There and Back Again
RiCE Magazine Issue 06 - Ramen for Real, Winter 2018
I never touched the stove. I would just ask my mom for some noodles, and she’d make them. The water would boil and the dried brick of carbs would go in with the packet of seasonings dumped in behind it. Three minutes later she would drain the noodles—pouring the broth down the drain—and hand me a bowl of noodles and a fork and let me eat in front of the TV. I thought it was Italian food. I didn’t know anything. I was just a kid growing up in America. Nothing about the generic looking cellophane package at the grocery store belied the long and complex history of ramen. I was Asian, but I was being raised in a white American household as an adoptee. There wasn’t anyone around to tell me any better.
The first time it occurred to me that ramen was maybe something more than I had imagined, was while watching the anime Ranma 1/2, when I was around 12 years old. The eldest Tendo sister Kasumi was preparing noodles for everyone. She was in the kitchen boiling them in individual baskets. I wondered to myself if this was the real way. But then she pulled the noodles out of the water and, after a few shakes, she dropped them into bowls of hot soup. An epiphany! I felt foolish. Even a little embarrassed. I had committed the dual crimes of both not knowing anything about where my food came from, as well as cooking it completely wrong. The stain of this ignorance would haunt me for years, until it fueled me to learn enough enough about food that I could go public with my zealotry, that I could bury my shame. But the road between growing up in America, knowing less than nothing about ramen, and living in Tokyo, with a mental map of ramen shops that is more constellation than list, is a long one.
For starters, I never drained the broth ever again. I also looked for ways to add things to my noodles. The full range of possibilities and their importance to the bowl itself would be years away from me still. But I began with green onions. Because I was growing up in the country, my grandmother would often give them to me from her garden, freshly picked and wrapped in paper towels. I’d chop up these small gifts and sprinkle them over my steaming bowl of ramen. Their color and piquancy went a long way to elevate my processed carbohydrates to something more closely resembling a meal.
And from there, I grew bold. Maybe even a little silly. I’d add leftover meat or whatever odd vegetables might be in the fridge. I still had never eaten real ramen, so I had no idea what sort of context I was working in. I just trusted my gut. Sometimes it was a little too much, but there is so much salt, fat, and MSG in instant ramen that almost anything you drop in it will be good.
I plugged along on this path of culinary guesswork for years. Slowly learning what I could and couldn’t get away with. My desire to have the real thing had grown considerably. I had reached a ceiling of possible experiences I could suck out of a manufactured package. After I graduated college, I was in New York City on a trip, and I had heard that some of the Japanese ramen chains were beginning to test the waters of the American market. The Setagaya group had opened a shop in the East Village, and I hauled a friend over one day for a late lunch to see if this was going to teach me about what I needed to know. Sadly, I did not learn much.
Like most Americans, we only knew instant ramen, and Setagaya’s menu flummoxed us. What was soy sauce ramen? What was salt ramen? Tsukemen made almost no sense at the time. I ordered the soy sauce bowl, and my friend got the tsukemen. When they landed on the table, my friend, who had less of an idea about what was happening than I did, dumped her bowl of soup over her noodles. And for the rest of the meal, she wondered why they were served separately in the first place. I felt that something was amiss, but I dutifully ate my entire bowl. Slurping down the noodles first, just like I had read they do in Japan. (I liked to get travel books as a child, because I thought that would teach me about other places. I had one on Tokyo, and there was a passage about Japanese people gulping down there noodles quickly and loudly. This, along with the accompanying photo of a kid trying to swallow his entire bowl in one bite would mystify me for years; until finally moving to Japan and seeing what it meant first hand). But at the end, I didn’t feel like I had experienced anything new. I passed the experience off as a misfire in my education. I would have to wait a little longer before I could truly know what I was missing.
The epiphany would come, strangely, not in Tokyo but in Seoul.
Korea, despite its love for ramen, does not have a strong bench of ramen shops. For Koreans, like Americans, what they know as ramen is Shin Ramyun. Most of the time, if you see ramen in Seoul on a restaurant menu it is exactly that, only prepared by someone else instead of yourself in the middle of the night. But my friend had been somewhere that she swore was the real deal. In the Hongdae district of Seoul, there was a little Japanese run shop called Menya Sandaime. I had my doubts. But once we walked in, it felt right. It felt more than right. It felt perfect. It felt like I wasn’t in Seoul anymore.
They played old Japanese music on the stereo. The counters were made of worn wood. None of the staff were speaking Korean. One worker was busy in back folding gyoza by hand. The place fired something in my imagination. Something about what I had always dreamed Japan must be like. And then the food came out.
I had never tasted anything like it before. Chefs and food writers often talk about depth of flavor, but this was the first time as an eater that I truly understood what that meant. Every element was distinct. It was as if every sip of the soup was a plunge deeper into the ocean. There were crosscurrents and eddies. New sensations and a sense of excitement. I inhaled the noodles in less than two minutes. I drank the soup in just one minute more. I sat there in a total daze, completely beside myself with joy. This was the taste I had been looking for my entire life. It satisfied a hunger that had been itching at me since I was little, in rural America. I wiped my brow. I sighed and swore that I would trade all the food of my childhood for this. I was caught in the heady rush of a love in full bloom. And then I ordered another.
