Get that old guy off the screen. He’s bringing me down, though he’s right about the triple pork triple garlic mazemen. It’s an undeniably intense dish that shows how energetically and skillfully Mr. Orkin colors outside the lines of Japanese cuisine.

Since Ivan Ramen opened in May, there is usually a line for the single restroom but rarely one to get in the door. Some of the pent-up steam in the ramen community may have escaped late last year, when Mr. Orkin opened Slurp Shop, in Gotham West Market. A quick-service counter with a noodle-dominated menu, Slurp Shop is a fine introduction to Mr. Orkin’s ramen philosophy (essentially, make everything — noodles, broth, droplets of fat on the surface of the soup — better), but not to his full breadth as a chef. For that, you need to go to Ivan Ramen, where he invests in creativity well outside the scope of standard ramenyas. Mr. Orkin supplements the noodles with dishes that cover many bases, though not the sweet one just yet. Desserts are promised down the line.

As suggested by a dining-room collage made of hundreds of pictures of Asian and Western pop icons and foodstuffs, Mr. Orkin’s cultural allusions are quick and funny, and come from several directions at once. He makes a whacked-out vegetarian chili dog with fried tofu in place of the frank, a rich and intense stew of mushrooms and miso as the chili, and a squiggly line of American yellow mustard. (There’s no substitute for yellow mustard.) Called a Tofu Coney Island, it’s a joke that tastes great. That was true for the JFC, too: deep-fried chicken hearts and livers with a honey-mustard sauce that tasted similar enough to the traditional McNugget garnish to make me laugh, and different enough (sharper, stronger and enriched with ponzu) to make me want more.

The Japanese borrowed ramen from China, and Mr. Orkin keeps up the custom. There is steamed Chinese broccoli with soy-pickled garlic, as well as a salad of crunchy daikon threads topped with spicy, funky XO sauce. On tables that could become laden with pork very quickly, each was a cool, welcome oasis.

The pork tended to disappear as quickly as it arrived. True, the scrapple waffle, a takeoff on Japanese okonomiyaki, hadn’t moved beyond the gimmick stage; it was all crisp, bland surface without the peculiar bits of fat and face that excite scrapple fans and terrify everybody else.