the ramen blog & other goodies!

Years of disappointing experiences have taught me that I shouldn’t order ramen from restaurants that aren’t ramenyas. Too many places have ramen on their menu only as an afterthought, and ramen aficionados like me end up being bitterly disappointed by the ramen I ordered and my eating companions point and laugh at me and make me the butt of their jokes for the rest of the evening and refuse to share their food and–ahem…sorry…got a bit carried away there. Where was I? Oh yes…you would think I would’ve learned better. But thanks to some friendly recommendations, not only did I order ramen from a restaurant that specialized in other foods, I decided to go to Honda Ya for the sole purpose of trying their ramen. Read the rest of this entry →

Food manufacturer Kinrei teamed up with Japan’s Sunday Mainichi Weekly magazine to research and produce Hakodate Flavor Salt Ramen, a packaged cold ramen reflective of ramen in the Hakodate region in Hokkaido. The Hakodate ramen uses local ingredients such as water from Hokkaido and salt from nearby Okhotsk Sea. The magazine wrote about the entire process in this week’s issue. Read the rest of this entry →

An oldie but goodie for the weekend!

Located across from a power station and nestled in a tiny plaza with really only a Donut Star and a bunch of small businesses as neighbors, Ma Ru Yu is in the running for worst location for a new ramenya.

The restaurant is homey, with simple decorations and cutesy hand-made signs on the walls to announce special items not on the menu. There’s a great hole-in-the-wall vibe, yet the place is very clean. The two waitresses there were both very friendly and efficient. The menu touts that there are ingredients flown in fresh from Japan and that they don’t use MSG. Hmm…I actually like MSG…I ended up ordering a shoyu ramen and an order of gyoza and hoped for the best. The food took a while even though the place wasn’t very crowded. Read the rest of this entry →

By popular request (yeah, here at ramen hq, we consider one request to be popular), we decided to delve into the world of real cooking and experimented with making hanjuku eggs. After some research, trial and error, and mixing and matching of different recipes, we believe we’re off to a good start. Read the rest of this entry →

So we all know what a big bowl of ramen looks like. What about a microscopic bowl? An engineering professor and his students at the University of Tokyo have created the world’s smallest bowl of ramen, complete with (unedible) “noodles” that are only 1/12,5000th of an inch long and 1/1.25 millionth of an inch thick. Compare that with a human hair, which is on average, only 4/1000th of an inch thick.

The ramen bowl was created “for fun” using carbon nanotubes, which are microscopic tube shaped pieces of carbon. No word on what kind of soup base was used, and unfortunately, it doesn’t come with any toppings or chashu. As soon as we come across a nice microscopic plate of gyoza to go along with the ramen, you’ll be the first to know!

Thanks to tamade38 for the heads up!