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The New York Times
January 31, 2010
One Noodle at a Time in Tokyo
By MATT GROSS
NOT far from Waseda University in Tokyo, around the corner from a 7-Eleven, down a tidy alley, lies a ramen shop that doesnft look like a ramen shop. In fact, Ganko, as itfs called, doesnft look like anything at all. Therefs no sign, no windows, only a raggedy black tarp set like a tent against a tiled wall, with a white animal bone dangling from a chain to signal (somehow) what lies within.
Past the tarp and through a sliding glass door is Ganko proper. Five stools are lined up along a faux-wood counter, and above it a thin space opens like a proscenium onto a small kitchen, crusted black with age and smoke but hardly dirty. The lone performer is a ramen chef. With a weekfs stubble on his chin, his eyeglasses fogged with steam and a towel wrapped around his neck, he certainly looks ganko, or stubborn, and he speaks hardly a word as he methodically fills bowls with careful dollops of flavorings and fats, ladles of rich broth, noodles cooked just al dente and shaken free of excess water, a slab of roast pork, a supple sheet of seaweed, a tangle of pickled bamboo shoots. All is silent until the final moment, when the chef drizzles hot oil on top and the shreds of pale-green scallion squeal and sizzle.
From then on there is only one sound \ the slurping of noodles. Oh, itfs punctuated by the occasional happy hum of a diner chewing pork or guzzling the fat-flecked broth, or even by the faint chatter of the cheffs radio, but itfs the slurps that take center stage, long and loud and enthusiastic, showing appreciation for the cheffs métier even as they cool the noodles down to edible temperature.
And when the noodles are finally gone, the bowl empty of everything but a few oleaginous blobs, each diner sets his bowl back upon the counter, mumbles gGochiso-sama deshitah \ roughly gThank you for the mealh \ pays the 700-yen fee (about $7.85 at 89 yen to the dollar) and wanders back out into the daylight world where Ganko suddenly seems like a hallucination, a Wonderland dream of noodly bliss.
Now, you might think that Ganko would be a closely held secret \ a destination I managed to uncover only through bribes, threats and tearful entreaties. But youfd be wrong. I learned about Ganko out in the open, from an English-language blog, Ramenate!, started by a Columbia University graduate student working on his Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature and, more important, cataloging his near-daily bowls of noodles.
Ramenate! is hardly the only ramen blog out there. There are dozens, many in English, many more in Japanese. Together they constitute but one small corner of Tokyofs sprawling ramen ecosystem, a realm that encompasses multilingual guidebooks, glossy magazines, databases that score shops to three decimal places (Gankofs underrated by RamenDB.com at 76.083), comic books, TV shows, movies (like the 1985 classic gTampopo,h in which a Stetson-wearing trucker helps a beleaguered widow learn the art of ramen) and, according to the Shinyokohama Raumen Museum (yes, there is a ramen museum), the 4,137 shops selling bowls of noodles in broth.
Still unclear? Well, combine New Yorkersf love of pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers, throw in some Southern barbecue mania, and youfve still only begun to approximate Tokyofs obsession with ramen.
This ramen is definitely not the dried stuff you subsisted on in college. At the best shops, and even at lesser lights, almost everything is fresh, handmade and artisanal, from long-simmered broths and hand-cut noodles to pigs raised on red wine (for an inside-out marinade). In some quarters, regional varieties predominate: shoyu, or soy-enhanced chicken broth (like Gankofs), is popular throughout Honshu, Japanfs main island, but tonkotsu, or pork-bone broth, from the southern island of Kyushu has developed a widespread following, while garlicky, thick-noodled miso ramen from Sapporo, in the north, has adherents too. Elsewhere, the flavors are simply at the whim of the chef, or of ever-shifting trends.
Over six days in late November, I submerged myself in Tokyofs ramen culture, eating roughly four bowls a day at shops both fancy and spartan, modern and ganko, trying to suss out not just what makes a good bowl but also the intricacies of ordering and eating well. Above all, I wanted to know why such a simple concoction \ brought from China by Confucian missionaries in the 17th century \ inspired so much passion and devotion among Japanese and foreigners alike, and to thereby gain some deeper understanding of Tokyo itself.
My guide for much of this ramen adventure was Brian MacDuckston, the 31-year-old English teacher from San Francisco behind RamenAdventures.com. Tall and pale, bald and bespectacled, Mr. MacDuckston resembles a noodle himself, and his thin, lightly tattooed figure belies the amount of ramen hefs consumed. Indeed, as he told me, hefs even lost weight during the three and a half years hefs lived in Japan \ a rare feat among food bloggers.
Not that he ate much ramen at first. It was only in January 2008, after months of noticing the 45-minute lines outside Mutekiya, a trendy ramen shop in the Ikebukuro neighborhood, that he finally decided to dip his chopsticks.
gIt was awesome back then,h he told me. The shop had recently been on TV, and was serving a special pork-laden ramen: gA slice of pork, and then it was stewed pork, and then it was a pork meatball, and then it was a pile of ground pork too. I couldnft comprehend it. It was delicious, of course.h
He was hooked. He began Googling best-of lists and standing in line for hours. gThatfs crazy, any way you look at it,h he said. gItfs noodles and soup, and you wait two hours for it? Therefs something crazy about that.h Still, it was his kind of crazy, and since he was between jobs and surviving on unemployment insurance, he started to blog.
Finish reading article at the jump:
http://s.nyt.com/u/tZM
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