Ivan Ramen

by Ivan Orkin

  Kaiseki—Japanese haute cuisine—is equally rigid. With each change of the seasons, you have a different set of dishes you’re supposed to make. Each dish has a specific plate it’s supposed to be served on. Kaiseki chefs have told me that it can cost upward of $100,000 for a restaurant just to change out all the plates and bowls every year.

  Being a good sushi or tempura or yakitori chef is about endless repetition. They’re slicing fish, frying vegetables, grilling meat. They’re just really, really good at it. When I watch a sushi chef or a tempura chef, I can see everything that’s going on. He’s dipping the vegetables in batter, and now he’s frying it; or he’s got some warm rice and he’s putting some sliced fish on it. It’s all very simple; the beauty and difficulty are in the execution. On the other hand, when I’d watch a ramen chef, I’d wonder what the hell he was doing, what he was ladling from those mystery containers, why he did what he did. A large part of why I ultimately decided to make ramen is that I was desperately curious about how it was done.

  We started with the basics. Mari and I attended the first annual World Ramen Expo in Yokohama. The Expo wasn’t exactly a gathering of artisanal ramen makers—more like a trade show, big companies peddling premade chashu (roast pork) and tare (seasoning). But it was a start. I met a representative from Yamato, a noodle-machine manufacturer I’d read about online. He told me that the company offered a six-day crash course for people interested in opening ramen shops. I figured, what the hell? If I was going to drop $100,000 opening a ramen shop, there was no shame in taking a beginner course first.

  Whenever I’d imagine making my own ramen, I’d get stuck on how the Japanese put so much flavor into their soup. The flavorful soups I knew were consommés, or purees, or flavorful stocks that you’d swirl pesto into. But this was a whole new animal. Like any good dish, for ramen to be delicious it needs two things: well-made components and perfect harmony. But because the elements that make up a bowl of ramen have such strong flavors—pork, smoked fish, soy sauce, salt—it’s easy to let the strong flavors overpower the lighter ones. I couldn’t understand how ramen broth had so much clear, distinct flavor.

  The ramen class was taught by noncooks, but they knew how a bowl of ramen was constructed. They taught me the fundamentals of making a ramen-style soup. I learned a little about dashi, and the function of fat—why and how it’s added—in ramen broth. I listened and asked a lot of questions, and silently thought about the changes I’d make. All my ramen eating had given me a clear idea of the flavor profile I wanted in my soup. A lot of ramen is strongly flavored from the first bite and can be overpowering by the end of the bowl. I think the inverse is smarter, building flavor to a climax at the end. I wanted to layer flavors, deploying the same tastes in several different guises—chicken broth plus chicken fat, for example. The idea would be to keep recognizable flavors hitting you in waves from different directions. The class provided me with a rudimentary roadmap to creating that effect.

  Almost exactly one year passed between the day we said, “Let’s start a ramen shop,” and the day we opened the doors of Ivan Ramen.

  Every day of that year I wondered if I should apprentice with a ramen chef. But being as old as I was, with the amount of cooking experience I had, I really didn’t have it in me to take on a one- or two-year apprenticeship. Ramen apprenticeships were generally for people with no cooking experience, more interested in a job than in the craft. Most people graduate apprenticeships only to open an identical shop to their master’s. I didn’t want to be disrespectful and approach a guy and say, “Oh please, teach me what you do,” and then bail after three months to open my own place. But I gave it serious consideration. There were multiple times when I walked into a ramen shop, hat in hand, ready to ask the owner about an apprentice position. But the words never came out. At the end of the day, I thought, “Fuck it, I’m a good cook, I can figure it out for myself.”

  The ramen course had removed the crucial obstacle of not knowing a damn thing about anything. After that, I upped the frequency and studiousness of my ramen-shop visits. I’d walk in, eat a bowl of ramen, and take mental notes about flavor, presentation, service, atmosphere, types of stools, bowls, chopsticks, background music—anything I could glean. Ramen shops can be cryptic. The signs didn’t entirely make sense, and I couldn’t see what was going on behind the counter, what they were dipping ladles into, or what the numbers on their noodle-cooking timers said. Ramen cooks are generally silent when they’re working, and the menus aren’t terribly descriptive; plus, at that my point my knowledge of kanji (Japanese characters) wasn’t what it is today.

