The Internet is littered with dozens if not hundreds of exclamation point–bedecked ramen blogs (Rameniac, GO RAMEN!, Ramen Adventures, Ramenate!) in English, Japanese, and probably Serbian, Hindi, and Xhosa. In Tokyo, you’ll find hot and cold ramen; Thai green curry ramen; diet ramen and ramen with pork broth so thick you could sculpt with it; Italian-inspired tomato ramen; and Hokkaido-style miso ramen. You’ll find ramen chains and fiercely individual holes-in-the-wall. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is having a meet-cute with her first bowl of ramen. As she fills up on pork and noodles and seaweed and bamboo shoots, she thinks, we were meant to be together, and she is embarrassed at her atavistic reaction to a simple bowl of soup.
On that first night, as soon as our ramen hit the table, we dove in, parceling out noodles, ultratender braised pork belly, and broth. I ate in a sleepy haze, peering through the glass door of the restaurant. That’s Tokyo out there, I thought, and grinned. Anyone looking in would have recognized me as a jetlagged sentimental dipshit who just survived his first ramen ticket machine.
In summer, most ramen restaurants in Tokyo serve hiyashi chūka, a cold ramen noodle salad topped with strips of ham, cucumber, and omelet; a tart sesame- or soy-based sauce; and sometimes other vegetables, like a tomato wedge or sheets of wakame seaweed. The vegetables are arranged in piles of parallel shreds radiating from the center to the edge of the plate like bicycle spokes, and you toss everything together before eating. It’s bracing, ice-cold, addictive—summer food from the days before air conditioning.
In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza, a young lifestyle reporter wants to write an article about hiyashi chūka. “I’m not interested in something like hiyashi chūka,” says my alter ego Yamaoka. It’s a fake Chinese dish made with cheap industrial ingredients, he explains.
Later, however, Yamaoka relents. “Cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings,” he muses. “The idea of trying to make a good dish out of them is a valid one.” Good point, jerk. He mills organic wheat into flour and hires a Chinese chef to make the noodles. He buys a farmyard chicken from an old woman to make the stock and seasons it with the finest Japanese vinegar, soy sauce, and sake. Yamaoka’s mean old dad Kaibara Yūzan inevitably gets involved and makes an even better hiyashi chūka by substituting the finest Chinese vinegar, soy sauce, and rice wine.
When I first read this, I enjoyed trying to follow the heated argument over this dish I’d never even heard of. Yamaoka and Kaibara are in total agreement that hiyashi chūka needs to be made with quality ingredients, but they disagree about what kind of dish it is: Chinese, Japanese, or somewhere in between? Unlike American food, Japanese cuisine has boundary issues.
For enlightenment, or at least sustenance, I went to Sapporo-ya, a lunch counter in Nihonbashi. According to Yukari Sakamoto, author of the guidebook Food Sake Tokyo, Sapporo-ya serves the best hiyashi chūka in town. (Yamaoka gets kicked out of a similar place in Ginza for loudly criticizing the food.) It was a perfect day for cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings: during the three-block walk from the subway station to the restaurant, I had to stop at a vending machine for water and then lean against a building, trying not to faint. You know how the weather report sometimes says, “75 degrees (feels like 78)”? In Tokyo in the summer, it’s 88 degrees (feels like 375).
Finally, I descended into the basement-level restaurant. In lieu of a ticket machine, a man sits at a podium, takes your order and your cash, and issues a handwritten ticket which you then present to a waitress about six feet away. This did not strike me as particularly efficient, but I wasn’t thinking about labor productivity. I was thinking, This is possibly the ugliest restaurant in the world.
There are so many thousands of ramen places in Tokyo that it’s foolish to generalize about their aesthetic, but many of them make your average hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurant look like the Four Seasons. They are not actually dirty, because nothing in Tokyo is actually dirty, but they manage to suggest decades of accumulated filth without the filth. The prevailing decor is “if you want decor, go to a fucking kaiseki place.” Also, many great ramen places smell like pork bones that have been boiling for three days, and when you sit down at the counter, you’re inches away from a giant vat of pork bones that have been boiling for three days. Some cooking smells (grilling meat, frying onions) reach into an ancient brain lobe designed to identify good eating; this is not one of them.
