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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> Meals like ramen were $8.00 USD including tax and tip

There is no tip in Japan. And 8 USD for Ramen is super expensive, in Kansai you can get ramen for 5 USD or even less. Ramen should not cost that much anyway, it's super fast to make and ingredients are super cheap too.

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But ramen takes notoriously long to make

See http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/02/how-to-make-tonkotsu-rame...

They are not going to make the broth from scratch separately for each customer, so it's not different from all the different kinds of preparation any restaurant needs to do to ready itself for the day.

It's $20.50 here in Brooklyn at a small neighborhood place (including tax and tip)! Ridiculous. I bought a premium instant ramen on Amazon, add my own meat/egg and it's as good or better.

Uhh what kind of places are you going to? And what kind of ramen did you buy? I consider Shinsengumi to be my minimum acceptable standard for restaurant ramen here in SoCal (I think there's plenty of better places here, but it's still good), and I don't even know how you could prepare instant ramen that was comparable even if you had comparable noodles, since the broth takes hours to prepare.

I'm not a ramen expect but I love shin seen gumi

>and I don't even know how you could prepare instant ramen that was comparable even if you had comparable noodles, since the broth takes hours to prepare.

Well, some people find Olive Garden as good as a high end restaurant in Rome, so for them it's "comparable".

I'm not a ramen connoisseur but to have this kind of ramen at home is a treat. I sometimes add mushrooms, garlic, chilis to broth.

Nongshim Shin Black Noodle Soup, Spicy, 4.58 (Pack of 10) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017IRZLKQ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apap_nz6...

Theoretically there's no reason why a quality broth can't be reduced to powder form and used with instant ramen.

That's my favorite store-bought brand too, but it still pales in comparison to fresh ramen at a good shop.

> Theoretically there's no reason why a quality broth can't be reduced to powder form and used with instant ramen.

I mean .. there really are. There are all sorts of aromatics and fats that can't be properly powderized. Note that, e.g., coffee is way better in fresh form than powder form, as are a huge multitude of foods.

Press it in osmosis membrane and ship it in a can.

Food doesn't work like that. There are plenty of foods that taste substantially different after sitting for just 15 minutes, let alone packaged and let sit at room temperature for months. Ramen is a very aromatic broth; it will not taste the same after months.

>Theoretically there's no reason why a quality broth can't be reduced to powder form and used with instant ramen.

I think the biggest issue is that dried animal fats will significantly reduce the shelf life.

I've tried a bunch of Nongshim stuff (including that one). I think it's the best instant ramen I've tried (although I've heard there's better stuff available in Asia), but it doesn't compare to the real stuff, even if you add things to it.

You're paying that largely to cover the establishment's rent, insurance and NYC regulations compliance of course, not the ingredients.

Ramen in NYC is mostly an exoticized item served at comparatively fancier places than the typically utilitarian presentation you'll find all over Japan. It's no wonder that you can find it at $20+ in Brooklyn.

It's interesting to see how foods become either premium (ala Japanese in the US) or commoditized like Vietnamese or Thai in the US. On the other hand, In Japan Thai or Indian can be premium cuisines.

On the other hand, most of it is presentation and perception. You can get a $5 burger as well as find a $20 burger --if you search hard enough you can find a $5 with the same quality as the $20 version --so it's not always exoticism that does the trick.

Pricing strategies for restaurants are not driven by whole-market perceptions but many combining factors such as local competition, available space, labor and rental costs, hours of available custom, etc.

To put it another way, you can do a high end anything restaurant, but takeaway makes far more sense in a high traffic location with massive rush hours, high rents and little available space, no foot traffic after 5PM and no access after 8PM.

> It's interesting to see how foods become either premium (ala Japanese in the US) or commoditized like Vietnamese or Thai in the US.

There's commoditized Japanese in the US, and there is probably premium Thai and Vietnamese.

There of course are exceptions to all sorts of things, but generally speaking these things hold. There are also high-end restaurants which serve mexican cuisine, but by and large, most establishments selling Mexican food sell what poor Mexicans understand as fast food in Mexico --but one can also find these to be expensive in far away places like Japan or China where reproductions using more local flavors can go for relatively high prices.

Part of it with Japanese food in the US is that word associates with "sushi" for most Americans and Sushi/Sashimi is decidedly not inexpensive in Japan for the most part. Some of the conveyor belt places are pretty reasonable but a lot of sushi is pricey.

Ramen's becoming more popular now but it seems as if there isn't a lot of demand between 50 cent package of Ramen noodles and $15-20 quality Ramen place.

As other commenters have said, its not specific to any cuisine. You can have "premium" any cuisine that you like. The difference seems mostly to be the people starting these businesses. If its easy for people from other countries to get a visa/start a business in the US, that will attract more "premium chefs". But if its not that easy, and the people running the restaurants are first-timers or relatives of immigrants just trying to make money, it would be hard for them to open a "premium restaurant".

I understand some of those aspects -- the curious part is that one cuisine from a third country might be seen as cheap food in an adopting country and premium in another adopting country -generally speaking.

I recently ate at a Chinese restaurant. My Korean roommate took me there with his family and told me that it was run by Korean people. I learned that Chinese food in Korea is fine dining, not the cheap shlock they dish out here.

