We kicked off soup season with Raleigh’s best bowl of ramen. Our thoughts
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Sono, once a sushi bar, offers four ramen styles and won readers' top choice.
- Spicy miso bowl costs $18, built on pork tonkatsu broth simmered four to five days.
- Broth, texture and heat deliver clear value. We finished the bowl in one sitting.
As the leaves fell on Fayetteville Street, yellows and reds caught in the sunbeams bouncing off skyscrapers, I faced an uncomfortable truth — I had had too much soup.
By the first week of November there can be no doubt, we are officially in Soup Season. Happy Ladling to all who observe.
Of all the soups, broths and bisques out there, ramen stands alone for its soul-soothing warmth and nap-inducing richness. Though founded as a sushi bar nearly two decades ago, downtown Raleigh restaurant Sono has been serving steaming bowls of ramen longer than many other shops in the Triangle.
Sono was recently named the best ramen in the Triangle, according to N&O readers, followed by Miso Ramen Bar with locations in Raleigh and Cary.
Ramen has this reputation for cheapness, as many people are introduced to it by the instant variety, cooked in a microwave and flavored with a salty seasoning packet.
But real ramen couldn’t be further from those bowls. It isn’t cheap, it takes days (not seconds) to make, and there’s a depth of flavor no seasoning packet could ever capture.
For this week’s On A Budget column — where we dine, tax and tip for less than $25 — I ventured to Sono to sample a bowl, finding great value and satisfaction, if you could possibly stop yourself from eating the whole thing.
Sono offers only four styles of ramen: rich porky tonkotsu, a spicy miso, chicken ramen and a veggie ramen with noodles made of kale.
How good is Sono’s ramen?
I went with the spicy miso for $18, which uses the same pork-based tonkotsu broth, but swaps out black garlic oil for spicy red miso paste. At nearly $20, Sono’s ramen is within a couple dollars of pretty much every other bowl in the Triangle, a pricey soup to be sure.
But this is a soup that takes four to five days to make, built from a broth of roasted pork or chicken bones, bubbled away in the largest stock pot you’re ever likely to see. Looking around for a comparably expensive soup, I did find an $18 lobster bisque at Perry’s Steakhouse.
But ramen is more than a soup. It’s rich without being decadent, a symphony of textures as your chopsticks dance from chewy wood ear mushrooms and bamboo shoots, to the silky yolk of a soft boiled egg and the sharp bites of green onions. There are also two slices of thick pork belly, the fat softened by the heat of the broth.
It’s that broth that makes or breaks a bowl of ramen, and Sono’s was clean and unctuous, slicked with jewels of fat and chili oil and the exact right note of salt.
I can handle considerable spice (which is usually what someone might say when they can’t), and found the heat from the spicy miso bowl to be the perfect hot tingle without making things uncomfortable.
Halfway through my bowl, I noticed a runner fly by on Fayetteville Street, his shirt tied above his head, seemingly at a full sprint, while I sat at the window feeling the slow creep of the ramen coma coming for my brain. At that moment, I knew even the slowest jog would have been as impossible as flapping my arms and landing on the capitol dome. This is the sacrifice we sometimes make for soup.
Often I pause bowls of ramen at this point, leaving a hearty bowl of leftovers for lunch the next day. I love when you can empty a takeout container full of ramen and it stands straight up, settling after a jiggle as the collagen and fat give it some structure before heat turns it back to broth.
But with the bowl from Sono, my chopsticks flew well past comfort, I continued slurping until just the bottom of the bowl was coated with the fiery red broth. Only the buttoned-up downtown Raleigh lunch crowd kept me from turning the bowl up and drinking.
This story was originally published November 11, 2025 at 8:00 AM with the headline "We kicked off soup season with Raleigh’s best bowl of ramen. Our thoughts."