The reason for this uncharacteristic inattention to detail is that the ramen shop wants you to understand that they are putting all of their money and energy into the bowl. You’ll get a potentially life-changing soup for less than $10. In exchange, you’re expected to ignore or learn to appreciate scruffiness. The message: “Our ramen is so good, we don’t need to wash our curtain.”
You’re also supposed to eat fast and get out. A ramen joint is not the place to play Lady and the Tramp with your lover; it’s solitary food. One chain, Ichiran, segregates diners into individual booths. You slide into a booth smaller than a study carrel and present your ticket; a faceless server on the other side hands you the soup through a curtain. Nevertheless, Laurie and Iris and I went out for ramen together often, ate slowly by local standards, and always felt welcome—though we never went to Ichiran.
Now, back to Sapporo-ya. The place is deep enough below street level that the windows let in no natural light; harsh fluorescent lamps made everyone look ill. The walls are greenish-yellow. If you are directing a modern adaptation of The Divine Comedy, shoot the purgatory scenes here.
The waitress set down my hiyashi chūka goma dare (sesame sauce). It was in every way the opposite of its surroundings: colorful, artfully presented, sweated over. The tangle of yellow noodles was served in a shallow blue-and-white bowl and topped with daikon, pickled ginger, roast pork, bamboo shoots, tomato, shredded nori, cucumber, bean sprouts, half a hard-boiled egg, and Japanese mustard. It was almost too pretty to ruin by tossing it together with chopsticks.
I sat at a communal table with two other men. One was a harried-looking businessman in the official summer attire of black pants and a white shirt. He dispatched his hiyashi chūka in five minutes with no apparent shirt stains and went back to work. People in Tokyo are capable of eating noodles at shocking speeds; I lost count of how many times people eating next to me disappeared so quickly that they might as well have left behind a cloud of smoke and a cartoon ZOING! sound. Also at my table, however, was an older man in casual dress, probably retired, who ate nearly as slowly as I did and with evident pleasure. Every bite of hiyashi chūka is a little different but always brought together by the lip-smacking, tangy sauce. As with any bowl of ramen, it is totally appropriate to lift the dish to your mouth and drink the broth, and I did, until it was gone. Yamaoka would not have been impressed—for about $11, there’s no way they’re using organic or otherwise rarefied ingredients. But it worked for me.
Then I looked around at the horrifying decor and got the hell out of there before I turned out to be the protagonist in a dystopian novel.
Our neighborhood ramen place was called Aoba. That’s a joke. There were actually more than fifty ramen places within walking distance of our apartment. But this one was our favorite.
Aoba makes a wonderful and unusual ramen with a mixture of pork and fish broth. The noodles are firm and chewy, and the pork tender and almost smoky, like ham. I also liked how they gave us a small bowl for sharing with Iris without our even asking.
What I really appreciated about this place, however, were two aspects of ramen that I haven’t mentioned yet: the eggs and the dipping noodles. After these two, I will stop, but there’s so much more to ramen. Would someone please write an English-language book about ramen? Real ramen, not how to cook with Top Ramen noodles? Thanks. (I did find a Japanese-language book called State-of-the-Art Technology of Pork Bone Ramen on Amazon. Wish-listed!)
One of the most popular ramen toppings is a soft-boiled egg. Long before sous vide cookery, ramen cooks were slow-cooking eggs to a precise donenes
s. Eggs for ramen (ajitsuke tamago) are generally marinated in a soy sauce mixture after cooking so the whites turn a little brown and the eggs turn a little sweet and salty. I like it best when an egg is plunked whole into the broth so I can bisect it with my chopsticks and reveal the intensely orange, barely runny yolk. A cool egg moistened with rich broth is alchemy. Forget the noodles; I want a ramen egg with a little broth for breakfast.
Finding hot and cold in the same mouthful is another hallmark of Japanese summer food, and many ramen restaurants, including Aoba, feature it in the form of tsukemen, dipping noodles. Tsukemen is deconstructed ramen, a bowl of cold cooked noodles and a smaller bowl of hot, ultra-rich broth and toppings. The goal is to lift a tangle of noodles with your chopsticks and dip them in the bowl of broth on the way to your mouth. This is a crazy way to eat noodles and, unless you’ve been inculcated with the principles of noodle-slurping physics from birth, a great way to ruin your clothes.
