A Ramen Round-up

Balmy. It's my new favorite word and, lately, I have had ample opportunity to use it. The weather here has turned hot, sweaty, sticky and strange. I'm either pairing tank tops with rain boots or hunkering down inside my air conditioned apartment as the warm, tropical rain loudly crashes down outside my window.

With the heat came a chilling realization: ramen season is over. Sure, technically, I can still pop into a noodle shop and get my slurp on, but I'd prefer not to spend my lunch break sweating into a hot bowl of soup. This is truly heartbreaking as I despise hot, humid weather as much as I love good ramen.

So, I'd like to do a little tribute to my dear friend ramen and share with you a collection of top notch bowls I've enjoyed in various cities around Japan. I'll miss you over these next couple of balmy months, my porky salty friend. Have a great summer! Stay Sweet! KIT!!
 

Butter + Ramen
Last weekend, as the temperature began to rise, I panicked and insisted on squeezing in one last round of ramen. I was visiting my BFIJ in Fukui so we stopped into her favorite local shop. It didn't look particularly exciting, but then I saw it. The ramen I have been wanting to try. The Shio Butter Ramen. Butter is a common ramen accoutrement in the Hokkaido region, the most northern island in Japan, where all the cows live and moo and donate their milk to make the particularly flavorful butter. The bowl arrived, as promised, with a fat nug of butter bobbing atop the salt broth. Chopped shiso leaves were another added bonus.  I swirled the butter around the bowl until it melted, immediately adding an oily sheen to the soup and even more calories to my (poor poor) happily overfed body. Salt is not my favorite ramen flavor, but the butter took the edge off, and the broth was smooth and unctuous. 

The Old Standby AKA My Very Very Favoritest Ramen in Kanazawa 

Ippudo is where I ate my very first meal in Kanazawa and it remains to be one of my favorite restaurants in the city. Not only is their Kyushu-style tonkotsu ramen consistently amazing, but they provide two of my favorite things: lots of condiments and free side dishes. Hurrah! After your bowl arrives, with it's rich, cloudy-white, pork broth and slippery noodles (you can choose to have them cooked hard or soft), grind some sesame seeds on top and use the garlic press to add a freshly crushed clove or two. Dig into the wooden bowls full of all-you-can-eat spicy chopped greens and bean sprouts coated in chili oil. Always pay the extra 100yen to add a perfectly cooked egg. After carefully biting through the hard cooked white, you'll be rewarded with a gooey, Hawaiian sunset orange, yolk. Sip your complimentary, bottomless iced tea and listen to the jazz playing in the simple but stylish dining room. When you finally stumble out the door, woozy and comatose from the decadent combination of pork, noodles and egg, the entire staff will shout after you. I don't know what they're saying, but I imagine it's something like "Dang! That shit was the joint, huh? Good luck staying awake at your desk, sucker!"  Some Bad News: I was shocked and disappointed to discover that Ippudo is a chain, with 34 shops in Japan. Some Good News: There's now an Ippudo in New York City, so I can get my fix stateside. 

Kyushu: The Ramen Mecca

Japanese people love waiting in line for food. A long line means it must be good, and these people will consistently queue up for hours for what they hope is the perfect plate of gyoza or freshest slices of sashimi. It is rumored that some will hop in any old line, not even knowing what they are waiting for, but assuming it must be life alteringly delicious. I am not so keen on the lines, but line up I did in Kagoshima. What else could I do? There I was in the motherland. The birthplace of my beloved Kyushu tonkotsu ramen. I was finally gonna eat one of my favorite foods on its home turf. I was like a Jew in Jerusalem, but with way more pork. Of course I would wait in line. And it was totally worth it. This was the absolute best bowl of my life. The pork nearly melted on my tongue, the noodles were chewy and ropey and (bonus round!) there was a handful of silky skinned, pork filled, wontons. A cold glass of lunchtime beer cut right through that rich, porcine broth.

So, there ya have it. Ramen season is officially over (maybe, probably, most likely). But not all is lost: cold soba season has just begun!

Instant Ramen Museum: Osaka Weekend Part II

I have recently taken on the role of Crazy Food Museum Girl. If I had children they would probably be sitting in the back of a station wagon right now, sighing, rolling their eyes and whining. "Mommmmm! Do we have to go to the canned corn factory? We just toured the Ritz Crackers museum for Dad's birthday!" So I'm thinking it's a pretty good thing I don't have children. They would have totally ruined my plan to visit The Instant Ramen Museum in Osaka and that would have totally sucked because this museum is what dreams are made of. 

