A Guide to the Regional Ramen of Japan
luckypeach.com
luckypeach.com
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:
Truly amazing ramen.
I'd also add the sesame ramen I had at Fujiyama Go Go in Kanazawa was amazing (yes, I know they are a chain).
The layer of oil floating over the stock, the corn, the pork and the butter topping doesn't help neither.
If you want healthy noodles, you can try Soba instead.
Instant noodle intake and dietary patterns are associated with distinct cardiometabolic risk factors in Korea
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24966409
[2] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140812121642.ht...
[3] http://www.care2.com/causes/did-you-know-instant-ramen-noodl...
Same way, no one with common sense would eat hamburger and french fries every day.
Doesn't that depends on how you prepare ramen ?
For me ramen are just noodles, the "junkyness" really depends on what you eat them with. Could you make the same argument for spaghettis ?
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!!!!
http://i.imgur.com/NzBzAdN.jpg
This is from a chain called 万豚記 (wan-zhu-ji) (memory of ten thousand pigs). It's owned by a corporation that has a zillion restaurants in Japan.
http://kiwa-group.co.jp/brand_search.php
many of them carry this style of heavy tantanmen which I love
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've been there and Silverlake Ramen was better. You can probably find more gems around Gardena/Torrance.
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.
http://www.yelp.com/biz/beni-tora-los-angeles-3
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.
Fukuoka also has food stalls with plenty of good ramen if someone is heading there
In the United States, "Jap" is an ethnic slur. You might want to use another word.
different groups have different insults. welcome to reality.
it's pretty common and non offensive elsewhere. not sure about uk... but other English speaking counties and latin countries use the term just fine
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!"
Said that, there's a nice vegetarian Ramen shop in Tokyo Station:
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.]
[1] http://www.thekitchn.com/cooking-japanese-nabemono-106649
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 called Yamadaya.
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).
EDIT: But I suppose it becomes a lot more true if you factor in the bread, and include things like bagels.
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.
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.)
Sauce, rub, wood and smoke, cuts of meat for bbq.
http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2008/01/a-list-of-regi...
Daikichi in Yushima, Tokyo also has a very good (clear) chicken soup -- it's not uncommon to see people lining up before it even opens.
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 can always go for imitation bacon or non-pork based Ramen but the experience is different.
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).
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?).
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.
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.