Vietamese-Japanese Noodles at Taiko Udon

Taiko Udon recently opened their doors to the public at their grand opening event late January. The restaurant is located in the plaza on the corner of Bolsa Avenue and Magnolia Street.

Taiko is fairly small with about six tables indoors and two outdoors. To avoid waiting, I would suggest avoiding major lunch hours during the weekdays and weekends. What I liked the most was that the menu was very short and simple. There are eight noodle dishes of which five are udon noodles and three are Vietnamese noodles. A side of me was a bit skeptical when ordering because I was at a Vietnamese restaurant ordering udon,which is a Japanese noodle dish.

My cousin ordered the pork udon for $5.95, and I ordered the tempura shrimp udon for $4.95. The pork udon is said to be one of the most popular dishes at Taiko. The pork udon comes with the noodles, green onions, cilantro, sliced pork and an egg. I tried some of the soup, and I thought that it had a more flavorful broth than the tempura shrimp udon.

The tempura shrimp udon was good, but not great. It was a bit simple for me. The broth was not bland, but it was really basic. The shrimp tempura udon also came with a bunch of other tempura vegetables that I did not care too much about. Good thing the tempura was given on the side instead of in the soup. I was able to pick out which ones I wanted in my udon.