Top 5 Reasons Why The Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum Made My Heart Go Pitter Patter:

1.) They have English audio guides! As I mentioned before, Yokohama's Ramen Museum was a bit of a let down because everything was in Japanese. But here I was able to soak up all kinds of useful instant ramen knowledge. Like, did you know that Momofuku Ando, creator of Cup Noodles, also invented the Styrofoam cup? Fascinating! These facts don't just grow on trees, people.

2.)YOU GET TO MAKE YOUR OWN CUP OF NOODLE! That's right: capital letters. Capital letters mean I'm serious about how awesome this is. This is awesome. Drop three 100 yen coins into a vending machine and an empty Styrofoam cup will drop out. You are then invited to sit down, in my case with an entire elementary school class on a field trip, with a basket of markers and decorate your cup. Then, take it up to the assembly line to receive your noodles. Here you get to choose what flavor broth you want (I chose Seafood) and four ingredients. I selected little bits of freeze dried asparagus, imitation crab, scallions and fish cakes shaped like little pink hearts and stamped with "Love." Next, watch as your cup is properly sealed and wrapped in cellophane. Brilliant! The Cup Noodle Factory wenches should also be mentioned: not only are they amazingly chipper and patient, they know that everyone wants to take about a billion photos of their personalized Cup Noodles. Without being asked, they automatically pose and hold up the cup for photos after every step.

3.) The museum is bright, clean, colorful and The Instant Ramen Tunnel highlights Cup Noodle and instant ramen packages sold around the world, from past to present.

4.) If you come on a day that was not the day that I came, you have the opportunity to make fresh ramen noodles. The museum offers hands-on courses, every day except Monday and Tuesday, so you can learn to stretch, knead, roll, cut and taste homemade ramen noodles. This only costs about $5.
 
5.) Oh, and speaking of money: the museum is free. Hurrah!

Perhaps I've slurped up all the noodle museums Japan has to offer. Fortunately the country is full of food obsessed tourists, which means there are many culinary theme parks.  Get in the car, kids! We're going to Gyoza Stadium!

The Ramenatrix Takes On Yokohama

If there was a beauty pageant for cities, but instead of a Swimsuit Competition there was a Best Museums Competition, Yokohama would take the crown. Hands down. Yokohama would have black mascara running down it's face as a monstrous bouquet of red roses was thrust into it's arms and a glittering bejeweled tiara placed on it's head. Yokohama would be choking back grateful sobs as it thanked God for this honor and hugged all the other competing cities, sulking on stage in their silky pink pageant-issue sashes.

Not only does Yokohama have the Yokohama Museum of Art (an amazing modern art museum with the best exhibition I've seen in years), it is home to the Yokohama Silk Museum, The Japan Newspaper Museum and Broadcast Library (after I left they exhibited New Year's Day front pages from every newspaper in the world. Interesting idea, no?), the Yokohama Doll Museum, the Yokohama Curry Museum and about a bazillion other galleries. But the main reason I went to Yokohama was to tour the Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum (their "u," not mine). No, I didn't stutter. An entire museum devoted to ramen. I'll slurp to that.

I could almost cry brothy tears just thinking about that fact that the majority of Americans think ramen is nothing more than a 10 cent packet of culinary desperation, eaten primarily and shamefully by college students who'd rather spend their parent-supplied grocery money on cases of Keystone Ice. If you've ever enjoyed true ramen, from a ramen shop, you know that is it so much more. At my favorite noodle slurping spots, in both Seattle and Kanazawa (they also have a branch in NYC for those of you in that hood), you can decide the firmness of your ramen noodles, the flavor of your broth, and a variety of accessories that include slices of pork, bamboo shoots and soft boiled egg. In Japan, different regions are famous for their particular spin on what was originally a Chinese noodle soup. At the ramen museum you are challenged to taste nine varieties.

The museum has three floors and two of them are built to be a 1:1 replica of a particular Tokyo neighborhood circa 1958, the year instant ramen noodles were invented. I strolled past the fake store fronts and old Japanese movie posters, cursing my lack of stomach space as I tried to decide which of the nine ramen shops I wanted to try. The original goal was realistic: to eat two bowls at two different shops. But, lamely, I woke up with a stupiddumb cold and didn't have much of an appetite, so the new goal became quiet pathetic: one bowl of ramen. Thanks a lot, immune system. You always ruin everything.



I eventually settled on Eki, from the Hokkaido region in northern Japan. I have been curious about Hokkaido ramen since I arrived in Japan, mostly because I heard there is often a pat of butter in the broth, plus it looked particularly porcine in the photo with both slices and crumbles of pork floating around the miso broth.

