I thought not, but my faith had been shaken. I needed ramen reassurance; I needed to know that all was still right with the ramen world, that a good, solid, simple, cheap, sustaining bowl was still an attainable dream.
The windswept concrete plain beside the old Tokyo Olympics athletics stadium in Komaba Park on a chilly Wednesday afternoon might not seem the most obvious place to seek solace, but for a few days every year this is home to the Ramen Show featuring twenty temporary outdoor ramen restaurants and some of the best ramen chefs in the land. After lengthy queuing with a mixed demographic of ramen nerds (there were even some females), I try three disappointing bowls. The first, from a restaurant from Akita, is way too salty; another is made by a seventy-year-old female chef. This initially offers hope, but it has a distressing aftertaste of grease; a third bowl, which uses whole ‘tai’, or sea bream, as a soup base is a waste of that most elegant of fish. I feel a strange affinity with Goldilocks.
I talk to the chef responsible for the first of these. He wants ‘to translate Japanese culture into a bowl of ramen,’ he says. Inspired by soba noodle traditions, he makes his ramen noodles to order in front of the customers in his restaurant.
‘I’m interested more in culture than tastes of fashion,’ he continues earnestly. ‘I want to keep my restaurant going for a hundred years, and pass on my techniques to other generations.’ The chef, who has bleached blond hair, white-framed sunglasses and a CND earring, dismisses all the ramen he has tasted outside of Japan as ‘wrong’.
I had by this stage grown used to the grandiloquent pontificating of ramen chefs. ‘Ramen is like the American Dream: you can make your fortune by expressing yourself freely,’ one chef had told me. Another once claimed that ramen was ‘the perfect food’. This kind of guff has long historical roots in the ramen world. Another ramen chef, Yokohama’s so-called ‘Ramen Nazi’, Sano Minoru, famously forbade his paying guests from talking, or wearing perfume, so that they might better appreciate his soup and, as far back as the 1960s, the ‘legendary’ ramen joint, Ramen Jiro (no relation to the sushi chef Jiro Ono), close to Keio University in western Tokyo and famed for its gut-busting bowls of oily, garlicky tonkotsu, published its six ramen commandments. The first three were:
1. Live purely, truthfully and beautifully. Go for walks, read books and smile when saving money. On the weekends, fish and practise copying sutras.
2. For the world, for people, for society.
3. Love & peace & togetherness.
I mean, seriously.
In my time writing about food, I have had to endure a good many pretentious lectures on life and creativity from chefs – Italians with Michelin stars are by far the worst offenders – but ramen chefs do seem even more prone to philosophising than the norm. Perhaps it is an insecurity born from a life spent cooking a so-called ‘B-grade’ food, as fast foods like ramen are categorised in Japan; or that they feel a need to compete with other more highfalutin’ forms of Japanese dining, like kaiseki ryori, or sushi. Maybe the relatively restricted framework of ramen – everything in one bowl – makes them just more frustrated generally and this vacuous preaching serves as some kind of safety valve. But my experiences at the kaiseki ramen place and the ramen festival have left me questioning everything. A fundamental truth which I had held dear for many years – my carefully formed and cherished ramen world view – have been, if not shattered, then at least fractured. I had spent years assuring those who had never been to Japan that the ramen was unimpeachable here, by far the best anywhere in the world, and that it was literally impossible to eat a bad bowl in Tokyo. ‘If you take the very best bowl of ramen you can find in London or New York,’ I would tell well-intentioned people who foolishly recommended ramen restaurants in either city to me, ‘it will only be as good as an average bowl in Japan.’ It was an insufferably smug, superior attitude. I realised this at the time, but I felt it was my responsibility to put people straight on just how great ramen in Japan was. It was my duty to inform these poor, misguided ramen ingenues that only by travelling to the other side of the world could they properly appreciate the greatness of noodle soup and understand that there were no bad bowls in Japan. But here was proof that it was possible to find poor-quality ramen in Tokyo after all – a new and troubling development which gnawed at the very essence of all I held dear and true in the world.
