While this is a pretty epic listing (well done!), it's still not even close to complete. My personal pet peeve omission is Okinawa soba, which despite the name is very much in the ramen family:
There's also the momofuku instant ramen museum in Ikeda, (Osaka) where you can design and create your own instant cup ramen. Loads of tourists and local families with kids, but worth visiting if you have 2 hours to kill.
I was also surprised to see no mention of Sano-style ramen, which spread a lot and was/is fairly popular. Though, to be fair, it's hard to make a comprehensive guide of even major regional styles of ramen without writing a small book!
I like ramen, but I am careful about frequency of eating ramen.
It is known among Japanese that extreme ramen freaks have short life.
We Japanese maybe tend to be salt addicted.
So careful people eat soup moderately.
I ate quite a lot of Ramen. Some of them, quite delicious... but never a Ramen that I would consider healthy. All the Ramen I ever tasted were too salty and too greasy. Also, unlike most Japanese meals, Ramen is served as a main dish only, without any vegetables on the side. So your meal will consist mainly in white flour, salt and fat.
Spaghetti are almost entirely carbohydrates. This is not good or bad, you just need to combine with other foods to make a balanced meal.
I cook my own ramen, and I can assure you is super healthy, because I control the amount of sodium.
I use dashi for the broth, but if you cook your own broth, it's even healthier.
There used to be a chain in LA called "Chin-ma-ya" that served a variety called "tantanmen" that I haven't found elsewhere. Both the torrance and little tokyo location closed and now I only have vague memories of their terrible looping music to satiate me. You can get tankotsu anywhere but only they had the delicious tantanmen with the golden fried shrimp and the curry-side-dish-thingy. I barely appreciated them when they were here and now I crave what I cannot have.
For what it's worth, I live in Japan and even though tantanmen is common here, I've never had it with fried shrimp or a curry side dish, so it's very likely a special thing for that particular chain.
A second to greggman's rec of Tsujita, as well. They have excellent tsukemen (dipping ramen). Across the street, their second location, Tsujita Annex, has really good tsukemen and their ramen is excellent too, if ridiculously filling.
First it's tonkotsu(豚骨). not trying to be snarky. Just passing on info. But second, at least in my experience, all tonkotsu in LA sucks except Tsujita. And even Tsujita sucks unless you get their tsukemen or as they call them "dipping noodles".
Or course everything in food is subjective. I like extremely rich flavorful noodles. Some people like light flavors.
As for tantanmen, apparently real tantanmen (if you can call any food real) is the Chinese kind where there's a thick oily spice sauce at the bottom of the bowl and you have to stir it up. In other words there's no soup.
In Japan there's another style of tantanmen which is has a soup broth. As usual there's a wide variety from light to heavy. The light stuff is not for me but the heavy stuff is AMAZING!!!!
> As for tantanmen, apparently real tantanmen (if you can call any food real) is the Chinese kind where there's a thick oily spice sauce at the bottom of the bowl and you have to stir it up. In other words there's no soup.
Oh, yes. The Chinese word is dandanmian, though, and most English-language menus will write it as "dan dan noodles" (and I've seen it written as "dong dong noodles", too).
Where I live (Dallas suburbs), there's one really amazing authentic Sichuan place -- Royal Sichuan -- which serves actual, authentic dandanmian, and it's some of the best food I've ever had in my life. I can't get enough of it.
I haven't had dandanmian in Dallas but I have had it throughout the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles (Monterey Park, Alhambra, the places where many claim the best Chinese food in the USA is). While I like it I don't crave it the way I crave the Japanese style so if you get a chance please come to Japan and try it here. I think you'll like it. Just make sure you pick a good one. There's also plenty of bad ones here too.
Like I said, everyone has different tastes. I've been to around 50 ramen places in and around LA trying to find anything remotely like what I have in Japan. Every place I've been in and around Torrance as absolute shit. Some would give me a bowl of what they called tonkotsu ramen and it tasted like ankake instead. Goopy white cornstarchy sauce with little flavor.
Tsujita was the only one that tasted anything like the kinds I like in Tokyo.
That only makes it better for me though. People like what they like. If you like Sliverlake more power to you. But it's nothing like ramen in Japan.
I remember being in Fukuoka and visiting the so called "ramen stadium" at the top of some shopping complex. More varieties than you could poke a stick at, and all purchasable via ticket machine only. I ended up getting some random thing that had pork, and what appeared to be quail eggs in a black broth. I can see why they like their ramen.
