A whistle-stop tour of Tokyo's best ramen restaurants
September 1st, 2010 by Grace
A cheap lunch has drawn me to Tokyo. It is a long way to travel to save a couple of quid on fast food, granted, but since I started visiting Japan around 10 years ago, I have become obsessed, haunted, by one Japanese lunch staple in particular: the salty-savoury flavours, steamy-meaty aromas and chewy-soft textures that lurk in a proper bowl of serious, seductive ramen.
Japan, too, is in the midst of its own colossal, collective ramen fixation. This is the so-called "ramen boom", which, in Tokyo alone, sees a new shop open every day; where each week countless newspaper articles and magazine features are published about it and TV shows are aired; not to mention the blogs (oh, how many working hours have I burnt browsing those back home?) and guidebooks which contribute to the ceaseless chatter on what you'd think would be the relatively limited subject of noodle soup. Ramen might be Chinese in origin, but the Japanese have made it their own. A new manga has just been launched here; its hero is a cat who runs a ramen shop.
Within minutes of checking in, I leave my hotel, wild-eyed and desperate for ramen, any ramen. The first place I come across is a dingy, greasy, narrow shop with all the charm of a Kwik-Fit waiting-room. Here I buy a token from the machine at the door, hand it to the chef and sit expectantly at the counter. It is a tonkotsu, or "pork bone", ramen, one of the four main categories – along with soy, salt and miso – which together head an almost infinitely diverse ramen family tree. As with many of the most memorable culinary flavours – well-hung game, the funkier French cheeses, offal – a proper tonkotsu should taste faintly of the barnyard, but this one has tipped fatally into the realm of animal bottoms.
My second bowl, an hour or so later, is at Mist, one of the new wave of upscale ramen restaurants targeting women, on the top floor of the chic Omotesando Hills mall. A waitress takes my coat as I enter – not something I have ever experienced at a ramen restaurant. Inside, all is moody lighting and glittery stainless steel. I choose a miso ramen, which, at 1,400 yen (£10), is double the price of my first. It is an improvement, but doesn't make my hair stand on end as some ramen can.
Clearly, with about 4,000 ramen shops in Tokyo alone (and 80,000 in Japan as a whole), I need guidance. As evening arrives, I meet Rickmond Wong at Shin-Daita station in western Tokyo. A Chinese-American from LA, 35-year-old Wong is the author of rameniac.com, one of the handful of English-language ramen blogs I follow avidly. Wong is a self-employed web designer, a job which, he explains as we walk to a nearby ramen joint, allows him to travel as often as possible to Japan to indulge his passion for ramen.
"Really, the best ramen in LA would only get a bronze medal in Tokyo," he sighs. Why doesn't ramen travel, I wonder? "The water is so important," he says, echoing what several of Japan's top kaiseki chefs have told me. "And you can get away with selling lesser ramen in London. There is a lack of education, but that is changing." (For what it's worth, Wong names Brewer Street's Ten Ten Tei as the least worst of London's offerings.)
We are heading for Basanova, a ramen restaurant owned by a chef from Fukuoka who has recently handed over the ' reigns to Keizo Shimamoto, a Japanese-American, also originally from LA. Shimamoto is now "living the dream", as his blog, goramen.com, puts it, of becoming a ramen chef.
As we arrive, Shimamoto, 32, with a dinky goatee and back-to-front baseball cap, is busy studying the viscosity of his pork broth, holding a sample of the soup up to the light in a refractor, a common tool of the modern ramen chef. "I'm looking for a rating of between five and 10," he explains. "Beyond 10 and it gets too thick, it's more of a sauce." Last year, Shimamoto travelled the length of Japan eating 55 bowls in 21 cities in 28 days. "I probably eat at least two bowls a day," he reveals.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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