If ramen could be this bad – IN JAPAN! – what else might have I misunderstood about this country and its food culture? What if all the years that had passed since I was first introduced to Japanese cuisine had been spent in some kind of mirage, clouded by delusional wish-fulfilment? I’d invested so much of my energy and reputation telling people how great Japanese food was, perhaps I had become blind to its faults and failures, or, even worse, was in denial. What if I had become so brainwashed by the imagined unimpeachable greatness of Japanese cuisine that I had become corrupted, oblivious to its frailties, a mealtime mythomane?
I needed an antidote, I needed it quickly, and I found it in tsukemen.
Tsukemen is ramen but not as we know it. Think of tsukemen (pronounced ‘sook-men’) as being ramen’s fatter, slightly retarded younger brother. Tsukemen is not noodles in soup, tsukemen is noodles and soup. This is dipping ramen: two bowls, one containing chunky wheat noodles with not quite the comely girth and softness of udon but almost, served alongside a thicker, more intense, reduced liquid poised in its savoury viscosity between a dip and a soup, not thick enough to be described as the former, not thin enough to be the latter. Tsukemen is more filling (you get almost double the noodles, c. 350g compared to around 180g in a standard bowl of ramen), arguably more satisfying, and definitely more messy.
Though it has been around since the 1950s, tsukemen’s time has come. Its popularity has been rising over recent years, as evidenced by the fact that there are now tsukemen restaurants specifically targeting women – usually a sign that a type of food has reached critical mass in Japan. And now, having spoken to a few chefs from each camp, I also suspect tsukemen chefs are less prone to the absurd pseudo-intellectualism that has characterised ramen chefs in recent years, and more prone just to giving their customers something hearty and delicious to eat.
At the same time as the Ramen Show was taking place at the old Olympic Park, there was another ramen festival, Tsukemen-Haku, a ramen vs tsukemen showdown, in full swing closer to Shinjuku.
Kabukicho is Tokyo’s red-light district, home of the notorious ‘soaplands’, love hotels and massage parlours, as well as sleazy hostess bars, pachinko parlours and nefarious drinking dens. Venture there or the adjacent warren of the Golden Gai as a lone foreigner and you will be fleeced by exorbitant ‘cover charges’, your drink might be spiked, you’ll get beaten up, or maybe end up with a particularly tenacious STD. The other day, there was a full-on yakuza riot there. The boss of the Matsuba-kai gang had an argument with a taxi driver. A rival boss, Chikahiro Ito of the Sumiyoshi-kai, happened to be passing and made some or other snide reference to his enemy’s character. Punches were thrown which soon escalated to the point at which fifty or so gangsters were observed brawling in the street. Over a hundred police were called. Just another night in Kabukicho.
With all its sleaze and the apparent disregard for the basic principles of Japanese hospitality, Kabukicho is so very not typical of Japan, but somehow it is also just as much a Tokyo icon as the Imperial Palace or the Hama Rikyu Garden. I am strangely drawn to it, as others are drawn to sewer safaris. It has texture. Certainly Kabukicho is not the kind of place any responsible parent would bring impressionable young children but I had last been there with my offspring a couple of days earlier to visit the hilarious Robot Restaurant, and we had had a ball.
You might have seen footage of the Robot Restaurant on one of those TV travelogue series, the kind usually filmed over a couple of days due to budget restrictions and fronted by some wide-eyed, borderline racist comedian. Typically they will visit the Robot Restaurant, hook up with a ‘geisha’, do an onsen and eat
some kind of wriggly seafood, before moving on to shoot the South Korea episode.
The Robot Restaurant is less a restaurant and more an orgy of liquid crystal, neon, lasers and mirrors, featuring bikini-clad J-Pop dancers on trapezes, five-metre-high remote-controlled pneumatic-breasted cyborgs, mock dinosaur vs robot battles and, at one point towards the end, a full-sized, neon-trimmed tank. It’s part coked-up carnival parade, part sci-fi sex show, and the food is terrible. The bar/waiting room is almost as entertaining: a kaleidoscope of liquid crystal screens, crazy gilding, crystal chandeliers, disco lights and mirrored walls. It must be an epileptic’s nightmare; like being inside Liberace’s head after he’s taken too many of his diet pills. Everyone should go. Once.