There's a similar one in Kyoto at the JR Rail station that is very nice with 8 styles of ramen, all in different little sit down restaurants with ticket machines: http://www.insidekyoto.com/kyoto-ramen-koji
What about instant ramen? While it's not entirely a fair comparison to freshly made ones, the Japs have certainly pioneered and mastered the skill of churning out instant ramen that has "fresh" pork/seafood in it. Personally, I prefer the dry soba to the soupy ones.
Japan is not a really easy country for vegetarian people because fish, and specially meat, consumed in tiny amounts, but they are everywhere. I would say that sometimes meat is used more as a condiment than as an ingredient. Also, in my experience, most of Japanese don't consider that things like the bonito flakes they put in the stock are "actual meat", and when you say that you don't eat meat, they actually understand that you don't eat steaks or sashimi.
Said that, there's a nice vegetarian Ramen shop in Tokyo Station:
Where do you live? Here in Minneapolis, where ramen is becoming trendy, many places have vegan alternatives.
That said, getting a really good umami flavor and rich texture in a vegan broth is hard - not impossible, but much harder than with meat. And frankly, most vegetarians are lousy cooks who don't pay attention to good textures and flavors, and most meat eaters are lazy cooks who don't learn how to get richness without meat doing the heavy lifting for them.
For vegetarian/vegan, a kombu-based broth can get that richness, but it'll take a lot of patience to make (this is also true of bone-based meat broth).
Search for shojin ryori, it's the food made at Buddhist temples (or temples of related religions), and probably it isn't the cheapest food. There are some well evaluated shojin ryori books on Amazon. Some temples will do vegan food, others will have eggs and milk, but I think you'll rarely find any kind of meat in it.
On the other hand, I'd love if they didn't put fish stock in everything, including ramen, I really like ramen. I found a ramen house where I live (Sao Paulo, there's a huge Japanese/Asian neighbourhood in here, and it's a great place to find vegetarian ingredients such as mushrooms) which offers one dish without fish stock, but they closed and reopened, and now I'm not sure they still have it on the menu.
And what has been said about vegetarianism in Japanese culture is true. They probably think fishes come from trees. I actually had an uncle (I'm from a Japanese family) who said he was vegetarian but ate fish.
It's pretty rare, and most so in the more traditional places. Even if there's no meat in the ramen, the broth is generally pork (occasionally chicken) based.
Funny story time: in my late and unlamented career as a translator, I was attached to a pair of US artists visiting Gifu's international arts and crafts fair. Both were vegans and expressed a desire to have vegan ramen.
I explained this to the ramen shop proprietor. He came out with a bowl of ramen with chashu (pork) on top of it. When I pointed out that pork does in fact count as a meat product, he plucked it off with chopsticks. I then said "Excuse me, I don't mean to be a bother about this, but I can't help but notice that you poured the broth from a pan marked Pig. Is there, I don't know, pork in the broth?" "Oh you read Japanese!" "Yep, literacy is a handy quality in a translator." "Do your guests read Japanese?" "No." "Then as far as they know it's hearty vegetable broth now isn't it!"
If you look out a miso broth then you’re probably OK. My wife has fish and shellfish allergies, but a surprising number of places were OK with that. The scary one for her is my favourite: kitsune udon. What looks like a block of fried tofu traditionally has bonito flakes mixed in before cooking.
While this is the "wrong" season for it (unless you are in the southern hemisphere) - you might want to try to cook a "nabe"[1] at home.
It's a brilliant, simple dish -- and typical for Japanese cuisine it can be magnificent in its simplicity if you are careful when selecting what to put in.
I would personally prefer some beef, fish, shell fish ... but there's nothing really inherent in the dish that dictates one need it. You'll need to amass things that in aggregate makes for a good broth -- and vegetables certainly can do that.
[ed: Ah, I was a bit quick googling. The recipe is great for the first part of the nabe -- but it doesn't mention that one way to end the whole thing, is, when all the other ingredients have been eaten, and have left their taste in the broth: Add ramen - and eat with the broth.]
If you live in the westwood area around ucla in LA there's a place that serves vegan ramen. It uses a soy based broth and it's really good. I'm not even a vegetarian.
In Japan, they usually think fish in vegetarian food is normal.
So you need to take care of the ingredients even when they clam they are vegetarian restaurant.