Enough Korean people have come to Atlanta that there is a restaurant there aimed specifically at giving Koreans a taste of home, that taste involved a completely different cuisine from both American Chinese food and Chinese Chinese food.

Something to be tucked in the back of one's mind is that in France most French eat normal French food --not fine dining French food, some people do take their time to cook somewhat complicated dinners. In China people eat regular Chinese food, not fine dining Chinese food --based mostly on: fried noodles, rice or soup stock. Each will have some kind of meat and wilted veggies --not many people cook at home. It's greasy, it's tasty (in the way salty greasy things are tasty) --but it's not by any means great food. For fine dining they will go to a banquet dinner, or some foreign fare --even tacos are exotic, if you can find them.

I never got the impression that Chinese food is upscale as a Korean. 짜장면 may as well be pizza and hot dogs for Koreans, for example. However, the Chinese cuisine meal I had for well over $300 / head in Choson hotel years ago was certainly nice. 12 year old me still asked for 짜장면 and they brought it over from across the street probably.

It wasn't Golden Buddha I hope? That place is what celebrity chef David Chang probably would charmingly refer to as "bad" Chinese food that is addictive, and it's decided not nice by any stretch of the imagination. As an out of town Atlanta Korean I'm still clueless about what most Koreans know here ITP and what's around Duluth.

Had to go look it up, it was Fung Mei off of Pleasant Hill.

Yes, they absolutely loved the Jajangmyeon. (짜장면 for those curious) I couldn't eat it.

Now that I'm thinking about it, they didn't really describe Chinese food as upscale. But more as like a treat. We're super spoiled here in America with all these different kinds of cuisines.

ITP the best Chinese restaurant IMO is Chong Qing Hot Pot in Chamblee. We had good meals at Northern China Eatery on Buford Highway, but Chong Qing is way better.

I'll edit this with the best Korean restaurant when I can get back with my roomie on where it moved to. -- edit, sorry he doesn't know himself. But the original restaurant we used to go to is called Yet Tuh. The owner got fed up with the small space and moved the staff out to the sticks.

> In Japan Thai or Indian can be premium cuisines.

Actually you find both: really cheap and really expensive ones. It's not about the country of origin that much.

But you can get a $2.50 burger at a fast food joint. This is what you should compare the ramen to :)

That isn't a fair comparison, as there is a massive difference in the quality of hole-in-the-wall ramen in Tokyo and a $2 fast food chain hamburger in the US.

I guess the issue is that fast food in the US is pretty protein-centric, which is fairly expensive for good quality. I'd probably take the hole-in-the-wall ramen personally but I can't think of any typical US "fast food" that lends itself well to inexpensive quality.

Good ramen isn't that cheap or easy to prepare but the time and ingredients required to make the broth can be spread over a lot of servings.

oO. Totto in Manhattan is one of the most famous Ramen and it's 12$ for a ramen. I don't know how much you tip but it's pretty far from 20$

I think you're quibbling. Add ~9% tax and ~18% tip and you're approaching $16 which isn't all that far from $20. Santouka Ramen is a similar price although there are various add-ons that get you up to $20 pretty quickly.

Leaving costs aside for a moment, I am very interested in what both Japanese people and expats consider to be the key differences between good and bad ramen for our startup http://8-food.com/ ... eg. personally I can't stand seafood flavors and get totally sick of that curry one.

In Sydney Australia ramen can be AUD$8-20 which is about USD$6-15. In China it's about 25-60CNY or USD$3.6-9.

The key differentiator of good ramen is the broth, followed by the meat.

For some reason ramen shops outside Japan likes to advertise about their noodles.

As for your comment about China you have to differentiate between Japanese ramen and Chinese.

Broth is the same differentiator common in Vietnamese pho. About the Chinese, yes I was differentiating... Chinese 拉面 is a broader and different beast. Generally much cheaper in China, eg. easy to find under USD$2-3.

Good ramen—not the stuff from a packet, the real thing—is more like $10-15 here in the low-cost-of-living Midwest.

>Ramen should not cost that much anyway, it's super fast to make and ingredients are super cheap too.

Not when it's good ramen. I've bought far more expensive ramen in the US, Europe, Singapore, and other places...

What drives the cost of good ramen other than location costs and popularity of the restaurant?

Have a look at: https://youtu.be/gmIwxqdwgrI

"What owning a ramen restaurant in Japan is like"

Thanks for posting that!

And a bit less than 500 Yen for a bowl of soba or udon with a topping.

800 yen for ramen is standard and has been for years.

You must be going to the fancy places. Yoshinoya's a lot cheaper, and that's for a beef bowl rather than just ramen.

The 1-michelin star ramen place is 1500 yen all in.

There's a 1-michelin star ramen next to my house that serves ramen for 800 yen.

http://gm.gnavi.co.jp/shop/0117018901/

damn that is cheap. consider their a la carte ranges from 700-1000. I live in germany near freiburg and all michelin star rated restaurants here start at like ~3200 yen per meal. (well there is prolly an exception an japanese restaurant in freiburg which serves from 600-~3200 yen per meal)

It's not Michelin but Bib Gourmand

In Tokyo maybe. In Kansai certainly not.

Well... rent...

Not sure rent explains everything. Ramen is very high a high volume business, and the additional customers you get in a very dense city like Tokyo should make up for the rent difference.

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