44 Fun Facts About Ramen

At many ramen shops in Japan, what do you use to order and pay before you sit down?

A ticket machine takes the order along with the money, which cuts ordering mistakes and helps shops that are short of staff.

Ramen's name is usually traced to the Chinese word lāmiàn, which literally means what?

Pulled noodles is the dictionary meaning, but one story says a Hokkaido restaurant coined 'ramen' from its Chinese cook's shout of 'hao le'.

Who invented instant noodles in 1958?

Momofuku Ando developed them alone in a shed behind his house, working every day for a year and discarding countless trial batches.

Tonkotsu ramen is the signature style of which Japanese island?

Kyushu's milky broth is said to have begun in 1947, when a Kurume stall's stock was accidentally boiled too hard.

Miso ramen was invented in which Hokkaido city?

Sapporo's own ramen was mostly soy-flavoured until a restaurant there, Aji no Sanpei, came up with miso ramen.

The Hokkaido port of Hakodate is famous for ramen in which flavour?

Salt is so standard in Hakodate that ordering just 'ramen' there gets you a salt-flavoured bowl.

Kitakata ramen's broth is flavoured with which dried fish?

Baby sardines, dried as niboshi, go into the broth, and the style grew from a Chinese immigrant's noodle stall whose owner shared his recipe freely.

What is the name for the lacto-fermented bamboo shoots used as a ramen topping?

Menma replaced an older name built on 'shina', a word for China that became offensive after the war and was dropped from many food names.

Chāshū, the classic sliced ramen topping, is made from which meat?

Pork chāshū takes its name from Chinese char siu, a roast, yet many ramen shops simmer theirs instead.

Which 1923 disaster helped ramen spread from Tokyo across Japan?

The Great Kantō earthquake scattered Tokyo's ramen cooks across the country, and portable noodle stalls multiplied in the ruined city.

What was the name of Japan's first specialised ramen shop, opened in Tokyo in 1910?

Rairaiken's light soy-sauce noodles drew around 3,000 customers a day at their peak, setting off Japan's first ramen boom.

Japan's first specialised ramen shop opened in 1910 in which Tokyo district?

Asakusa welcomed the pioneering shop back in July 2026, fifty years after the business had closed.

Kan'ichi Ozaki staffed his 1910 ramen shop with twelve cooks from which Chinese regional tradition?

Cantonese cook Fu Xinglei, one of those twelve, later opened his own branch of the famous shop in Tokyo's Meguro ward.

After World War II, which kind of market sprang up on bombed-out lots and helped ramen stalls spread?

Black markets filled the ruins, and ramen carts multiplied as repatriates who had learned noodle-making in China came home.

Nissin's first instant noodles, launched in 1958, had which flavour?

Chicken flavour gave the product its name, Chikin Ramen, and its success spread the word 'ramen' across Japan.

Tonkotsu, not to be confused with the cutlet dish tonkatsu, literally means what?

Pork bone is the meaning: the bones are boiled over high heat for hours until they break down into a milky, creamy broth.

Ie-kei ramen, with thick noodles in a rich, soy-flavoured broth, was born in which city?

Yokohama's Yoshimura-ya created the style in 1974, and shops following its recipe have since spread well beyond Japan.

One theory says which feudal lord, famous on TV as Mito Kōmon, was the first Japanese person to eat ramen?

Tokugawa Mitsukuni's noodles from the scholar Zhu Shunsui were a different kind, so historians favour a later, 19th-century arrival for ramen.

In ramen, what is tare for?

Seasoning the broth is tare's job, and the kind of tare a shop uses sorts three of ramen's four classic styles.

Besides wheat flour, salt and water, what alkaline ingredient goes into chūkamen noodles?

Kansui is the alkaline mineral water that gives ramen noodles their springy firmness.

Nissin's founder took his idea for flash-frying instant noodles from which fried dish?

Tempura showed him that hot oil drives water out, so noodles fried the same way dried out enough to keep without spoiling.

What is the term for a clear ramen stock, skimmed of foam as it simmers?

Chintan stays clear because it is kept just below a boil and skimmed, while milky broths are boiled hard for hours.

