturday evenings and dark the rest of the week, with takeout and delivery for the nights you stay in, the kitchen is set up for a sit-down dinner rather than a midday turn.

The origins sit with Susan Tung, who opened NAKA in 2023 in the former Hanoi House storefront on Hunter Street West after consolidating that concept over to Lansdowne. Local reporting at the time framed the choice plainly: rather than open something more mainstream, she wanted to keep promoting Asian cuisine in Peterborough. Emily Tan took over ownership the following year, and the menu, the staff, and the concept carried through the handoff without a reset. New owner on the banner, the same bowls on the pass.

What NAKA has settled into is a personal restaurant that happens to run on ramen. The Hunter Street West café district keeps a steady evening crowd nearby, and themed dinner nights pull regulars who come for the company as much as the noodles. The founding logic still governs the plate: Peterborough had appetite for Asian cooking done on its own terms, not smoothed out for a wider crowd. A bowl of tonkotsu that arrives beside oysters and a yuzu sour is not the tidy story of a ramen shop. It is a wider one, and NAKA has chosen to tell it.