In the US every ramen place I've ever been to has had a vegetarian alternative. If you simply don't like the taste of meat (as opposed to religious or philosophical purposes) you can ask for it without the meat - you are likely to get meat broth but that tastes more salty than meaty. Outside of the US it is probably rare.
This is a great write-up. I had the fortune of visiting a national Ramen festival in Japan (and the privilege of being on national Japanese television as the novel white-person!) and I really enjoyed sampling the various regional varieties all in one place. There's an astounding degree of variation that I wouldn't have predicted, a priori.
I didn't see it mentioned, but if you're not subscribed to the Lucky Peach, it's a really great publication. I happened upon Issue 1 (the Ramen issue) in a grocery store a few years ago and I've subscribed ever since.
I'm a bit saddened that we don't seem to have too many of these kinds of "multiple ingredient, endless variation" style foods here in the US. Most regional fare (pizza, BBQ) is comparatively simple. Or is it just me?
Isn't pizza a prime example of "multiple ingredients, endless variation"? After all, at a fundamental level pizza is oven-baked "stuff on flatbread", even the flatbread (dough) can be customised (different styles, seasoning, stuffing), to say nothing of the base sauce, cheeses and other toppings.
The US has lots of sandwich variants. Sometimes we use dipping sauces or soup sides, sometimes the ingredients are unusual, there are various styles of bread, toasted vs. untoasted, etc. This is a food genre that is shared with Europe and the Commonwealth, of course, but original variants abound here.
True, I was just thinking about that! But on the other hand, it's hard to compare a sandwich — something that usually takes no more than an hour of cooking, total — with ramen, whose broth can take several days to make, and whose flavorants alone have rich traditions and endless varieties.
EDIT: But I suppose it becomes a lot more true if you factor in the bread, and include things like bagels.
I think you're looking at the other side of the fence with too rosy of glasses. Is not bread for those sandwiches labor intensive? The fillings too -- all sorts of roasts and vegetables and pickles and meats that can each take a while to make. Why is it that 'broth' is allowed to add to the time of Ramen when these things arent allowed to add to the time of a sandwich?
Not to mention BBQ is something that does take a lot of time -- 2, 4, 8, 24 hours of BBQing, even multiple days if you sous vide it.
Yes, you're right. I thought of Katz's right after I posted that!
As for BBQ, I am not saying that it's an unworthy food in any way. It's just that ramen seems to have a lot more variations on account of all the different combinations of ingredients. (Broth, base, fillings, noodles.) Same with pasta in Italy. That's what I mean by "simple". (Though, yes, I suppose there are a whole lot of sauces and rubs, too.)
I think people who aren't heavy BBQ fans don't fully appreciate the number of decisions that goes into a well-made BBQ. The sauces and rubs alone show a huge amount of variation that can make or break the entire thing.
Others have argued for pizza, but I'll add that pasta in generally is like this (tons of variety both in how you sauce it and how you make the dough). Many egg dishes are great for this as well, such as quiches, omelets and frittatas, all of which are great for using up random leftovers :)
There's many kinds of ramen. Pork is one of the most common. There's chicken ramen. There's salt ramen. There's soy sauce ramen. There's miso ramen. And there's every combination. Soy+Miso+Chicken, Chicken+Pork, Pork+Sardine+Miso, Salt+Shrimp+Pork, Tomato, Cheese :P
You will find it hard to know for sure if there's no pork though because even if it's labeled salt-ramen if you look at the details it might say made with pork as well.
You forgot the seafood based combinations! They have pure seafood bases too, though. My Japanese friend brought me to a shop in Tokyo that apparently specialised in a 100% seafood base/stock. It was light compared to the meat-based stock but equally good.
While it's not uncommon to mix in chicken, fish etc, virtually all ramen stock is pork based though. There are porkless variants, but you'd have to look pretty hard to find them.
Historical and geographical context of Japanese ramen from a Chinese cultural perspective: ra part is derived from 拉 (Mandarin la) which means pulled and refers to the process of making the noodles, the men part is derived from 麺 (Mandarin mian) which is the traditional Chinese character for noodles (面 is the simplified form). In modern China, this 麺/面 normally describes long-form wheat noodles however other types of wheat noodles (such as knife-cut noodles), egg noodles, various bean noodles and rice noodles are also popular and some of them are described with the same character. However, many are produced using alternate methods such as squashing through a press or manually slicing a large, pancake-like, thin, often doubled-over piece of noodle material in to noodle-like strands, or by cutting chunks off a block of dough. China has a lot of noodle traditions, probably (logically for its size and population) far more than Japan. Personally I'm a fan of 米干 or mi gan which is a Tai-style broad flat fresh rice noodle normally prepared in the southwest and 刀削面 (dao xue mian) or knife-cut noodles which hail from north-western China. Modern mainland China's instant noodle tradition, probably partly re-inspired by Japan's (possibly via Hong Kong) is known as 方便面 (fangbian mian) or 'convenience noodles'. A Taiwanese academic take on this whole thing would be interesting.