At ramen shops that let you choose, what does ordering your noodles 'barikata' get you?

Extra-firm noodles, a Hakata-style order, since Hakata's ultra-thin noodles are said to have been chosen because they cook fast for busy fish-market workers.

Japan's earliest record of ramen-like noodles, from 1488, comes from a diary kept at which kind of place?

A Buddhist temple's diary: a monk there recorded keitaimen, noodles made from a recipe in an old Chinese book.

Tsukemen was made famous at which Tokyo shop, where it sold as 'morisoba'?

Taishōken's Kazuo Yamagishi let his apprentices open shops of their own under the Taishōken name.

Which dairy topping is a classic on Hokkaido's miso ramen?

Butter tops many Hokkaido miso bowls, a style that spread across Japan after cooks showed it off at department-store Hokkaido fairs.

Narutomaki, the white disc with a pink spiral, is a slice of what?

Fish cake is made by rolling pink-dyed fish paste inside white paste, which is why every slice of narutomaki shows a spiral.

What does a customer receive when ordering kae-dama at a tonkotsu ramen shop?

A noodle refill is what you get: order it while there's broth left, and fresh noodles drop into your soup for a few hundred yen more.

Ie-kei ramen's standard toppings include nori and which boiled green vegetable?

Spinach sits beside chāshū and nori, and Ie-kei diners traditionally choose how rich and oily they want the broth.

Hakata ramen takes its name from a district of which city?

Fukuoka's Hakata district gives the style its name, and Fukuoka-born chains such as Ichiran and Ippudo carried it across Japan and abroad.

Beni shōga, left on Hakata ramen tables for self-service, is what?

Pickled ginger gets its traditional red from umezu, the brine from making umeboshi, tinted with red shiso.

Which dish from Susaki, Kōchi, began as ramen kept hot for postwar deliveries?

Nabeyaki ramen outlived the shop that invented it: that shop closed when its owner died, but many Susaki shops carried on its taste.

Despite its name, the very spicy 'Taiwan ramen' originated in which Japanese city?

Nagoya's Taiwan ramen is credited to Misen, a Taiwanese restaurant there whose Taiwan-born founder created the fiery dish.

Nagasaki champon is the Japanese take on a noodle dish from which Chinese province?

Fujian cooking is the restaurant's own account of champon's roots: Shikairō's founder, from Fujian, devised it as a cheap, nourishing meal for Chinese students.

How is tsukemen served differently from regular ramen?

Noodles and soup come separately, and the noodles are usually rinsed in cold water, which firms them into a chewier bite.

Aburasoba replaces the soup with a small amount of what?

An oily soy-based sauce sits in the bowl, and diners mix everything together with the noodles before eating.

Hiyashi chūka, chilled ramen on a plate, is most often credited to a restaurant in which city?

Sendai's Ryūtei is the most popular origin story, and the dish was devised to beat the summer slump in hot-noodle sales.

Tantan-men is Japan's take on dan dan noodles from which Chinese province?

Sichuan's dan dan noodles come without soup, but chef Chen Kenmin reworked them into the soupy tantan-men Japan knows.

Which 1985 Juzo Itami comedy did its publicity bill as the first 'ramen western'?

Tampopo follows a truck driver who helps a struggling noodle-shop owner perfect her ramen.

What is the Korean variation of ramen, made much spicier, called?

Shin Ramyeon and Buldak Ramyeon are the famous brands; cheese, dumplings and tteok sometimes go on top.

What is the ramen emoji's official Unicode name?

Steaming bowl is its official name, and like many food emoji it shows a Japanese dish because emoji began on Japanese mobile phones.

Portable ramen stalls advertised themselves with which wind instrument?

Charumera also gave its name to an instant ramen that Myojo launched in 1966.

Post-war ramen stalls began serving jiaozi dumplings, known in Japan by what name?

Gyoza came with Japanese settlers returning from China after World War II, many of whom had learned to make dumplings there.

Nissin launched which product after seeing Americans eat broken instant noodles with forks?

Cup Noodles came in its own cup, so buyers needed no bowl or chopsticks, and it went on to sell around the world.