  Still, I was always watching. I knew the gist of what was going on, and I was picking up information bit by bit. Finally, I came home with what I thought was a good set of recipes. They weren’t my recipes, but I thought they’d make a bowl of ramen like we’d eaten at any number of restaurants. I made a bowl for Mari and she said, “This is garbage. You’re a good cook and a smart guy. Don’t make other people’s food. Go back and figure out what you want to cook, and make your own food.”

  I knew I wanted to make a double-soup shio ramen. I would keep the broth light and the taste clear, incorporating flavors that appealed to me. I tinkered obsessively in our tiny Tokyo kitchen, trying to come up with a bowl that reflected my personal point of view, while remaining faithful to the qualities I’d fallen in love with. I was reading a lot of ramen cookbooks, and I would constantly run through ideas and recipes in my head.

  Every serious Japanese soba shop makes its own noodles by hand. The most serious chefs go so far as to plant their own buckwheat, harvest it, and grind it to ensure the highest level of product. Not so with ramen shops, where noodles take a distant backseat to the soup and the chashu. In fact, most shops order their noodles from a manufacturer. It made no sense to me to put so much time and effort into crafting a perfect bowl of soup and accompaniments, just to let someone else drive their noodle bus right through the bowl. I was going to make my own noodles—no question.

  Ramen noodles are just flour, water, salt, and kansui—a bicarbonate that gives them their signature alkaline flavor and mouthfeel. Some places will also add whole eggs to their noodles for color and flavor and a little extra bite, but I find that it interferes with the wheat flavor. Without kansui, though, you’ve just got wheat noodles. A little kansui gives the noodles a unique aroma, a mild metallic tang, and most important a springiness, the characteristic dance the noodles do as you slurp and chew them.

  Striking the right mix of flour, water, and kansui is a funky balance of science and craft. The more water you add, the chewier the noodle becomes. Too much kansui, and you can end up with bitter noodles and crumbling structure. On rainy days, when there’s more moisture in the air, the flour might take less water. But there’s no substitute for experience. To get a perfect noodle recipe, you’ve got to try it over and over and over again. I tried dozens of flour combinations, making batch after batch of noodles on a $20 hand-crank pasta machine I’d bought in Little Italy years before.

  What I was looking for was a noodle with flavor and bite (in Japanese, noodles with real chew are said to have “mochi mochi”), one that slurps smoothly and adheres to the soup. I made lots of noodles that tasted amazing on their own, but for whatever reason the soup just wouldn’t stick to them. I didn’t make my first complete bowl of ramen until three months before we opened, and I didn’t actually finalize the noodle recipe until just a week before.

  Meanwhile, we needed to start looking for a location. As I mentioned, my mother-in-law had demarcated a tiny area where we were allowed to look. We scoured the area for three months without luck. The realtors told me there was absolutely nothing available. Even when we expanded our search to towns with six-figure populations, there was nothing. Ramen shops have a bad reputation. They’re dirty, and smelly, and often have disreputable owners who suddenly decide to disappear on some miserable, customerless night. It’s hard to convince real estate agents and building owners
that you’re going to be different, especially when you’re a foreigner. Furthermore, a lot of places in Tokyo change hands many times without bothering with a realtor; some guy tells his friend he’s thinking of moving out and then his friend scarfs up the space.

  At the time, we were also eating our way through a ramen guidebook. One day we followed the book to a shop in a town called Rokakoen, just a ten-minute drive from our house, well within my mother-in-law’s permissible area. The owner was a weathered, wiry five-foot-tall woman in her fifties with an exceedingly friendly demeanor. She made a classic Kyushu tonkotsu ramen with Hakata-style noodles—very thin noodles that cook in 20 to 30 seconds. She seasoned them with a few squirts of soy sauce and a sprinkle of MSG, then topped it off with pork soup. It wasn’t bad, and the shop was pretty famous. The owner had gained some notoriety for starting out in a food truck, then graduating to this space.