The World’s Greatest Supermarket
スーパー
No one postures in a supermarket. It’s an unfiltered view under those bright lights. You’re going to see the real culture and the real cravings and appetites of the people.
—Peter Jon Lindberg
A while back, I was listening to The Splendid Table, and Lynne Rossetto Kasper was talking to Lindberg, a Travel and Leisure columnist. The subject? Supermarkets around the world.
“What country do you think has the best supermarkets?” asked Kasper.
Lindberg didn’t hesitate. “It has to be Japan,” he replied.
The moment I stepped into Life Supermarket in Nakano, I knew what he meant. The name is written in English and pronounced “rye-fuh,” and it looks like a small suburban American supermarket, except the only parking lot is for bicycles. Dozens and dozens of bicycles. Bicycle parking lots in Japan can be enormous. Think it’s hard to find your car at the airport? I saw a parking lot outside a mall in Asakusa with room for at least a thousand bikes, all spooned together, with none of those helpful cartoon reminders that you’re parked in 2C.
Go through the sliding doors and take the escalator down to the basement. If it’s a hot day—and in July, it’s always a hot day—you’ll drink in a welcome blast of air conditioning and, perhaps, a less-welcome blast of the Life Supermarket theme song. This five-second jingle is played on a continuous loop in random parts of the store at random times of day, at various tempos. The song consists of a girlish voice singing, “FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY / SURPRISE, SURPRISE!” over and over and over again.
This induces the Five Stages of Dealing with an Intolerable Jingle. First you laugh. Then you get confused. Then you get angry. Then you go into a wide-eyed trance. Then you load up your basket with Japanese candy bars. In a couple of days, I went from, “Why are they polluting this beautiful supermarket with this terrible song?” to “I don’t hear anything, but for some reason, I feel like if I shop here more often I’ll get a funny surprise.”
This may be a silly thing to say, but Life Supermarket is thoroughly devoted to Japanese food. It’s easy to cook Japanese in a small kitchen, and it’s just as easy to stock a satisfying range of Japanese ingredients and prepared foods in a small supermarket. Life Supermarket is tiny compared to a suburban American store.
True, there’s an aisle devoted to foreign foods, and then there are familiar foods that have been put through the Japanese filter and emerged a little bit mutated. Take breakfast cereal. You’ll find familiar American brands such as Kellogg’s, but often without English words anywhere on the box. One of the most popular Kellogg’s cereals in Japan is Brown Rice Flakes. They’re quite good, and the back-of-the-box recipes include cold tofu salad and the savory pancake okonomiyaki, each topped with a flurry of crispy rice flakes. Iris and I got mildly addicted to a Japanese brand of dark chocolate cornflakes, the only chocolate cereal I’ve ever eaten that actually tastes like chocolate. (Believe me, I’ve tried them all.)
Stocking my pantry at Life Supermarket was fantastically simple and inexpensive. I bought soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, rice, salt, and sugar. (I was standing right in front of the salt when I asked where to find it. This happens to me every time I ask for help finding any item in any store.) Total outlay: about $15, and most of that was for the rice. Japan is an unabashed rice protectionist, levying prohibitive tariffs on imported rice. As a result, supermarket rice is domestic, high quality, and very expensive. There were many brands of white rice to choose from, the sacks advertising different growing regions and rice varieties. (I did the restaurant wine list thing and chose the second least expensive.) Japanese consumers love to hear about the regional origins of their foods. I almost never saw ingredients advertised as coming from a particular farm, like you’d see in a farm-to-table restaurant in the U.S., but if the milk is from Hokkaido, the rice from Niigata, and the tea from Uji, all is well. I suppose this is not so different from Idaho potatoes and Florida orange juice.
When I got home, I opened the salt and sugar and spooned some into small bowls near the stove. The next day I learned that Japanese salt and sugar are hygroscopic: their crystalline structure draws in water from the air (and Tokyo, in summer, has enough water in the air to supply the world’s car washes). I figured this was harmless and went on licking slightly moist salt and sugar off my fingers every time I cooked.
I went to Life Supermarket as often as possible. It just made me happy. In the produce section, I bought cucumbers, baby bok choy, and ginger, and I was able to choose from stem ginger and young ginger as well as the mature ginger sold in Western markets.