When we visited, the ushers invited Asger and Emil to take part in the show and ‘battle’ a robot. Audience participation tends to throw my children’s contrasting characters into even sharper relief: on this occasion, Emil, too cool to be manipulated for others’ entertainment, declined. Asger, always happy to be the centre of attention no matter the context, readily agreed, and so, as the show approached its climax, he left his seat and joined the battle on the floor, administering thumps to a giant robot with preposterous oversized boxing gloves as we cheered him on, waving our glow sticks enthusiastically.
Now I think of it, whoever is behind the Robot Restaurant really should be put in charge of the opening ceremony of the 2020 Olympics.
On that occasion, at night, all of Kabukicho’s rich tapestry of ne’er-do-wells and low-lifes were present on the streets: the yakuza bruisers, the pimps and the bouncers, but during the day it just looks shabby. I pass by Tokyo’s pungent Korean quarter, Shin Okubo Koreatown, and continue on to the tsukemen festival, which is taking place in a small urban park surrounded by high-rise blocks.
Two rows of Portakabins at either end of the park have been turned into ramen kitchens for ten of Japan’s top ramen/tsukemen restaurants to set up temporary stall (five making ramen, five making tsukemen), with a large, open-sided marquee in the centre of the park with trestle tables for the slurping aficionados. There are some unusual types of soup on offer – one restaurant is using a lamb bone broth, which I have never heard of before, another has based its soup on mushrooms.
My guide to all of this is Takamune Yano, executive chief editor of the best ramen magazine in Japan, Ramen Walker, whom I had met a couple of times before at the magazine’s publisher, Kadokawa (which also happens to be my Japanese publisher).
I spot Yano-san, dressed in his customary salaryman uniform of navy blue jacket and grey slacks and carrying his black rucksack, at the entrance to the festival, and we begin to peruse the various offerings. Yano-san commands an incredible level of detailed knowledge about each ramen shop and its chef, from the length of time you have to queue, to where they trained, for how long, and the intricacies of how their broth differs from their master’s. He is similarly clued up on the economics of running a ramen joint. ‘If you own four or five decent ramen restaurants, then it’s a Benz for every member of your family,’ he tells me as we walk around the festival.
I had come to think of Yano-san as ‘Ramen Man’, a Clark Kent figure with ramen superpowers. Merely being in his presence means I am granted not only queue-jumping ability, but backstage access. That is how I come to meet, Masaaki Hayasaka, the owner-chef of Ufushin in Sendai, eastern Honshu, who is also director of the Ramen Union.
I am introduced to him behind his temporary kitchen and begin with the obligatory discussion about ingredients and technique. Hayasaka-san’s noodles feature ‘silk gel’ (whatever that is) and, for this event, he is blending two broths, one tonkotsu (boiled pork bones) and the other made from konbu and various dried fish (sardine, bonito and squid). This was a very good thing as far as I am concerned. Though I like it from time to time, tonkotsu, with its milky soup of endlessly boiled pork bones, is not my favourite type of ramen. For me, a soup made at least in part from some kinds of dried fish is a prerequisite for great tasting ramen.
Hayasaka is a large man with a cube-shaped, closely shaved head. He is wearing a pink and white swirly-patterned shirt, stretch pants and a silver earring with a blue stone in one ear, and sporting a goatee. He has one other distinguishing physical feature which we shall address in a moment.
He started his career in a Western-style kitchen aged sixteen, turning to the path of ramen aged twenty-three because, as he puts it, ‘You can make more people happier more easily with ramen, and when you are a ramen chef you get to see their faces when they eat.’ Now in his forties, Hayasaka has come to the conclusion that money and possessions did not make him happy. ‘I always tell my apprentices: up until forty, you can think about what I call “primary success”: money, women, cars, but any longer and you need to think about other things. Then it is time to start giving, the “secondary level” of success, and if you only ever achieve the primary success, then you should be ashamed of yourself.’
He tells me all this, not in a preaching or pompous manner, but speaking softly, from the heart. We sit at a makeshift workstation in a tent behind the Portakabin kitchen where his restaurant has set up temporary shop. We are surrounded by catering packs of soft drinks, ashtrays, rice cookers and, oddly, a Mexican wrestler’s mask hanging on the side of the tent. ‘No matter how rich you are, it doesn’t mean you can make people happy,’ he continues. ‘And if you can’t make someone happy, you are nothing. Ramen is my chosen medium of happiness.’