  It was a small shop, nothing fancy, with just enough space to make an honest bowl of ramen. It was located on a corner and had a nice L-shaped counter. The neighborhood was funky and interesting, the train station and a major highway were nearby, and it was close to home.

  While sitting at the counter, eating a bowl of tonkotsu ramen, I mentioned to the owner that I intended to open my own ramen shop. As she removed my bowl, she said she was tired and thinking of retirement. She told me I could come help out in the shop, and that I would be her heir. When she retired, I could purchase the rights from her. I could be her new son, she told me, a wonderful and talented person who would take Tokyo by storm. I was thrilled, even if her invitation seemed a bit impulsive and erratic and possibly indicative of some more serious emotional instability. I generally feel suspicious of people who are too affectionate too quickly. I don’t love being hugged by people I just met. I was wary of the owner taking me under her wing so quickly, but it was the first real lead I’d had, so I followed it.

  I started coming in to help cut vegetables and cook and perform various odds-and-ends tasks, all without pay. Then, a month into our arrangement, she phoned me up and indignantly forbade me from returning to the shop. I was baffled. She didn’t give any explanation, only that I was no longer welcome in the shop. I was distraught and confused, and had no idea what I’d done, but I respected her wishes. Only much later did I find out that she’d taken great offense when I opened her refrigerator without permission. I’d wanted to see how she organized it, and apparently she considered that extremely rude.

  So I didn’t visit the shop for the better part of three months. Then one day Mari told me I should suck it up and see what was bothering the lady. I popped my head into the shop, and just as mysteriously as she’d turned on me, she gathered me back to her bosom. We were best buddies again. She said she was ready to retire, if I still wanted the shop. I’m not sure what changed her mind, but I have a hunch it was the money dangling in front of her. We made a deal for the space that week. In exchange for $20,000, she would hand over the restaurant and leave everything—the bowls, the noodle cookers, and the pots.

  On March 1, 2007, I stood on the street, looking at an empty ramshackle little building in a quiet corner of Tokyo. The transfer hadn’t come off as smoothly as we’d hoped. The owner had wanted me to give her friend a sweetheart contract as a carpenter; when he came by and gave a half-assed proposal, I declined, and the owner freaked out and stripped the place of all the promised appliances. Nevertheless, the building I was looking at would soon be my own ramen shop. That’s all that mattered.

  Most of her equipment was junk anyway, and in retrospect, starting with an empty space allowed me to build a shop to my specifications. But there was plenty of work ahead of me. There was no lighting to speak of. The counter was a cheap polished pine veneer with curved edges that were beginning to split open like a banana peel. There were no bowls, utensils, or noodle strainers—no stove, oven, or anything that would lead you to believe the space was once a restaurant.

  I paced out the cement room, imagining how the kitchen would look. Noodle machine on the far wall, work counter next to it. Dishwasher in the corner, stove next to the noodle machine. In the States, you need an Ansul fire-suppression system set up precisely over the burners, and a duct system with filters, everything perfectly aligned. In my little shop, I had a stainless steel box surrounding a fan in the wall to “direct” smoke outside. The permitting system in Tokyo is a bit more lax than New York’s, to say the least. Compared to New York, outfitting a kitchen in Tokyo is a breeze.

  The upstairs loft was another story. Judging from the droppings on the floor, the place was infested with rats the size of raccoons. I set about cleaning and gutting the entire thing, then putting in all new floors, walls, and ceilings. I would go to the DIY center, buy truckloads of material, drop it on the floor of the shop, and try to figure out what to do with it.

  Just to add a little hiccup to the process, one week after signing the contract and getting the keys, I kicked a basket in a childish fit of frustration. I heard the bones in my big toe crunch, and I cursed in pain. I was in a wheelchair for six weeks. While my crew climbed ladders, painted, ran gas and electric lines, and installed equipment, I sat on the sideline making comments, and doing my crippled best to help. My wife was absolutely furious with me.

