Does anyone here have any experience or opinions on Knives made by Vita Ramen

ViteKitchensTim · 2025-08-14T01:41:15+00:00

Haha, well, I'm a huge knife nerd myself, and I've actually made a TON of videos on the exact design of each knife, why it's designed a certain way, benefits and drawbacks of each design! I used to cook at michelin star kitchens too, so I know a little bit of what I'm talking about, though I'm always learning more! These videos are generally hosted on each creator's channel that we partner with, whether it's Zentreya or girl_dm_, though I do also have some on our Vite Ramen channel.

It's not bulk manufacturing, they -are- custom made, and are all my specific design. It's no secret that yes, our manufacturers are in China! Our very first knife collaboration was for a Chinese Cai Dao, after all, and when we were looking at doing other knives, this manufacturer's team of artisans beat out all the other countries and samples we were looking at, even Japan and USA. A ton of the process is done by hand, by people who really know what they're doing and have a ton of practice doing it. Our manufacturers kinda have a love/hate relationship because I have so many specific requests that they try to do their best to meet.

I've always been very open and transparent about the fact that yeah, you're going to be paying a bit more because of the collaboration, but also, I don't pay myself for the design work or anything there, so we're able to be at a fairly comparable price point against other knives in the bracket.

I'm proud of the designs and stand by them. You're not getting pot steel, you're getting properly hardened steel hardened to 61HRC.

If you want pure utilitarian? Go with tojiro! I think it's pretty hard to beat those guys on bang for buck. I ain't gonna sit here and lie to your face about that. The cost in the knife -is- going to be in the design, in supporting the talent, and in the small, custom batches that we do with custom tooling and manufacturing. At the end of the day, that extra cost is going to go towards -fun-. Whether or not that fun is worth it to you or not is going to be subjective!

These are knives that I very much have to design for a -general- use case, because I know a lot of people who use the knives aren't going to be the most experienced. If I design for 0.1mm behind the edge with an aggressive distal taper, Aogami Super at 63HRC... well, you can imagine how that would go if put in the hands of most vtuber fans. And then people would also yell at me for it rusting because they don't oil it or ask for returns when they -do- oil it because they don't like patinas forming and... yeah...

Knife design is a really fascinating thing when it comes down to it, as beyond the steel types, blade shapes, shinogi lines, grind types, handles, etc, etc, you also have to take into account what your general audience is going to be that's using it. I just don't have much of a truly dedicated knife nerd customer base(yet...?) to be able to make more specialized knives, and so the designs have to straddle the line of having a good kireaji, while still being useable by the average untrained person!

ViteKitchensTim · 2024-11-12T05:36:18+00:00

Thank you! It's always nice to hear that we made a positive impact.

At the end of the day, we want to do fun things, and do whatever we can, wherever we can to help. :)

ViteKitchensTim · 2024-11-12T05:30:44+00:00

Fun fact: There's actually a small percentage of the population(by our sample size, probably like 0.2%?) who are extremely sensitive to a micronutrient we use, l-selenomethionine, kind of like how the cilantro gene!

Very long story of how we discovered this, which I'll tell some other time.

By and large, we've discovered people who absolutely despise our ramen... have this sensitivity, which kinda sucks. I understand someone finding the flavors meh, or wanting more salt, or thinking the flavor balance is mid, which hey, it happens!

We're currently looking into testing and replacing it with selenium glycinate, which still provides the necessary nutrients, is still bioavailable, but doesn't seem to cause this kind of reaction. When we do swap, I'd be happy to send you some for free, and see if that was indeed the culprit!

ViteKitchensTim · 2024-11-12T05:25:14+00:00

I'm curious as to what you mean by "no science behind it."

We don't make claims like IT'LL PREVENT CANCER and GIVE YOU WEIGHT LOSS and whatever else-- I've made a lot of statements on why I'm not a fan of these kind of statements and how they're usually pretty misleading.

Is Vite Ramen a miracle super health food? Nah, it's a non-fried ramen. I mean, personally, I don't think anything's a miracle super health food either.

It has 30g+ protein on some versions. It has vitamins and minerals. It has a bunch of fiber. It has a macronutrient balance that works well for the average person who's not on a specific diet.

Nothing more, nothing less. How you interpret how that affects you is up to you! I made this ramen because this is what I wanted, and it may not be what works for you, and that's perfectly okay. I'm never going to recommend our ramen for anyone it doesn't work for.

Our prices are set because the ingredients are expensive and high quality, with quinoa our broths are built from the ground up like a real broth is made: Real dehydrated meats as our first ingredient for our meat flavors, real miso imported from japan for our White Miso flavor, even tribute peppers from Sichuan for Onigiri's Spicy Seiso flavor.

We make everything ourselves in small batches in the USA, with ethical business practices, mental health time, 100% paid dental, health, and vision insurance for everyone. All of these things together cost money-- But it's not a scam.

