the ramen blog & other goodies!

They’re doing it again! A few weeks ago, Santouka Ramen offered a special toromi shoyu ramen, limited to 20 bowls a day. Now they’re back with another special ramen, also limited to 20 bowls a day, and limited only to the Costa Mesa store for their 20th anniversary. This time, the ramen appears to be a miso base, and is called the Awase Aji Ramen.

I’m not sure if this is a cool new trend, or a marketing scheme gone berserk. Either way, if the ramen is good, I’ll keep coming back for more!

The special is happening this weekend, Friday 3/27 through Monday 3/30 and only at the Costa Mesa Mitsuwa.

In time for Valentine’s Day, Lotte has teamed up with ramen shop Menya Musashi ???? (with several branches in the Tokyo area) to create a chocolate flavored ramen. The ramen will be called Ghana Miso (Ghana is one of Lotte’s brands of chocolates) and will be served from now until February 15. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) this isn’t as strange and/or fantastic as it sounds: the chocolate is only used as an ingredient in the ground pork topping and not as a soup ingredient. Too bad. That might’ve been more interesting.

source: Trends in Japan

Cup Noodle fanatics rejoice (at least if you’re in Japan. Cup Noodle fans in other countries can simply sulk in the corner)! Enter the My Vending Machine contest before the end of March to win one of 3000 home Cup Noodle vending machines!

I’m not sure what the point is: if pouring hot water into a styrofoam cup isn’t challenging enough for you, this rube goldberg machine is right up your alley. Frankly, I don’t care that it’s not particularly practical. I would definitely eat more Cup Noodles if I had one of these. I want one!

via Trends in Japan

It’s about freaking time! After waiting for a long long time, and after literally months of fruitless enquiries to media 8 entertainment (a hearty “I hope your ramen is limp” to media 8!), I’m happy to report that the Ramen Girl will be out in Japan on Jan 17. The Ramen Girl (trailer here) is a movie about an American girl (Brittany Murphy) who is abandoned by her boyfriend in Japan. She ends up hanging out at a local ramen shop and eventually decides that she needs to become a ramen chef. The movie promises to show us “that each ramen bowl must contain a universe of feeling and truly be a gift from the heart.” Yeah…… To be fair though, I’ve rewatched the trailer a few times, and watched the Japanese trailer (it’s exactly the same as the English one), and I have to say that I’m at least a little more excited than ever to watch this movie.

Of course, that’s assuming it doesn’t dissolve into pure east meets west schmaltzyness. Then again, the casting of Toshiyuki Nishida as the “tyrannical, temperamental Japanese master chef” and Tsutomu Yamazaki as the “grandmaster” makes me less ambivalent (tip: click on the imdb link for Yamazaki-san and scroll down until you see a ramen movie you recognize. Yep, that’s him!).

One thing I have to take exception to is some of people (you know who you are!) calling this a “remake” of Tampopo. Of course, since I haven’t seen the Ramen Girl yet, I’m not really in a position to judge, but neither have the people comparing this to Tampopo. How in the world does this trailer make you think it’s similar to Tampopo besides having ramen as a main theme? I mean, is the Transformers a remake of say Herbie the Love Bug simply because both movies feature talking cars? Tampopo is so much more than just some movie about someone learning to make ramen, and this sort of “lump them all together” thinking just bothers me. End rant.

No word on when or if the movie will be coming stateside, though I have a feeling that a straight-to-DVD release is as much as we can hope for. For those of you who aren’t looking forward to seeing if Brittany Murphy can give this kind of movie the acting chops it deserves, I leave you with another, possibly more entertaining Japanese movie to look forward to:

Thanks and tips of the ramen bowl go to:
Keizo and Cutie for the heads up about the movie release date.
Brittany Murphy Media for the picture.
And Coilhouse for the High Kick Girl lowdown.

“North Korean scientists have created a new type of noodle that has twice as much protein and fives times as much fat as ordinary ramen.” –wait, did I read that right? North Korea? Apparently, a technologically-advanced team of North Korean scientists have specially engineered the “super ramen” from ingredients such as soybean and corn, instead of the usual wheat flour. Designed to stave off hunger pangs longer than “conventional” or, I guess, “non-Super,” ramen, this could certainly be a breakthrough for a country that’s experiencing severe food shortages and famine.

Sadly, somehow, I don’t think anyone at Nissin is losing any sleep over this, though I’m sure diet fad heralds are eager to see the outcome of this grand experiment.

Thanks to Korean Melon and Big in Japan. Photo courtesy of yeowatzup.

An elderly woman in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, became ill after eating a Nissin Cup Noodle. After an examination, paradichlorobenzene, which is used in mothballs and insect repellent, was found in the soup. The specific Cup Noodle was traced back to a factory in Ibaraki Prefecture and was manufactured on August 30 of this year. Nissin President Susumu Nakagawa announced that his firm will voluntarily recall about 500,000 Cup Noodles that were produced on the same date.

(By the way, for anyone who’s wondering, Cup Noodles are known as Cup Noodle (singular) in Japan.)

via Japan Today with thanks to Cutie for the tip.