Rice, Noodle, Fish (18 page)

Perhaps no city in Japan is better known for one dish than Takamatsu and its udon. Hundreds of restaurants dedicate themselves to Sanuki-style udon—thick al dente noodles afloat in dashi and topped with everything from raw egg to tempura to braised beef. Not sure where to go? Wave down one of the taxis marked with bowls of udon, and they'll deliver you to the city's finest noodle dispensaries.

(Matt Goulding)

Soba culture gets deeper and more delicious the higher you climb, and mountainous Nagano produces some of the country's finest buckwheat noodles. Here you can have your soba cold and naked, hot and swimming in dashi, topped with wild duck and tinged black with charcoal. Both Kusabue and Fujiki-an have been in the soba game for a few centuries—worthy places for your noodle indoctrination.

(Matt Goulding)

Hakodate at the southern tip of Hokkaido offers one of the finest displays of seafood you'll find anywhere on the planet. The morning markets teem with wild salmon, hairy crabs, giant sea scallops, and golden mountains of sea urchin roe. The best way to enjoy it all? A breakfast
donburi
, bowls of steamed rice topped with any or all of Hokkaido's finest raw materials.

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Osaka's reputation as a center for good times and cheap food is well earned: the city abounds with casual eateries, lively bars, and street stands dispensing quick bites with potent flavors.
Kuiadore
, Osakan dialect for eating yourself stupid, is a founding principle in Japan's most freewheeling city, and it should be the primary objective while in Japan's second city. One could survive very happily on
takoyaki
,
okonomiyaki
, cold beer, and the good vibes of the Osakan citizenry for weeks at a time.

(Matt Goulding)

There's something deeply lovable about this southern Kyushu city: maybe it's the spewing Sakurajima
volcano, the sprawling sea views, the seedy entertainment district. Probably it's the abundance of Japan's best shochu (with over a hundred distilleries in the city) and
kurobuta
cuisine—shabu-shabu, tender braises, and ramen all made with black-footed Berkshire pork. Combine both in as many of the city's excellent izakayas as possible.

(Matt Goulding)

Fukuoka is the last bastion of Japan's
yatai
culture—a robust world of street food stalls that recalls a day when much of Japan's best food came from wooden stands. You'll find
yatai
specializing in everything from classic cocktails to French country cuisine to regional Italian cooking. Above all, you'll find the Big Three: yakitori,
oden
, and
tonkotsu
ramen. With spacing tight and alcohol aplenty,
yatai
are a good way to make friends fast.

(Matt Goulding)

 

If there is one word that will bring visitor and host together, this is it. Said with a slight twinkle in the eye, it can melt all the barriers of language and culture into a warm broth of love for one's fellow man.

Personal space in Japan is highly valued and yet nearly impossible to defend.
Sumimasen
and its expat-impatient variety,
excuse-me-masen
, are the Purell of jostling: a word you can just lather on any situation to defuse and disinfect.

Like
vale
in Spain or
doch
in Germany,
dozo
in Japan is a multitool of a word. It adds politeness—not an undervalued commodity in Japan—to any situation, whether you're letting someone pass in front of you or handing over a present.

It's not just that most people don't speak English; most street signs and place names are not in the
Romaji alphabet, and guidebook and Internet addresses routinely fail.
Doko
is your friend.

You did come to Japan to eat, yes? Say this word (remember, the
u
is silent in Japanese) with a question mark at the end, and you will immediately be led to Japanese food.

It's the equivalent of putting yourself in the chef's hands—most common at high-end sushi bars but also used in many top restaurants. Say it when you want to be taken on a boundless gastronomic adventure, or when you have no idea how to order à la carte.

Use this and
gochiso sama deshita
to bookend mealtime, and you will win hearts everywhere you go. This is essentially a small blessing to be intoned just before you begin eating, aimed at those who prepared the food for you.

After you finish eating, say this incantation to thank and praise the cook. When you return for lunch the next day, they'll give you a hero's welcome.

 

 

Toshiyuki Kamimura eats four hundred bowls of ramen a year. That's a bowl every day for lunch or dinner, plus one for breakfast about once a week. For that weekly breakfast bowl he usually goes to Ganso Nagahama out toward the ocean, a legendary spot located in what looks like an auto-parts warehouse that stays open twenty hours a day. “Sometimes I can't wait until lunch,” says Kamimura, who consumes his ramen with a sense of urgency, conveying thick ropes of noodles into his mouth and sliding them down his throat like a duck, barely pausing to chew, “so I eat with the taxi drivers getting off the late shift.”