  Thankfully, I had an enviable team helping me put the shop together. Mari is an acclaimed interior stylist; my brother-in-law Shochan is a set designer and carpenter; and my first hire, Taro, had just graduated from one of the best art schools in Tokyo. I’d met Taro at a party we had at my house. He was interested in learning English and then moving to London, so I said, “Why don’t you come work at my ramen shop for a year or two and I’ll teach you to speak English?” He agreed; so the three and a half of us built the restaurant together.

  I knew that I wanted a bright, modern place, but it had to be unmistakable as a ramen shop. I was a gaijin trying to break into the highly scrutinized, carefully documented, publicly policed world capital of noodle shops. There would be people ready to harp on every missed detail. We ultimately decided to keep the bones of the old shop, but jazzed up the counter with a dark wood-grain laminate, squared off the corners, and added steel trim. We added lighting above and below the bar. Most ramen shops have stools for seating, and generally they’re the most uncomfortable stools you can find. Ramen shops are all about fast turnover, and owners don’t want customers to feel like they can hang around. But I wanted my business to be focused on service, just like Lutèce had been all those years earlier. I bought nice comfortable stools and decided to worry about shooing customers out the door later.

  In New York, dealing with permits, getting community board approval, and finding an honest and reliable contractor are always enormous clusterfucks. In Tokyo, my contractor did everything on a handshake agreement and insisted on not being paid until a month after the shop opened. If there were any problems, he’d fix them without a word. He still comes around regularly to make sure everything’s fine. As for my health inspection, a guy came in with a clipboard, and asked if there was a bathroom. There was, and he took a look. He asked if there was a hand sink. There was, which he confirmed, then handed me a form to sign. Done.

  I’d lived in Japan for a total of seven years when I decided to open the shop. I didn’t see myself as an outsider every second of every day anymore. People in town were accepting from the beginning; they didn’t seem to bat an eye. It was a strangely organic process, especially considering that I’d never owned a business before. As I said, I didn’t feel a tremendous amount of pressure to succeed. My wife was supportive, and it was just something I really wanted to do. I was tired of sitting at home, talking to my American friends over the Internet. I wanted to use the language and hang out with Japanese people.

  I also wanted to make a great bowl of ramen. I worried that people would expect my ramen to suck ass. I wanted to prove them deeply wrong from the outset. At home, I was consumed with researching and perfecting my dashi, sampling flours, cooking pork. I was deter
mined to apply the skills I’d amassed as a cook, and to leave lazy tendencies behind. I’d always had the terrible habit of making great food without recording measurements or taking notes. I heard plenty of stories about new ramen shop owners who thought they’d come up with the perfect recipe at home, only to find themselves lost when they tried to make it in large quantities at the shop.

  In my kitchen, I weighed every ingredient in grams and wrote it down. Precision is key to ramen, and crucial to running a restaurant. You have to be able to communicate exactly what you want to the people working for you, and they have to be able to replicate the same results over and over. With experienced cooks, you can just explain the concept and proportions and then count on them to taste things and reproduce your dishes. But when you’re selling ramen for seven or eight bucks a bowl, it’s impossible to pay veteran cooks twenty bucks an hour. I knew from the outset that I’d be hiring inexperienced helpers, so I’d tried to keep careful measurements and make all my recipes foolproof.

  In the midst of all this recipe testing and DIY construction, I never stopped to consider the strangeness of a Jewish guy from Long Island opening a ramen shop in Tokyo. In other words, I was too focused on opening my ramen shop to think about opening my ramen shop.

  During my first stint in Japan years earlier, I’d sometimes lapsed into petulance, deliberately acting against the grain out of frustration. Upon my return to the country, I decided from day one that I would try to completely adhere to all cultural nuances. I’d do everything to the letter, try to make people feel comfortable, and always behave as a Japanese person would. It puts people at ease; it shows that you respect them and their ways. People accept you much more readily and forgive your faux pas more than if your attitude is “I’m gonna do it my way.”