In Today’s Kim’s Adventure we head out to Pretend City Orange County. Pretend City is a nonprofit children’s museum and features 17 interactive exhibits designed as a small, interconnected city. On August 30th, 2009, Pretend City opened and was awarded the Possible Dream grant the following year. It aims to build better brains through purposeful play, hands on learning and most importantly gives the little ones a chance to burn off their energy so the parents can have some time to work on their marriage.

Today we’re here for their special exhibit called Dino’s in the City. Explore engaging interactives with life-like animatronic dinosaurs and exciting educational content created by the Omaha Children’s Museum.

Before leaving we got one last photo op near the cool Jurassic park jeep.

We had a serious case of the munchies, so we decided to go to Marufuku ramen. Marufuku Ramen is the Bay Area’s well-known purveyor of authentic Japanese ramen, featuring a silky, smooth, 20-hour Hakata-style broth. It has opened a location in Irvine’s Los Olivos Marketplace back in 2021.

The key process behind Marufuku’s luscious tonkotsu broth is a 20-hour cook time. In order to fully extract the umami flavor, this authentic broth is made by slow boiling pork bones. This slow-cooking process results in a combination of oily broth featuring a thick, milky layer of umami. Swimming in this thick hakata-style broth is specially selected “ultra-thin artisanal noodles.” Here, guests can dictate their own experience from the style of ramen to the choice of protein and even the firmness of the noodle itself. This was our first time here, so it was now time to dig in.

Pretend City Children’s Museum
Address: 29 Hubble, Irvine, CA 92618
Website: https://www.pretendcity.org/

Marufuku Ramen
Address: 8543 Irvine Center Dr, Irvine, CA 92618
Website: https://www.marufukuramen.com/