Ivan Ramen

by Ivan Orkin

  So I began putting down roots in the neighborhood. The shop is located in a small corridor of shops, and it was important to me that my business be an extension of the community, so before we even started working on the shop I went to each neighboring shop, introduced myself, and offered a small gift. This is traditional—a properly polite gesture that put me on good footing with everyone.

  The Nogamis, who own the tofu shop across the way from Ivan Ramen.

  Fukuya-san, my butcher.

  Tatsumiya-san, my produce lady.

  I was especially interested in the butcher across the way, Fukuya-san. The erratic woman who sold me my shop had told me that the butcher had terrible meat, but it quickly became apparent that this was untrue. In fact, meeting Fukuya-san was an incredible stroke of luck. I had no idea how to buy meat in bulk in Japan, and lo and behold, a wise, friendly butcher was stationed ten feet away.

  I told Fukuya-san that I was excited to work with him and believed strongly in buying locally, but that we needed to work together on price and quality, and he came through. I not only got good prices and high-quality meat, but a leader of the local business association was now my ally. Later, as things began to pick up at the noodle shop, Fukuya-san was an indispensable friend. When more customers began to arrive, I had to make larger and larger quantities of soup, without any way to cool it safely and store it. For months before I could rent more space, Fukuya-san would stay late at his shop every night so that I could bring big stockpots over to his shop. There, he’d hum to himself as he methodically stirred and cooled them for me.

  Next on my agenda were vegetables. The local yaoya (vegetable shops) in town varied wildly in quality, and weren’t interested in selling in bulk. After visiting nearly every store in the area, I finally found my vegetable connection in the form of a specialty fruit shop near the train station. Tatsumiya-san specialized in produce that was lightly damaged, scraped, or bruised. People in Japan are obsessed with perfect produce—perfectly round, perfectly colored, perfectly smooth fruit and vegetables. And they come at a premium. It’s not uncommon for a nice apple to sell for ¥500 (about $6). A small bunch of perfect-looking grapes sell for ¥1,000 to ¥1,500. And then, of course, there are the ¥10,000 melons that have been grown in glass cases to come out as squares. Tatsumiya-san’s produce never looked perfect, but it was always delicious and the prices were lower than anywhere else.

  In addition to making nice with local vendors, I started building relationships in the broader ramen community. I became friends with Shimamoto-san, the representative from Yamato, the company that sold me my noodle-making machine. When my $15,000, five-hundred-pound noodle machine arrived at the shop three weeks before we were to open, I had no idea how to use it. I’d been making doughs at home on my hand-crank machine, and had a sense of what a good dough should feel like, but this was a new challenge.

  Thankfully, Shimamoto-san knows everything there is to know about combining water and flour. He has an entire mental catalogue of flour at his disposal, and knows exactly what percentage of water is necessary to achieve different textures. He has a magical sense with noodles. He talked me through the ways different protein levels of flour interact with each other, how egg whites can add bite, and how to effectively manage the percentage of water to make spectacularly chewy noodles.

  Shimamoto-san sent me bags and bags of flour samples. Flour for bread, flour for udon, different kinds of rye flour. At one point, I had twenty bags of flour spread over the counter and laid out on the floor, with notes written in kanji explaining the protein levels and characteristics. I tested combination after combination, making a bowl of ramen with each new dough and trying them on my wife and brother-in-law. They’d say, “Oh god, this noodle is terrible,” and I’d go back and make another one.

  Whenever I reached an impasse, I’d call up Shimamoto-san and say, “I can’t get it right.” He’d ask what percentage of water I was using. If I said 36 percent, he’d say, “I really think 38 would be better,” or he’d suggest a different flour. Each batch was a little better than the last, and just before opening, I finally figured out how to craft the noodle I wanted.

  Evidence of my continuing dopiness: a week after signing the lease on the shop, I kicked a basket and broke my foot. I was in a wheelchair for most of the restaurant’s construction.