And I bought dozens of negi. Negi are sometimes called Japanese leeks or Welsh onions, and in Tokyo they're often called shiro negi (white negi) or naganegi (long negi) to distinguish them from the shorter, greener variety popular in the Kansai region of Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe. (Tokyo is in the Kantō region and is constantly comparing itself to Kansai in terms of food, culture, and language. The two regions are 300 miles apart, a two-and-a-half hour train ride. What looks like a cultural chasm to the Japanese will probably be as obvious, to the tourist, as the differences between Oregon and Washington.)
Negi are Tokyo's favorite aromatic vegetable, and also my favorite. Fatter than scallions but thinner than green onions, negi improve everything. They’re sliced thin and used as a garnish on noodles, rice bowls, and tofu; sliced thick, they’re found in hot pots and on yakitori skewers. It’s like a negi fairy has gone around Tokyo flinging them everywhere. At udon chains, you can buy a cup of extra sliced negi to mound atop your noodles and be your own negi fairy. When we returned to Seattle, going back to food not covered in negi was no fun.
The produce in Japan is eerily perfect and tastes as good as it looks. (Organic produce, however, is rare.) I went around leering at eggplants and squash. I wanted to buy more vegetables than I could cook, just to have them around, much as Senator Phil Gramm once said, “I have more shotguns than I need, but not as many as I want.”
Vegetables in Japan are cheap, plentiful, unblemished, and delicious; vegetables five minutes past their prime are taken out back and shot. A supermarket cucumber is one of the greatest pleasures Life Supermarket (and life itself) can offer. Fruit, however, is mostly imported, expensive, and merely OK. We ate a few apples and grapefruits and blueberries that weren’t as good as what we get in Seattle. They did have some of those expensive gift melons every visitor to Japan is required to gawk at; because Life is not a fancy store, however, the melons there were only $40, not $100-plus. I started to devise a melon arbitrage scheme involving stuffing my carry-on with Seattle farmers market melons and...okay, I just wanted to say “melon arbitrage.”
Next to the fresh produce is the pickle section, a rainbow coalition of preserved vegetables in plastic tubs. The spicier varieties kept luring me in, especially pickled radish stems, cut crosswise into short lengths, salted, and tossed with dried chile. They’re a little crunchy and offer a bracing hit of acidity along with a tag-team punch of spice from the radish
itself and the red chile. I also enjoyed the spicy vegetable medley with chunks of cucumber, carrot, and napa cabbage. That said, almost nothing I ate in Japan was really that spicy, aside from a Dangerously Spicy Kimchi Rice Ball I bought at a convenience store. Then again, I didn’t try about eighty-seven other pickle varieties for sale at Life.
Buying fish in the supermarket in Japan is a delight, even if the fish is displayed in styrofoam trays, as it is at Life. The most common supermarket fish, mackerel, also happens to be my favorite, and it’s sold in a variety of precise quantities. Want three small mackerel fillets? Sure thing. One large? Right over here. Mackerel costs practically nothing and is a snap to cook with the fish grill. I also tried marinated aji (Spanish mackerel) but skipped the salmon.
In the freezer case I found a brand of Korean rice dishes that I liked, and potstickers appeared in many guises: raw, cooked, fresh, frozen. My favorite freezer item, however, was frozen water. This is verging on the level of delusion that causes people to ascribe the quality of New York bagels to the local tap water, I know, but Tokyo has really wonderful ice. Sold in resealable plastic bags imprinted with the Japanese character for ice (氷), each clear, slow-melting shard is a unique and ephemeral objet d’art. Every time I came home from Life or anywhere else, I’d artlessly fling off my shoes, plunk a few lovely ice cubes into a glass, and fill it with mugicha, or barley tea, which is not really tea, just toasted barley steeped in cold water. You can brew mugicha yourself from loose barley or teabags, but we bought it in large plastic bottles at Life. It tastes ever so slightly like coffee and is said to be especially restorative on a hot day, and in summer in Tokyo there is no other kind of day. I found mugicha perplexing at first and then proceeded to drink gallons of it. The amount of mugicha Tokyo drinks on a July day would fill many swimming pools with uninviting toasty-brown liquid.
Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Page 4