His first memories of eating ramen come from his childhood in Kagoshima, the city at the southern tip of Kyushu famous for its fat-strewn pigs and potato-based liquor. Back then, Kamimura's parents would have ramen delivered from a local restaurant as a treat for the family. Even with the distance of time and the warm mist of nostalgia, Kamimura can't help but put a critical spin on those infant ramen moments. “By the time it got home, the broth was cold and the noodles were compromised. It wasn't impressive ramen.”

He moved to Fukuoka, the capital of Kyushu, when he was seventeen in
order to study photography at Fukuoka University. It was in that first year living on his own that Kamimura had his ramen epiphany. The transformative bowl came from Ichiran, now a popular national chain of middling quality but back then a gateway to a new life: “It was a whole different experience. I had no idea ramen could be so good.”

In the twenty years since, he has gone from being a passionate consumer to one of Japan's most important ramen bloggers. When it comes to food writing, the Japanese are avid consumers of data, and the nascent ramen blogging industry specializes in chronicling every aspect of Japan's chief noodle obsession. On his website, Junction 9 (named for a local intersection with a concentration of killer ramen), Kamimura reviews hundreds of shops across Kyushu, offering detailed analysis on broth strength, noodle type, and topping cohesion. He's also a frequent contributor to
Ramen Walker
, the most prominent of Japan's dozen or so ramen magazines, among other publications, and appears regularly on television, offering his take on the pressing ramen issues of the day.

Ramen bloggers aren't just passive observers of the noodle soup phenomenon: they create trends, drive or deflate business, and generally analyze ramen creation, consumption, and culture down to a microbial level. In some cases they eventually find themselves on the other side of the counter, stirring the soup and kneading the noodles. They, as much as the bandanna-wearing chefs and the legions of slurping salarymen, are the heart of modern ramen culture.

To be a ramen writer of Kamimura's stature, you need to live in a ramen town, and there is unquestionably no town in Japan more dedicated to ramen than Fukuoka. This city of 1.5 million along the northern coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, is home to two thousand ramen shops, representing Japan's densest concentration of noodle-soup emporiums. While bowls of ramen are like snowflakes in
Japan, Fukuoka is known as the cradle of
tonkotsu
, a pork-bone broth made milky white by the deposits of fat and collagen extracted during days of aggressive boiling. It is not simply a specialty of the city; it is the city, a distillation of all its qualities and calluses.

Indeed, tell any Japanese that you've been to Fukuoka and invariably the first question will be: “How was the
tonkotsu
?”

Ramen, despite its reputation as a cheap fast food, is a complex pillar of modern Japanese society, one loaded with political, cultural, and culinary importance that stretches far beyond the circumference of the bowl. And all those big ideas start here in Fukuoka, ground zero for the ramen craze, a dizzying galaxy of bone-broth dispensaries that can be overwhelming for the noodle novice.

I'm not a novice, not exactly. Like most Westerners, my ramen history begins with a brick of dried noodles and a silver spice packet, a three-for-a-dollar subsistence plan that propelled me through the lean college years. Later came the real thing, first in the early ramen boom of New York, later in noodle crawls around Tokyo that opened my mind to how sophisticated and staggeringly delicious the best bowls could be.

But this kind of ramen world, one where every block houses a bowl that could make your knees buckle, is brand-new territory, and objective is nothing if not ambitious, naive, and slightly hazardous to my health. I'm stalking the million-footed beast: not just a bowl that will make my stomach dance, but an experience that will help me better understand how a bowl of noodle soup from China came to define Japanese food culture in the twenty-first century. Any local can take you to a handful of her favorite shops, but it takes the discerning eye of a ramen blogger to understand the details. That is why I've enlisted Kamimura-san to be my ramen guru, my noodle-soup interpreter, a spirit guide in a journey to better
understand the bowl behind the city, and the city behind the bowl.

米 麺 魚

In the broadest sense, a bowl of ramen comprises four principal constituents:
tare
(a seasoning base), broth, noodles, and toppings. (Of course, ramen wonks like Kamimura could nitpick these parts into dozens of subcategories.)

Let's start from the top of the bowl and work our way down. In theory, toppings can include almost anything, but 95 percent of the ramen you consume in Japan will be topped with
chashu
, Chinese-style roasted pork. In a perfect world, that means luscious slices of marinated belly or shoulder, carefully basted over a low temperature until the fat has rendered and the meat collapses with a hard stare. Beyond the pork, the only other sure bet in a bowl of ramen is
negi
, thinly sliced green onion, little islands of allium sting in a sea of richness. Pickled bamboo shoots (
menma
), sheets of nori, bean sprouts, fish cake, raw garlic, and soy-soaked eggs are common constituents, but of course there is a whole world of outlier ingredients that make it into more esoteric bowls, which we'll get into later.