  Working with people like Fukuya-san, Tatsumiya-san, and Shimamoto-san was exactly what I had hoped for when I imagined running my own shop. For the first time in my life as a Japanese resident, I was part of a community. My neighbors say I’m more Japanese than Japanese people, which is silly, but I try to embrace as many customs as I can. I became a big proponent of goaisatsu, the proper greetings. Every morning I’d walk around the neighborhood shouting, “Ohayo gozaimasu!” (“Good morning!”), with a bow. I ended up getting a lot of unintended brownie points for this; later on, TV crews would follow me on my morning rounds. But at the time, it was invigorating just to interact with people so full of life, who take their business so seriously and work so hard well into their sixties. I still learn something from them every time we talk.

  At Kappabashi, the equivalent of New York’s Bowery Street, we bought all of our pots, pans, bowls, chopsticks, and noodle strainers. Kappabashi is heaven on earth for cooks and food nerds. You’ll leave every time overloaded with tools you never thought you needed for tasks you never knew you wanted to perform.

  We were getting close. The night before our opening, I finally made a bowl of shio ramen that I was really, truly happy with. The interior of the restaurant was set, and Taro made the sign and designed the logo. We chose a font that was reminiscent of a Showa-period coffee shop—a source of nostalgia in Japan—with a little extra flourish. It would be a fitting addition to the funky little shopping arcade where the restaurant was located. Taro ordered stainless steel letters and bought a cheap orange waterproof board. He drilled holes in the board and ran a long length of LED tubing through the holes, then attached the letters and ran stainless steel tubing around the outside of the board.

  There’s a scene in Tampopo where the main character finishes renovating her ramen shop and stands shoulder to shoulder with her companions, looking at the new sign they painted, taking it all in. I had that exact same moment outside my own shop, my chest swelling with pride and validation. We’d built Ivan Ramen ourselves—even if I was confined to a wheelchair for a large part of it.

  The Shop

  A week before opening to the public, we planned a series of soft openings for friends and family. Behind the counter, it would just be me and Taro. Taro had no cooking experience and no restaurant aspirations, but he was quick and smart and I figured I could count on him to back me up.

  I walked through the kitchen and imagined making each bowl of ramen, where each ingredient was, how I’d move. I grabbed a pen and paper and drew a map, laying out the locations of the utensils, bowls, sauces, noodles, eggs, toppings. Serving ramen is not as complicated as putting out a fine-dining menu, but it’s just as easy to screw up, to lose track of what you’re doing, leave out a crucial ingredient, let the soup cool down after a lull and not reheat it (the worst ramen infraction is lukewarm soup). All the while, the customers are inches from your face with nothing to do but watch your every move.

  A soft opening doesn’t give you license to serve lousy food or provide sloppy service, but it removes the pressure of set business hours and menu items; if things get too screwy, you can just shut down. Your friends are the customers, and if you fuck up, they’ll understand. For us, the soft openings were a fantastic learning experience—because we got to see exactly how horribly wrong everything would have gone if we’d immediately opened to the public.

  We were trying to heat the soup one portion at a time, which bogged down service. We were washing dishes by hand and didn’t have a rack to hold the clean ones. At every turn, we’d find something missing or a process we needed to fix. But each night of that week, after serving twenty or thirty people, we’d si
t down with a couple of beers and analyze our mistakes. We reconfigured the dish station, decided to keep twenty portions of soup hot at any given time, and learned to move without constantly bumping into one another. Some customers remarked that the shop was a little hard to see from the street, so we installed more signage. We bought a free standing light box and wrote (ramen yateru yo, or roughly, “Hey, we’re serving ramen!”) in funky Japanese script.

  Then Taro designed a poster to put in the window—a list of frequently asked questions that we had heard during the soft opening. Questions like “What does the ‘Ivan’ in Ivan Ramen mean?” “What kind of ramen do you serve?” “Why did you open a ramen shop?” (Answers: “It’s my name, I’m an American guy from New York,” “A double-soup ramen made from rich chicken stock and clean-tasting dashi,” and “I saw Tampopo in college and it made a big impression on me.” Of course, the last answer isn’t really the case. I love the movie, but it didn’t inspire me to open a ramen shop. The thing is, everyone I spoke to about the shop wanted some kind of explanation for why I’d decided to open it. “Tampopo made me do it” was easier to say than “It all began with my year of washing dishes at Tsubo in Syosset, New York …”).