For all I know, an entire pig had been marinating in my bowl of ramen all morning long. The broth tasted more like a rich gravy, with a thin layer of oil hovering on top. The noodles, thicker and more yellow than the ones I usually suck down, lay in a lazy tangle on the bottom of the bowl, passed out and drunk on pork fat. An Elvis track is barely audible behind the sound of scissors snipping at the stiff tentacles of a large dried squid, the sizzle of oil hitting hot pans, and a spoon loudly banging on the rim of a metal pot. But, of course, the most powerful noise of all: the chorus of in-stereo slurps as my neighbors noisily sucked up the long curly noodles. I looked down the counter at the chopstick wielding ramenistas bowing into their bowls and imagined miniature Honey I Shrunk the Kids sized people climbing up the toothsome noodle ropes that stretched from broth to mouth. It is not only acceptable to loudly slurp your ramen in Japan, it is encouraged and seen as a sign of enjoyment. It is also very practical: the slurping allows in air that helps cools down the steaming hot soup.

It was a damn fine bowl, though not the best I've ever had. But, a lover of all things noodle, ramen has quickly made it's way onto my Favorite Foods list and I'm game to try a new variety any chance I get.

Truth be told, the rest of the museum was a bit disappointing. You can buzz on through the Tokyo neighborhood section in about 15 minutes, and the actual ramen exhibit is fairly small and completely in Japanese so I didn't learn a thing. However, I absolutely appreciate the museum's existence and think it was would be about 74 times more awesome if you can read and comprehend Japanese. I've heard of people spending their entire day there, but I worked hard to stay for an entire hour before hopping back on the train and heading back downtown.

Luckily, it turns out Yokohama is super mega awesome and I didn't make the trip in vane. I was completely smitten with the clean, modern and architecturally organized city with it's picturesque skyline, many parks and beautiful harbor. After spending a few days in the land of chaos, crowds and neon lights that is Tokyo, the country's second biggest city felt more refined, relaxed and breezy. I instantly got that "Oh my God, I could totally live here" sensation and was reminded of both Seattle and Boston. The city boasts a touristy Chinatown, where I was (finally) able to buy some proper hot sauce, and enjoy a little dim sum. Standing on the harbor on my first night in the city, I caught an amazing sunset and my first clear view of Mt Fuji. It was New Year's Day, I had just spent a week traveling around Japan with one of my best friends, and now I was on my own. I felt incredibly calm, happy and peaceful. With just a wee bit of a swine hangover.

Snow is For Suckers

So, the sky decided to open up it's giant butt hole a few days ago, and it's been pooping down plops of freezing cold snow ever since. It must have eaten a bad cloud or a rotten oyster or something because there are monstrous piles of white stuff everywhere. Poor sky. Oh, and poor me.

It might look pretty idyllic if you happen to be a rosy cheeked character in a Norman Rockwell painting, perched before a roaring fire, wearing a cashmere unitard, with a hot toddy in one hand and a bottomless trust fund marinating in a downtown bank. In that case, you might feel obliged to say something like "Oh, Richard, isn't it just beautiful? Put down that Chicken Soup for the Rare Coin Collector's Soul and and come look at this! It's simply magical!"

But those of us who have to tromp to work in this blustery mess, who have to wear tights and leggings under our pants, two shirts and a jacket under our coat and manly, super-tread, not 100%, waterproof hiking boots, that look ridiculous with the business suit you are required to wear, aren't so thrilled. Let me rephrase that: I'm not so thrilled.

I know this snow business is old news for those of you who grew up in New York or Alaska or for those raised by a talking cartoon polar bear in Antarctica, but I'm from California, bitches. Not Lake Tahoe or Plumas County: the Bay Area. I can handle the rain, thank-you-very-much Seattle, and I thoroughly enjoy an afternoon of sledding...but living in the snow? Meh. It's been four days and I'm totally over it. Are we there yet?

This morning *cough* at noon *cough* as I hit the snooze on my alarm for the fourth time, I began to seriously contemplate hibernation. What a great idea! Now I see why that crazy Grizzly Man wanted to befriend all those bears in Alaska: bears know what's up. Maybe I can just lounge my way through the winter. I'll hide inside my cozy little bento box with my new fuzzy pillow, and my friends, and wait for the city to thaw out. Oh, and when I say friends, I mean instant ramen (the good kind), the Internet, Sex & the City, downloaded Mad Men episodes, Bon Appetit magazine and a stack of good books. I'll emerge in Spring, bleary eyed, bloated from MSG, warm and dry, just in time to watch the cherry blossoms pop! pop! pop! open, on the trees, like kernels of fluffy pink popcorn.