I went back at least three more times in the week before I left Seoul. It’s the only thing I could think about. It’s the only thing I wanted to eat. I was obsessed. Later on, I would learn more about what kind of ramen it was and why its flavor was so complex. Menya Sandaime specializes in Tokyo-style tonkotsu, and their “kuro ramen” is double soup blend of tonkotsu and niboshi. I now know that kind of soup is not at all unusual here in the capitol, but for me at the time, it was revelatory. When it fell into the vast pool of my ignorance, it turned a food I had eaten all my life into something new and interesting. My culinary identity pivoted on that meal. I wanted to know more. I wanted to feel that intensity again. I wanted to feel it longer.
The arc of my life, which had been contorted until then, began to straighten out, slowly, too slowly, towards Japan. I needed to go there. To be here in this country, eating this food. I felt closer to it, but I knew that I needed to be here to fully understand what ramen was about. It would take another two years before I was able to make the move to Tokyo, but eventually I did.
I wanted to eat everything, but I wanted to eat ramen the most. In the intervening time, I had sought to recreate the high of that initial encounter. But the ramen in America had been, largely, a disappointment. Too narrowly considered and too poorly prepared, it had left me wanting. The boom years of American ramen had not hit yet. The entire idea from the format of the shops to the noodles themselves were a distant cry to what I felt was possible. To the American dining public, it was just another ethnic food. And like those before and after it, it lived as an impoverished manifestation of itself: disconnected from its history and context without the care of those who knew how to make it best. I moved to Japan with this central lack in mind. And meal by meal, I closed the circle of my journey.
Each bowl was educational. I ate ramen three or four times a week in my first year. I pushed myself to gain a more fully rendered picture of what was possible. Outside of Japan, most people only know tonkotsu. But to be here in Tokyo eating it is to witness a culture of infinite variation. Americans do not understand the concept, much less the difficulty in execution of a proper shio style ramen. Miso is easier to understand, but getting miso of any quality in America is almost impossible. Shoyu should be straightforward, but as most Americans only know soy sauce as mass market Kikkoman or, more commonly, the little packets stuffed into bags of Chinese take out, they lack the culinary vocabulary to articulate the fully fleshed out flavors of classic shoyu ramen. And this is only speaking in the broadest possible terms. More specific iterations such as tsukemen, niboshi, tori paitan, tonkotsu gyokai, or even tantan men remain almost total mysteries.
Is this changing? Perhaps. There have been new waves of shops opening that are attempting to push Americans into a more total understanding of what ramen is. But there is a great amount of learning that the American eater must endure, before ramen in America can even begin to resemble what is available in Japan. My own way through the cultural gap was long, but look long enough and you find your way home, be it a city, a body of water, or a bowl of noodles.
The first time it occurred to me that ramen was maybe something more than I had imagined, was while watching the anime Ranma 1/2, when I was around 12 years old. The eldest Tendo sister Kasumi was preparing noodles for everyone. She was in the kitchen boiling them in individual baskets. I wondered to myself if this was the real way. But then she pulled the noodles out of the water and, after a few shakes, she dropped them into bowls of hot soup. An epiphany! I felt foolish. Even a little embarrassed. I had committed the dual crimes of both not knowing anything about where my food came from, as well as cooking it completely wrong. The stain of this ignorance would haunt me for years, until it fueled me to learn enough enough about food that I could go public with my zealotry, that I could bury my shame. But the road between growing up in America, knowing less than nothing about ramen, and living in Tokyo, with a mental map of ramen shops that is more constellation than list, is a long one.
For starters, I never drained the broth ever again. I also looked for ways to add things to my noodles. The full range of possibilities and their importance to the bowl itself would be years away from me still. But I began with green onions. Because I was growing up in the country, my grandmother would often give them to me from her garden, freshly picked and wrapped in paper towels. I’d chop up these small gifts and sprinkle them over my steaming bowl of ramen. Their color and piquancy went a long way to elevate my processed carbohydrates to something more closely resembling a meal.
And from there, I grew bold. Maybe even a little silly. I’d add leftover meat or whatever odd vegetables might be in the fridge. I still had never eaten real ramen, so I had no idea what sort of context I was working in. I just trusted my gut. Sometimes it was a little too much, but there is so much salt, fat, and MSG in instant ramen that almost anything you drop in it will be good.
I plugged along on this path of culinary guesswork for years. Slowly learning what I could and couldn’t get away with. My desire to have the real thing had grown considerably. I had reached a ceiling of possible experiences I could suck out of a manufactured package. After I graduated college, I was in New York City on a trip, and I had heard that some of the Japanese ramen chains were beginning to test the waters of the American market. The Setagaya group had opened a shop in the East Village, and I hauled a friend over one day for a late lunch to see if this was going to teach me about what I needed to know. Sadly, I did not learn much.