  On June 2, 2007, we opened our doors to the public.

  Whenever a new shop opens in Japan, it’s traditional for friends, family, and related businesses to send flowers—big garish displays with the name of the sender prominently displayed on a long wooden board sticking out of the vase. It’s a way for friends to show support, and for the shop to show that they have the endorsement of prominent community members. The more connected the shop owner is, the more splashy the displays.

  Once again, my brother-in-law came to the rescue. He was good friends with Yuko Kotegawa—one of Japan’s most famous movie stars—as well as Princess Tenko, the country’s most famous magician. On opening day, smack in the middle of our assortment of flowers were two beautiful, ostentatious displays with the names of these beloved entertainers attached. It created a lot of buzz in our little neighborhood. “Who the hell is this gaijin?” they were asking, “and why does he know these celebrities?”

  By the time we opened the restaurant, the word gaijin had taken on a new meaning to me. I didn’t feel so sensitive about it. In general, I think the word’s connotations had softened over time, as Japan became a more cosmopolitan country. Really, it all depends on who’s saying it and how they’re saying it. It can still be hurtful if its utterance is dripping with nastiness. But I knew I was a gaijin opening a ramen shop. That was going to be my hook.

  And in fact, it led to our first breakthrough. Shortly before we opened, Mari sent an anonymous tip to one of Japan’s preeminent ramen critics, Ohsaki-san, saying that there was a gaijin running a ramen shop in Rokakoen, and his stuff was pretty good. Ohsaki has eaten more than eight thousand bowls of ramen. He’s a god among ramen geeks. He is to the Tokyo ramen scene as Will Shortz is to crossword puzzles.

  The second or third day we were open, I was behind the counter, still cooking by the seat of my pants. One customer finished his bowl of shio ramen, stood, and started peppering me with questions about my noodles and soup in rapid-fire Japanese. I was in the middle of assembling another bowl, with chopsticks full of noodles, and I didn’t catch the first question. I looked up and said, “Huh?” Rather than repeating the question, he gave me a look that said, “I guess he doesn’t understand me,” turned on his heels, and walked out the door.

  “That was Ohsaki-san,” Taro whispered in my ear.

  My heart sank. I wondered if I’d just blown it before we’d even really began.

  Fortunately, he found my ramen better than my Japanese. In a very brief entry on his blog, he raved about my shio ramen—and with that, I had officially entered the Tokyo ramen scene. There are ten thousand ramen shops in Tokyo, and only a small handful get any kind of media attention, much less words of praise from Ohsaki-san.

  After Ohsaki’s little review came out, the pace picked up a bit. We’d serve thirty or forty customers each day, rather than ten or fifteen. Ivan Ramen appeared on a few more ramen blogs, and word started to spread. For most of the first summer, though, the shop was still a relatively quiet newcomer.

  Being wall-to-wall busy from day one can be as much a curse as a blessing in the restaurant world. There’s no time to practice, and no opportunity to grow on your own terms. Our quiet arrival on the scene meant we didn’t have to worry about a line of impatient people stretching down the block.

  We were paying our bills, and I was happy to concentrate on making good food and getting through each day. A ramen restaurant doesn’t require the same kind of deft, breakneck moves as a fine-dining kitchen. It might be easy to slip into complacency, treating the repetition as monotonous. A lot of people do. But I felt my past chefs sitting on my shoulder. Work clean, prep correctly, label everything, season, taste—those lessons weren’t lost on me just because I wasn’t working at Lutèce anymore. Even if I wasn’t making foie gras torchon, I approached my work with the same commitment to quality. I worked my ass off making forty liters of soup at a time in our hundred-square-foot restaurant. I’d roast tomatoes, braise pork belly, make dashi, and cook sofrito, all in this silly, tiny spot. We were open from 5:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., then I’d break down my station, clean up, and start again the next day at 6 a.m.