While shape and size will vary depending on region and style, ramen noodles all share one thing in common: alkaline salts. Called
kansui
in Japanese, alkaline salts are what give the noodles a yellow tint and allow them to stand up to the blistering heat of the soup without degrading into a gummy mass. In fact, in the sprawling ecosystem of noodle soups, it may be the alkaline noodle alone that unites the ramen universe. “If it doesn't have
kansui
, it's not ramen,” Kamimura says.

Noodles and toppings are paramount in the ramen formula, but the broth is undoubtedly the soul of the bowl, there to unite the disparate tastes and textures at work in the dish. This is where a ramen chef makes his name. Broth can be made from an encyclopedia of flora and fauna: chicken, pork, fish, mushrooms, root vegetables, herbs, spices. Ramen broth isn't about nuance; it's about impact, which is why making most soup involves high heat, long cooking times, and giant heaps of chicken bones, pork bones, or both.

Ramen is one of the few foods in Japan that comes with no rule book.

(Matt Goulding)

Tare
is the flavor base that anchors each bowl, that special potion—usually just an ounce or two of concentrated liquid—that bends ramen into one camp or another. In Sapporo,
tare
is made with miso. In Tokyo, soy sauce takes the lead. At enterprising ramen joints, you'll find
tare
made with up to two dozen ingredients, an apothecary's stash of dried fish and fungus and esoteric add-ons. The objective of
tare
is essentially the core objective of Japanese food itself: to pack as much umami as possible into every bite.

With all these variables in play, the potential combinations are limitless, but in Fukuoka, the single-minded dedication to
tonkotsu
is so relentless that all other ramen is beside the point. Kyushu has long been the center of Japan's pork industry, and no dish better expresses the potential of the pig better than
tonkotsu
. To make sure I fully understand the Fukuoka-
tonkotsu
connection, Kamimura starts me off at one of his favorite shops, Ramen-Ya Mototsugi.

Watching Kamimura review a ramen shop is like watching a detective work a crime scene. He starts with the
noren
, the cloth awning that invariably hangs from a shop's entrance. “If it's greasy ramen,” he says, reaching up and rubbing the yellowing drapes with a nod of approval, “it will look like a dirty shirt.”

Next, he inhales deeply.
Tonkotsu
is legendary for its fragrance, which, when emanating from the most intense shops, can assault your olfactory system from a three-block radius. It's a barnyard smell, pure sweaty-foot funk, and it's everywhere in Fukuoka, a misty aroma that hangs over the city the way fog clings to the hills of San Francisco.

“When I walk into a place and smell the broth, I can imagine how it was
made,” says the ramen whisperer as we slip into the shop. I draw in a deep breath, and my head swims with the memory of pigs passed.

After he orders, Kamimura turns his attention to the noodles. Are they cooked in individual baskets for easy timing, or are they dropped coil by coil into an open pot of boiling water? Most cooks go the basket route these days, but Kamimura prefers the purity of a free boil. “I respect the talent it takes to cook it all together—it takes real touch and intuition.”

All the while, he's watching for little precursors of quality: the way the ramen cook shakes the water from the noodles after they're done cooking so as not to dilute the precious broth; the careful hand-slicing of a roll of
chashu
so that it melts on contact with the hot soup; the judicious layering of
negi
and nori and other garnishes to elongate the textural juxtaposition.

“I work hard to gather all the information necessary to make my judgments. If you don't poke your head into the kitchen, you never know,” Kamimura says.

Our first bowl of ramen arrives. It's a muscular rendition, the spitting definition of Hakata-style
tonkotsu
: pale, thin, straight noodles, thick ivory broth, two slices of
chashu
, and little else in the way of toppings. Sesame seeds, ground white pepper, and electric pink pickled ginger are the holy trinity of table condiments in Fukuoka, but Kamimura isn't much for accessories. He wastes no time in cracking his wooden chopsticks and breaching the surface, but I wade in more cautiously.

Most Japanese food is a collective experience: the sushi chef feeds you piece by piece, the yakitori arrives in a great heap for divvying up, and the shabu-shabu bubbles away between you and your dining partners. But not ramen. With ramen it is just you and the bowl—the most intense and intimate of all food experiences in Japan. You may belly up to the bar with friends or colleagues
in tow, but once your bowl arrives, all talking ceases as you turn your attention entirely to the task of conveying noodles and soup from bowl to mouth. No conversing, no pausing, no “How is the soup working out for you?” from the waitstaff. You bow your head, let the steam wash over you, and don't look up again until you can see the bottom of the bowl.