Like most Americans, we only knew instant ramen, and Setagaya’s menu flummoxed us. What was soy sauce ramen? What was salt ramen? Tsukemen made almost no sense at the time. I ordered the soy sauce bowl, and my friend got the tsukemen. When they landed on the table, my friend, who had less of an idea about what was happening than I did, dumped her bowl of soup over her noodles. And for the rest of the meal, she wondered why they were served separately in the first place. I felt that something was amiss, but I dutifully ate my entire bowl. Slurping down the noodles first, just like I had read they do in Japan. (I liked to get travel books as a child, because I thought that would teach me about other places. I had one on Tokyo, and there was a passage about Japanese people gulping down there noodles quickly and loudly. This, along with the accompanying photo of a kid trying to swallow his entire bowl in one bite would mystify me for years; until finally moving to Japan and seeing what it meant first hand). But at the end, I didn’t feel like I had experienced anything new. I passed the experience off as a misfire in my education. I would have to wait a little longer before I could truly know what I was missing.
The epiphany would come, strangely, not in Tokyo but in Seoul.
Korea, despite its love for ramen, does not have a strong bench of ramen shops. For Koreans, like Americans, what they know as ramen is Shin Ramyun. Most of the time, if you see ramen in Seoul on a restaurant menu it is exactly that, only prepared by someone else instead of yourself in the middle of the night. But my friend had been somewhere that she swore was the real deal. In the Hongdae district of Seoul, there was a little Japanese run shop called Menya Sandaime. I had my doubts. But once we walked in, it felt right. It felt more than right. It felt perfect. It felt like I wasn’t in Seoul anymore.
They played old Japanese music on the stereo. The counters were made of worn wood. None of the staff were speaking Korean. One worker was busy in back folding gyoza by hand. The place fired something in my imagination. Something about what I had always dreamed Japan must be like. And then the food came out.
I had never tasted anything like it before. Chefs and food writers often talk about depth of flavor, but this was the first time as an eater that I truly understood what that meant. Every element was distinct. It was as if every sip of the soup was a plunge deeper into the ocean. There were crosscurrents and eddies. New sensations and a sense of excitement. I inhaled the noodles in less than two minutes. I drank the soup in just one minute more. I sat there in a total daze, completely beside myself with joy. This was the taste I had been looking for my entire life. It satisfied a hunger that had been itching at me since I was little, in rural America. I wiped my brow. I sighed and swore that I would trade all the food of my childhood for this. I was caught in the heady rush of a love in full bloom. And then I ordered another.
I went back at least three more times in the week before I left Seoul. It’s the only thing I could think about. It’s the only thing I wanted to eat. I was obsessed. Later on, I would learn more about what kind of ramen it was and why its flavor was so complex. Menya Sandaime specializes in Tokyo-style tonkotsu, and their “kuro ramen” is double soup blend of tonkotsu and niboshi. I now know that kind of soup is not at all unusual here in the capitol, but for me at the time, it was revelatory. When it fell into the vast pool of my ignorance, it turned a food I had eaten all my life into something new and interesting. My culinary identity pivoted on that meal. I wanted to know more. I wanted to feel that intensity again. I wanted to feel it longer.
The arc of my life, which had been contorted until then, began to straighten out, slowly, too slowly, towards Japan. I needed to go there. To be here in this country, eating this food. I felt closer to it, but I knew that I needed to be here to fully understand what ramen was about. It would take another two years before I was able to make the move to Tokyo, but eventually I did.
I wanted to eat everything, but I wanted to eat ramen the most. In the intervening time, I had sought to recreate the high of that initial encounter. But the ramen in America had been, largely, a disappointment. Too narrowly considered and too poorly prepared, it had left me wanting. The boom years of American ramen had not hit yet. The entire idea from the format of the shops to the noodles themselves were a distant cry to what I felt was possible. To the American dining public, it was just another ethnic food. And like those before and after it, it lived as an impoverished manifestation of itself: disconnected from its history and context without the care of those who knew how to make it best. I moved to Japan with this central lack in mind. And meal by meal, I closed the circle of my journey.
Each bowl was educational. I ate ramen three or four times a week in my first year. I pushed myself to gain a more fully rendered picture of what was possible. Outside of Japan, most people only know tonkotsu. But to be here in Tokyo eating it is to witness a culture of infinite variation. Americans do not understand the concept, much less the difficulty in execution of a proper shio style ramen. Miso is easier to understand, but getting miso of any quality in America is almost impossible. Shoyu should be straightforward, but as most Americans only know soy sauce as mass market Kikkoman or, more commonly, the little packets stuffed into bags of Chinese take out, they lack the culinary vocabulary to articulate the fully fleshed out flavors of classic shoyu ramen. And this is only speaking in the broadest possible terms. More specific iterations such as tsukemen, niboshi, tori paitan, tonkotsu gyokai, or even tantan men remain almost total mysteries.
Is this changing? Perhaps. There have been new waves of shops opening that are attempting to push Americans into a more total understanding of what ramen is. But there is a great amount of learning that the American eater must endure, before ramen in America can even begin to resemble what is available in Japan. My own way through the cultural gap was long, but look long enough and you find your way home, be it a city, a body of water, or a bowl of noodles.