  Any sort of language safety net was gone once the shop opened. I was on my own, precariously negotiating my own contracts, cold-calling new purveyors, and shooting the breeze with customers. My Japanese improved more in those first few months than it had in all my previous years living in Japan. But the day I knew I had really arrived was when one of my suppliers called and casually said they had made a mistake and my katsuobushi (dried bonito) shipment would be a few days late. I spent twenty minutes berating the poor woman on the other end of the phone in fast, fluent, low-class, very angry Japanese. It’s a crappy thing to be proud of, but it worked—the shipment arrived four hours later.

  I was pretty much a loner in the beginning. Rokakoen is a quiet, isolated area. I was working a shitload of hours, and the only other ramen shop owner I knew personally was the crazy lady I bought the shop from. When Mari was working, the kids slept upstairs in sleeping bags on a fold-out foam couch from IKEA. Isaac was ten and Alex was six when we opened. During the day, they’d hang out with the tofu supplier while he made tofu, or go into the tobacco lady’s shop—she’d put cartoons on and give them snacks while their dad was slinging noodles across the way.

  Confessions of a Noodle Addict: Ohsaki-San

  Ohsaki-san doesn’t cut a particularly intimidating figure. He has a round, friendly face, disarming glasses, and a stocky build (although he’s nowhere near as portly as you’d expect someone who eats eight hundred bowls of ramen each year to be). But at the time I opened Ivan Ramen, Ohsaki-san was among the most influential, terrifying people who could take a seat at my counter. His word was gospel to ramen devotees. Nobody ate as much ramen as Ohsaki-san, and nobody could make or break a shop as easily as him.

  Nowadays, Ohsaki-san has become more of a godfather to the ramen world. He’s stopped giving his opinions about individual shops, opting instead to spread the ramen gospel from a neutral throne. He’s organized 850 of the 80,000 ramen shops in Japan into a ramen committee that puts on ramen seminars and a five-day ramen event each year. His company, the Ramen Databank, is the most exhaustive resource for ramen hunters in Japan, with a website, magazines, TV shows, and apps.

  Ohsaki-san speaks about ramen with the reverence of an obsessive. He’s completely serious in his devotion to the stuff. From his earliest experiences with ramen at age eight, he’s been addicted to its variety and subtlety. I’d think it was a little bit laughable—if I didn’t feel the same way myself.

  Ivan Orkin: Why did you start eating ramen, and when did ramen eating become the project that it is for you now?

  Ohsaki-san: I was born in Fukushima Prefecture, a place famous for Kitakata ramen. When I
was young, I would always eat Kitakata ramen and figured that that was what ramen was.

  But then I moved to Tokyo, and found tonkotsu soup and miso soup, and noodles that could be thick or thin. This piqued my curiosity. Each ramen shop had a different style, so I just started eating. If you ask a mountain climber why he climbs mountains, he’ll say, “The mountain was there.” I decided to eat ramen because there was a ramen shop in front of me.

  IO: What’s your mountain? What’s the goal of eating so much ramen?

  O: My purpose is to try every ramen shop. But every month sixty new ramen shops open in Tokyo alone. Each new ramen shop has a new style and a new type of ramen, and I want to eat everything. It’s an endless goal, endless eating. This year beef ramen appeared. Last year, there was none. Ten years ago, there was no cold ramen.

  Ramen history only started a hundred years ago. If sushi is an adult, then one-hundred-year-old ramen is just a child, a junior-high-school student. If it studies and grows, it will become an adult.

  IO: Where does ramen exist in the pantheon of Japanese cuisine?

  O: I don’t think of ramen as Japanese cuisine. Ramen has become a world cuisine. Ramen is popular in New York, in France, in Germany. Everybody knows sushi as sushi. Until recently, everybody thought of ramen as just noodles. Now people can distinguish ramen as ramen, and like sushi, it is its own unique cuisine.

  IO: Can you explain the idea of kodawari?