T+L travels to the Japanese island of Kyushu to seek out the spiritual home of tonkotsu ramen.
I am on a plane, crossing an ocean to eat a soup made of pork bones. Mid-flight, I dream of my first encounter. Of the first slurp, revelatory as a first kiss. Of steam rising off the fat-slicked surface, the hot mishmash of chewy noodles and the just-set egg spilling its sunsetty yolk into the porky depths that are touched with the tang of sea and soy and miso and whatever proprietary, body- and mind-altering secrets have been stirred into the mix by the cooks at that pocket-size, second-floor shop in Omotesando that has a line up the stairs and down the block.
You don’t forget your first time with tonkotsu ramen. Mine happened a decade ago. Cold, gray Tokyo lunchtime in December. The first, skeptical spoonful. (What’s all the fuss about?) Then the full rush of pure rendered meaty umami-ness. (Where has this been all my life?)
It is not a normal smell, the smell of tonkotsu ramen. The odor (no one would call it a fragrance) does not tip gently up the nasal passage. Rather, it sticks like a blow dart in the bridge of your nose. A sour, worrying foulness that speaks of some ancient, ancestral revulsion: this is how you first become aware of the proximity of true Hakata-style tonkotsu ramen. And it’s precisely this strange funk that—once you’ve overcome the initial, misleading impression and fallen hard for the stuff—you find yourself dreaming about.
Since that first encounter, I’ve slouched over countless bowls of ramen, traditional and otherwise, in Tokyo—and sometimes in New York when the weather turns cool and I miss it. I’ve taken the train to Yokohama to visit the Ramen Museum. But I’ve never made it south to Fukuoka, a seaside city on the island of Kyushu, at the southwestern end of the country, to find the spiritual home of tonkotsu, the style of ramen that first opened my mind and staked its claim there of permanent longing. Memory propels me back. And also the plane. A plane is a must for crossing an ocean in time for dinner.
12:45 a.m. Somewhere in the northern outskirts of Tokyo
I land in Tokyo late—and hungry. Happily, ramen shops keep insomniac hours, so I use my one-night layover to begin my ramen mission before flying to Kyushu in the morning. Tokyo’s is a culture of everythingness: every regional variety of ramen delivered to the big stage of the capital city, then endlessly remixed and reinvented. You could fill every issue of this magazine for a year trying to describe the shape-shifting universe of Japanese ramen and you wouldn’t get close to a complete picture. There are, in fact, many magazines devoted solely to ramen—and ramen TV shows, comic books, competitions.
Among the legion of ramen bloggers is my guide tonight, a 33-year-old California transplant named Brian MacDuckston. Gangly, personable, head shaved, smile full of braces, MacDuckston supports himself doing educational dance- and sing-alongs for kids; at night he documents his noodle addiction on his site, Ramen Adventures.
I ask MacDuckston to paint me a picture of the state of ramen in Tokyo these days. “There’s a place called Papapapapine,” he says. “Its speciality is pineapple ramen. Pineapple in the soup, pineapple in the toppings. What’s goofy is, it works.” Picture painted.
Rather than wade into the torrent of the new, I want to get right into the classical Kyushu swing of things, so MacDuckston steers us, by multiple subway connections, to the moonlit streets of a semi-industrial suburb. This is big-sky country by Tokyo standards.
We’re looking for Tanaka Shoten, an out-of-the-way shop celebrated for its traditional Hakata-style ramen. We smell it before we see it.
Inside, we take our place at the bar and order a round of foam-topped draft beers. When the ramen is set before us, we lean our faces into the piggy shvitz of rising steam before getting to work slurping, splattering, and spooning up the milky, mouth-coatingly rich soup. Down the line, every head in the place is bowed in identical communion.
Noodle neophytes take note: ramen as it is served in the many thousands of steamy little shops and multiplying chains across Japan has nearly nothing in common with the denatured supermarket variant—brittle noodle-bricks and MSG-laced flavor dust. This kind of ramen exists in Japan, of course, in a vast universe of categories that would make even our novelty-addicted American minds explode. But the undergraduate-sustaining, just-add-water stuff has as much to do with real ramen as freeze-dried astronaut food has to do with flying to the moon.
Real ramen knocks you back a little and then sets you right on your feet. What we register as the “soup” component is really two things: the stock, which is cooked for many hours, and the tare, a reduced soy- or miso-based flavor-intensifying sauce that is introduced in small quantities just before the boiled noodles are dropped into the bowl. The stock is the soul of ramen; the tare its animating spirit. The stock is the steady thump of the rhythm section; tare, the soaring improvisational riffs of the horns. Tonkotsu refers to pork bones—and it is those long-boiled, marrow-rich, collagen-imparting pig parts that give the Hakata style (named for a neighborhood in Fukuoka) its distinctive stank and opaque creaminess and have spread its fame and influence to every ramen-crazed corner of Japan.
Behind the bar, a thick-armed dude with a towel tied round his head agitates a roiling cauldron with a wooden spoon as big as an oar. His damp T-shirt says Power of Bones. “He’s beating the flavor out of those bones,” MacDuckston says, dreamily.
12 p.m. Tenjin Area, Fukuoka City
Japan’s seventh-largest city has much to recommend it to the curious traveler and little evidence that anybody’s been heeding the call. There are beaches, curving canals, sparkling shopping centers, and sweet, squat blocks of hip boutiques and coffee shops. Monocle magazine ranked it 12th in its Global Quality of Life Survey. Rem Koolhaas did a striking housing project here; Michael Graves, a lovely Hyatt.
Despite these charms, the city is not high on the foreign visitor’s circuit. Even Japanese in the north seem to admire the idea of this relaxed southern city more than they actually come here.
My friend Shinji Nohara agreed to travel down to Kyushu from Tokyo, mainly because he knew we’d eat well.
Japan Airlines (JAL) offers daily flights to Fukuoka from both Tokyo Narita and Haneda airports with a flight time of two hours. A more leisurely option is the five-hour ride on Japan Railways’ high-speed Nozomi train.
Ganso Nagahamaya 2-5-19 Nagahama, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka; 81-92/781-0723. $
Ichiran Nakasu 5-3-2 Nakasu, Hakata-ku, Fukuoka; 81-92/262-0433. $
Mengekijo Genei 2-16-3 Yakuin, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka; 81-92/732-6100. $
Nankin Senryo 702-2 Nonakamachi, Kurume; 81-94/237-7279. $
Papapapapine 3-12-1 Nishi-Ogikubo, Suginami-ku, Tokyo; papapapapine.com. $
Ramen Unari 6-23 Nakasu, Hakata-ku, Fukuoka; 81-92/281-8278. $
Shifuku 429 2-3-1 Enokida, Hakata-ku, Fukuoka; 81-92/4740-0900. $
Tanaka Shoten 2-14-6 Hitotsuya, Adachi-ku, Tokyo; tanaka-shoten.net. $
Yatai Nagahamaya #1 1-10 Minato, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka. $
$ Less than $25
$$ $25 to $75
$$$ $75 to $150
$$$$ More than $150
