It doesn’t matter if you live in Japan or just traveling the country for a few days, there is one dish you will hardly get around eating. I speak of ramen, of course.
They come in all sorts of variations. From the thickness of the broth, to the grade of softness of the noodles (the men), on towards the types of broth the ramen are based on (mainly soy sauce, pork or miso), plus all kinds of seasonings and to be finally mentioned, all the ingredients that I will just describe as “other”, out of time reasons for now.
Some might say there hardly is the “one” ramen taste, since every chef seems to have just his personal note added to the recipe. There is also no lack of competition on the ramen marked, leading to a mix out of old and proven ramen shops as well as lots of young aspiring talent ready to proof their own take on the dish.
To get to my point, it is easy to get lost in the sheer amount of possibilities, if you just want to eat some good fucking ramen.
But fear not! Because if you are lucky enough to share a similar taste to mine, I will provide you now with a solution for this problem! While I have the luck to live in Japan and therefore eat loads of different ramen as well as kind of being “forced” due to my job to try out even more ramen from time to time, I feel like I have a good take on the ramen landscape and are therefore qualified enough to write this. At least when it comes to Fukuoka.
Now, there is directly a good news if you like ramen in general, which is, there are hardly any ramen to be found that taste bad. BUT that said, it is also not too easy to find “The One”. The real deal, one to enlighten your taste nerves to a new level.
In this series I plan to introduce different types of ramen and restaurants in Fukuoka, which I find to be particularly interesting or/ and tasty.
And since this blog entry is already kind of long we will start with a short one:
If you come to Japan or Fukuoka for the first time and hardly have eaten any real ramen at all you can hardly go wrong with Ichiran ramen, a huge and famous ramen chain, definitively worthy of their popularity. It offers kind of a unique ramen experience due to the fact that you can highly customize your ramen. Something that is usually just to a lesser extent possible at your local ramen restaurant. Therefore it is a good starting point to try out different types of pork based “tonkotsu” ramen if you have no idea where to start.
Basically all the times I have eaten there I would describe it as “solid”. As you might have figured by now, the huge variety comes with the cost, that you don’t really get what I like to call “the chefs experience” where you get the taste chosen from the chef and in my opinion leads more to something I would describe as characteristic tase. After all Ichiran is a big chain and targets the taste of the masses and while it is pretty good in doing so, I haven’t found “The One” under the many combinations they offer. But maybe the next time I go there, I will. Who knows.
