Mosh Ramen debuts as newest concept for Pueblo's upcoming Fuel and Iron Food Hall
Mosh Ramen is the latest restaurant to be revealed of the five new dining concepts that will be featured at the Fuel and Iron Food Hall, along with a bar and dessert option, when it opens in the Holmes Hardware building this fall.
A pop-up event for Mosh Ramen was hosted at Bingo Burger this week, which is owned by the chefs behind the hot chicken concept that was announced last month as the first restaurant coming to Fuel and Iron. The dining room was packed more than half an hour before service, with diners excitedly waiting for a meal of ramen noodles that otherwise can't be found in Pueblo.
Created by chef Chris Doose, a Puebloan who has experience in nearly every aspect of the culinary world, Mosh Ramen is going to add Asian-fusion cuisine to Pueblo's food scene.
When he originally pitched his concept for Mosh Ramen, Doose had never actually made ramen. In the year since, he's read every book and consumed all the information he could about how to make the best ramen dish, he said.
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On the menu at the pop-up event was bulgogi beef kimchi fries and tonkatsu ramen with pork confit. Doose put a Korean twist on a local favorite — carne asada fries — with French fries topped with kimchi, marinated beef and a kimchi mayonnaise. The kimchi, a traditional Korean side dish of salted and fermented vegetables, adds a level of heat to the dish that is ultimately cut by the rich kimchi-infused mayonnaise drizzled on top.
"The goal was — Adolfo's is like a late-night thing here, carne asada fries drunk or hungover is the best thing in the world so I wanted to make an Asian version," Doose said.
After the appetizer, diners were served a flavorful ramen dish that couldn't be more different than the ramen on grocery store shelves and the staple often found in dorm rooms.
Doose and his team presented a complex bowl of ramen, with broth cooked over the course of eight hours building layers of flavors over time. The broth was topped with pork confit, slow-cooked in its own fat for more than six hours, in addition to ramen noodles, mushrooms, half an egg and a garnish of scallions to round out the meal.
"To get to that I've made a lot of bad bowls of ramen," Doose said, looking back on his trial-and-error approach to mastering his ramen recipes.
Doose is the perfect example of the type of chef that the Fuel and Iron Food Hall wants to showcase, said founders and developers Zach Cytryn and Nathan Stern.
The goal for the Fuel and Iron Food Hall is to give promising chefs the opportunity to build a following with their unique concepts before branching out into a traditional brick-and-mortar location in Pueblo.
"Our incentive with finding our restaurateurs was giving people a shot who might not otherwise get one," Cytryn said. "It's really expensive to build out a new restaurant — hundreds of thousands of dollars — and most start-up chefs don't have that money."
The food hall offers restaurateurs the opportunity to present their food to the public without the six-figure cost of opening a traditional restaurant that is often a barrier to many chefs opening their own locations.
"So a cool thing about this, it's an incubator model, so we're the ones building out the kitchens and chefs like Chris... this really gives him the platform to unleash his concept, get a following and then, once he has proven history, some time under his belt, a lender would look at him much differently than they would now," Cytryn said.
The food hall will occupy the first floor of the renovated Holmes Hardware building with the second and third floors used for affordable housing units. First priority will be given to employees at the food hall.
The pop-up series will continue through June, featuring the remaining restaurants. The series is presented by Legacy Bank, a Colorado bank with locations in Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Canon City, Buena Vista, Lamar, Wiley, and Pueblo West.
In addition to their upcoming development in Pueblo, the Fuel and Iron team is also planning to open a Pueblo-themed bar in downtown Denver.
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Contact Chieftain reporter Lacey Latch at llatch@gannett.com or on social media @laceylatch.
This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Mosh Ramen is newest concept for Pueblo's Fuel and Iron Food Hall