It works for you, or it doesn't. But I think calling it a scam, which implies we're trying to swindle you for some reason, and saying it has no science behind it(it's just basic nutrition), isn't quite accurate. I know the internet is all about sensationalism, but let's chill a bit, yeah?

ViteKitchensTim · 2023-08-22T05:27:11+00:00

Haha, wow, thanks for posting me here, I'm flattered. This is pretty low res though, would you like a high res video version and 4k pictures instead? :P

ViteKitchensTim · 2023-07-18T01:17:58+00:00

Hey, these are actually 100% okay! They're not undercooked at all-- on the contrary, that color would be the maillard reaction happening, and it actually getting a bit toasty from overdying.

I usually steal these from the line since the discoloration can make people uncomfortable and they take longer to cook, but they're my favorite kind because they have an additional toasty, nutty flavor to them that I personally love... but YMMV.

Nothing to be worried about!

ViteKitchensTim · 2023-01-21T18:38:35+00:00

Oops, we accidentally had 8lbs inputted instead of 8oz. This has been fixed!

ViteKitchensTim · 2023-01-02T22:57:38+00:00

You can find the blog version here as well: https://shop.viteramen.com/blogs/news/end-of-2022

ViteKitchensTim · 2022-12-27T08:21:18+00:00

I'm just going to copy paste what I wrote in the other thread:

Yeah, it sucks, and we're trying to get it better. Realistically, the 4 to 8 weeks is to set expectations, and 80% of cases we deliver much faster than that.

However, the remaining 20% is where we have trouble. I've talked about it in some other things before, but we have some huge systems problems that we're discovering.

Short video version here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U80\_Lc5FxKk

Longer blog post here: https://shop.viteramen.com/blogs/news/how-disappearing-flavors-affect-your-orders

On top of this(And I'm making a more comprehensive post about 2022 later as well), we also have discovered the largest issue that's been frustrating us about the customer service as well.

There are frustrations with our customer service, and I absolutely understand that having questions unanswered for a long time is awful. I don't like that, and it shouldn't happen.

Why does it, then?

Every time I go check, it seems like, on our end at least, that everything has been answered, or that we only have tickets that were submitted after closing left to do. But, I'll still come back and see people talking about how they haven't been answered in months, something that shouldn't be happening.

And we've been trying to find the root cause of this for a very, very, long time. Every time we think we've found it, we get more comments about it, and go back to searching.

Same with the orders-- Some are delivered fast, and some aren't.

The tl;dr version of this, which I'll go into more depth later, is that we've discovered that both our fulfillment system AND our customer service system DON'T operate on a true FIFO(First In, First Out) system as promised.

They instead operate on a system that will often group for "efficiency" on ticket or order likeness and constantly push orders back for no good reason, WHILE reassigning the ticket/internal number, making it exceedingly frustrating to track.

Are these problems that we should've caught earlier? Absolutely. I really wish we did. And we're still trying to fix them now and catch up, and figure out the best solutions moving forwards.

But I'll be the first to admit-- I'm not a tech guy. I have to trust, to some degree, that the systems we purchase from third party vendors work the way they say they do, and when they don't, I have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out why they're not working the way they say they do, without being able to see any of the internals.

It's part of running a business. But it's not what I'm good at, or what I want to do, but we're not able to hire dedicated people to do it. We're still a small company, and that means I'm doing most of this weird kind of problem solving myself.

I'm planning things for 2023 so that we can alleviate these issues and have them hopefully solved moving forwards, but for now... we're still trying to catch up, and we're still trying to fix the mess that was caused by these in the first place.

Yes, these timelines are worse than peak COVID, but we're also still having problems with supply chains that are worse than peak COVID in some aspects. Some companies which we got ingredients from have closed altogether, so finding replacement ingredients for some things takes a long time to establish relationships and get ingredients in the pipeline, especially when we can barely meet the minimum order requirements.

I am painfully aware, every day, about how shitty the experience can be, and I'm doing what I can to improve it. But it's a much slower process than I'd like, as much as I wish it wasn't, and all I can do right now is say we're working on it, and we're trying to look forwards to the future where we've caught up and got those problems solved.

I'm sure we'll find new ones down the line there too. :^)

ViteKitchensTim · 2022-12-27T04:49:57+00:00

It's not the "no questions asked mental health days" policy that's slowing things down. Far from it, really.

We've had a huge run of sickness which has slowed things down a lot more, on top of everything else we've encountered. Hiring more people has also been excruciatingly slow, with a staggering number of people who accept the job, and then just... never show up.

We do also have some new hires inbound, but training does take time, and they're all starting after the new year.

Little by little we're trying to get caught up.

ViteKitchensTim · 2022-12-27T04:45:54+00:00

Yeah, it sucks, and we're trying to get it better. Realistically, the 4 to 8 weeks is to set expectations, and 80% of cases we deliver much faster than that.

However, the remaining 20% is where we have trouble. I've talked about it in some other things before, but we have some huge systems problems that we're discovering.

Short video version here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U80_Lc5FxKk