Note that the Wikipedia page for Ramen[1] is laughable in claiming the origin of ramen is unclear. It's clearly Chinese. Interestingly however, it claims the Japanese only began to use the term ramen after the 1950s, ie. after they invaded China, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam (all but Korea being huge noodle consumers). Previously the Japanese used other terms which directly attributed the tradition to China. While there is apparently no clear evidence, one could reliably assume that Buddhist monks and other travelers around the Nara period[2] would have brought knowledge of Chinese and Central Asian foodstuffs back to Japan from post Silk Road China.
As a postscript to be fair (borrowing happens in many directions!), so-called Chinese baozi (包子) or steamed buns are actually Turkic in origin, as attributed by surviving Yuan Dynasty cookbooks (see also Jewish, Polish, Russian, Tibetan traditions). The same sources include an early recipe for baklavah which has since died out in China... probably in the anti-foreign repression following the Mongol Yuan Dynasty at the dawn of the Ming, which incidentally was when Zhenghe sailed his great Chinese fleet to Southeast Asia and Africa. Also, some people claim Italy's noodle tradition is a post-Marco Polo thing (who, some credible evidence attests, was actually from the now Croatian island of Dubrovnik, under the sway of the piratical Venetian empire but not 'Italian' per-se).
Wikipedia (and you) conflate two different things here: the origin of ramen the food as we know it today, which is quite arguably Japan (although admittedly it's a fuzzy line to draw); and the origin of ramen the name, which I agree is almost certainly from Chinese 拉麺. However, Japanese ramen doesn't taste at all like Chinese 拉麺, they've become entirely different dishes.
Also, you're spinning the name change as Japan somehow attempting to claim credit, while it's actually more the other way around: the term 支那 shina became pejorative, so they stopped using it. This also predates Japan exporting instant noodles to the world (c. 1971), much less the term "ramen" being adopted into English to mean them (1990s?).
You're right there is an etymology question (the term ramen is clearly Chinese in etymological origin, the other names clearly refer to China) and the historical origin of noodles in Japan generally. I think given the etymological evidence of all terms (ramen and pre-ramen) combined with geographic proximity it would be exceptionally hard to argue that's not China as well.
As far as putting words in to my mouth or motivations in to other people's brains when discussing history, please don't do that, it doesn't lead to constructive conversation.
> Also, some people claim Italy's noodle tradition is a post-Marco Polo thing (who, some credible evidence attests, was actually from the now Croatian island of Dubrovnik, under the sway of the piratical Venetian empire but not 'Italian' per-se).
That whole area between Trieste and Dalmatia is a melting pot. Especially prior to WWII, there were quite a few people who were ethnically Italian there. Venice ruled the area during Marco Polo's lifetime, so it's certainly possible that even if he wasn't born in Venice, he was very much Venetian; similar to how John McCain is not Panamanian.
Also, I'm not sure if 'piratical' is particularly accurate in describing the Venetian republic. They probably did their share of looting and pillaging like anyone in power back then, but their wealth came from trade and commerce. Which is why things started going badly when new trade routes were opened to the Indies, and to the Americas.
You are perfectly right to question the piratical adjective to describe the entire empire in Marco-Polo contemporary times; that was my error - recently I read a history of the Venetian seafaring which made out that basically the city grew entirely from a den of swamp-dwelling brigands and ruffians who dwelt there to escape the long arm of other mainland powers. How accurate that picture is I don't know (I assume pretty fair though, given the geography and technology of the time), but looking at the history it seems 400-500 years had passed before Marco Polo... so it's not exactly current characterization regardless!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_soba
And if the god of ramen is Hakata-style tonkotsu, its temple is Ichiran:
http://blog.gaijinpot.com/ichiran-ramen-without-word/
And while it's a tourist trap, Yokohama's Ramen Museum is still a good way to sample many of these:
http://www.raumen.co.jp/english/