As we talk, Hayasaka makes gyoza with one hand. This is his only hand. He used to have two hands, but six years ago he lost his entire right arm in a grisly ramen accident. It happened one summer afternoon six years ago when Hayasaka had been making noodles in the back room of his restaurant.
‘My noodles have a high hydrolysis rate,’ he begins the tale. ‘They use lots of water because I want them to be easy for my customers to digest. Lower water content makes them difficult to digest, especially for children and the elderly. But in summer, it is harder to make noodles with a higher water content because the dough gets so sticky.’
To mix the dough, Hayasaka-san uses an industrial mixer. He shows me a photograph of one on his phone. It looks like something almost agricultural, a fearsome metal bathtub with whirring blades capable of handling thirty kilos of flour at a time. Like many chefs, Hayasaka-san has no inhibitions about placing his hands in kitchen machinery while it is in motion. In professional kitchens, safety guards are for amateurs. But this time, reaching in to adjust the dough while the machine was still running his hand had become jammed in the super-sticky wet mixture. His entire right arm was damaged beyond saving and eventually had to be amputated at the shoulder.
‘I thought about what I can do, not what I can’t do,’ the chef tells me when I ask him how he faced up to life after the accident. ‘When chefs make food, they have to make do with what they have in the fridge, and it is the same with life. People may think I have lost my arm, lost fifty per cent of what I can do, but no. I live life, not fifty per cent of life. The only thing I can’t do is put my hands together and pray, so I had to find out how I could give thanks in a different way.’
He was right-handed so started training his left hand while still in hospital. Within a month he was writing again. He left hospital after two and a half months, and was back at work in his kitchen the next day.
Hayasaka believes that his personal tragedy helped him empathise with the victims of the earthquake and tsunami which struck the coast by his home town of Sendai to such devastating effect in March 2011. His restaurant was not directly affected, but Hayasaka-san immediately sprung into action and headed off to the epicentre of the disaster around three hours’ drive away with a mobile kitchen which he had already prepared for use in educating elementary school children in ramen-making. He ended up driving to the disaster zone every day for eight months, calling in favours from suppliers to source produce, gas canisters and water, serving more than 100,000 bowls of ramen during the course of that first y
ear. But he did more than feed people. ‘I think that those who had lost their houses and relatives saw me, a chef who had lost one arm, and I think it maybe inspired them to keep going.’
Hayasaka invites me into his kitchen where his team, dressed all in black, one of them wearing a Mexican wrestling mask, are in full flow serving bowl after bowl of ramen (not, today, their usual tsukemen) to a long queue which has formed out front. And that is how, after a brief initiation, I find myself part of a crack ramen kitchen brigade.
I have never enjoyed the heat of service in a professional kitchen, though I do understand why some get a kick out of it, and my experience in a ramen kitchen is as stressful as my other kitchen experiences. Hayasaka shows me how to cook the noodles and his technique for shaking the water off once they are ready, before gently sliding them into the bowl without splashing a single drop of soup. I manage to assemble a dozen or so bowls, cooking the noodles, draining them, first ladling in the tare – which in the case of ramen is a kind of essence, or flavouring – then the soup, adding the toppings of chashu, meatballs, wakame and spring onion, before passing them over the counter to the bewildered diners, before I give up and leave the kitchen to the professionals (to their obvious relief).
After the stress of the kitchen, Hayasaka and I chat a little about the difference between ramen fans and tsukemen fans. Mostly, people like both, he says, but there was a key difference with the way you eat the latter. Tsukemen doesn’t stay hot for long (hence the practice of one tsukemen restaurant in Tokyo I once visited where they reheated half-finished bowls by placing a super-hot pebble in the soup), so you have to eat it quickly, and you mix the ingredients yourself, in your mouth. ‘In Western food, you take a piece of potato and eat that, then you take a piece of meat and eat that, but in Japan we eat small pieces of different elements of a dish and combine them in our mouths to control a complex and changing flavour – that’s the Japanese way, and also the tsukemen way,’ he explains. Tsukemen was simpler, cruder, and usually more salty than ramen, but it always provoked a stronger reaction from his diners.
The Meaning of Rice Page 18