Ramen Trivia
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44 free Ramen trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Ramen is a Japanese-Chinese fusion dish that started in Yokohama Chinatown in the late 1800s, was long dismissed as cheap working-class food, and is now treated as a national dish with thousands of specialist shops in Tokyo alone. The story runs through Cantonese cooks in Asakusa, American wheat flour after the war, black-market stalls, and a 48-year-old salt merchant named Momofuku Ando who flash-fried noodles in 1958 and changed what the world eats at 2 a.m. This quiz covers the bowl itself — kansui noodles, chintan and paitan broths, the three tare families, menma and narutomaki — plus the regional map: Sapporo miso, Hakodate shio, Kitakata's flat noodles, Hakata tonkotsu, Ie-kei in Yokohama and oddities like Taiwan ramen from Nagoya. There are questions on instant noodles, Cup Noodles, Tampopo, the steaming-bowl emoji and the canned ramen sold from vending machines in Akihabara. Fifty questions, four options each, with a short explanation after every answer. Play on your phone or print it for a food-themed quiz night.
30 of 44 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01At many ramen shops in Japan, what do you use to order and pay before you sit down?
A ticket machine
A ticket machine takes the order along with the money, which cuts ordering mistakes and helps shops that are short of staff.
Q 02Ramen's name is usually traced to the Chinese word lāmiàn, which literally means what?
Pulled noodles
Pulled noodles is the dictionary meaning, but one story says a Hokkaido restaurant coined 'ramen' from its Chinese cook's shout of 'hao le'.
Q 03Who invented instant noodles in 1958?
Momofuku Ando
Momofuku Ando developed them alone in a shed behind his house, working every day for a year and discarding countless trial batches.
Q 04Tonkotsu ramen is the signature style of which Japanese island?
Kyushu
Kyushu's milky broth is said to have begun in 1947, when a Kurume stall's stock was accidentally boiled too hard.
Q 05Miso ramen was invented in which Hokkaido city?
Sapporo
Sapporo's own ramen was mostly soy-flavoured until a restaurant there, Aji no Sanpei, came up with miso ramen.
Q 06The Hokkaido port of Hakodate is famous for ramen in which flavour?
Salt
Salt is so standard in Hakodate that ordering just 'ramen' there gets you a salt-flavoured bowl.
Q 07Kitakata ramen's broth is flavoured with which dried fish?
Baby sardines
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.
Q 08What is the name for the lacto-fermented bamboo shoots used as a ramen topping?
Menma
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.
Q 09Chāshū, the classic sliced ramen topping, is made from which meat?
Pork
Pork chāshū takes its name from Chinese char siu, a roast, yet many ramen shops simmer theirs instead.
Q 10Which 1923 disaster helped ramen spread from Tokyo across Japan?
The Great Kantō earthquake
The Great Kantō earthquake scattered Tokyo's ramen cooks across the country, and portable noodle stalls multiplied in the ruined city.
Q 11What was the name of Japan's first specialised ramen shop, opened in Tokyo in 1910?
Rairaiken
Rairaiken's light soy-sauce noodles drew around 3,000 customers a day at their peak, setting off Japan's first ramen boom.
Q 12Japan's first specialised ramen shop opened in 1910 in which Tokyo district?
Asakusa
Asakusa welcomed the pioneering shop back in July 2026, fifty years after the business had closed.
Q 13Kan'ichi Ozaki staffed his 1910 ramen shop with twelve cooks from which Chinese regional tradition?
Cantonese
Cantonese cook Fu Xinglei, one of those twelve, later opened his own branch of the famous shop in Tokyo's Meguro ward.
Q 21Nissin's founder took his idea for flash-frying instant noodles from which fried dish?
Tempura
Tempura showed him that hot oil drives water out, so noodles fried the same way dried out enough to keep without spoiling.
Q 22What is the term for a clear ramen stock, skimmed of foam as it simmers?
Chintan
Chintan stays clear because it is kept just below a boil and skimmed, while milky broths are boiled hard for hours.
Q 23At ramen shops that let you choose, what does ordering your noodles 'barikata' get you?
Extra-firm noodles
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.
Q 14After World War II, which kind of market sprang up on bombed-out lots and helped ramen stalls spread?
Black markets
Black markets filled the ruins, and ramen carts multiplied as repatriates who had learned noodle-making in China came home.
Q 15Nissin's first instant noodles, launched in 1958, had which flavour?
Chicken
Chicken flavour gave the product its name, Chikin Ramen, and its success spread the word 'ramen' across Japan.
Q 16Tonkotsu, not to be confused with the cutlet dish tonkatsu, literally means what?
Pork bone
Pork bone is the meaning: the bones are boiled over high heat for hours until they break down into a milky, creamy broth.
Q 17Ie-kei ramen, with thick noodles in a rich, soy-flavoured broth, was born in which city?
Yokohama
Yokohama's Yoshimura-ya created the style in 1974, and shops following its recipe have since spread well beyond Japan.
Q 18One theory says which feudal lord, famous on TV as Mito Kōmon, was the first Japanese person to eat ramen?
Tokugawa Mitsukuni
Tokugawa Mitsukuni's noodles from the scholar Zhu Shunsui were a different kind, so historians favour a later, 19th-century arrival for ramen.
Q 19In ramen, what is tare for?
Seasoning the broth
Seasoning the broth is tare's job, and the kind of tare a shop uses sorts three of ramen's four classic styles.
Q 20Besides wheat flour, salt and water, what alkaline ingredient goes into chūkamen noodles?
Kansui
Kansui is the alkaline mineral water that gives ramen noodles their springy firmness.
Q 24Japan's earliest record of ramen-like noodles, from 1488, comes from a diary kept at which kind of place?
A Buddhist temple
A Buddhist temple's diary: a monk there recorded keitaimen, noodles made from a recipe in an old Chinese book.
Q 25Tsukemen was made famous at which Tokyo shop, where it sold as 'morisoba'?
Taishōken
Taishōken's Kazuo Yamagishi let his apprentices open shops of their own under the Taishōken name.
Q 26Which dairy topping is a classic on Hokkaido's miso ramen?
Butter
Butter tops many Hokkaido miso bowls, a style that spread across Japan after cooks showed it off at department-store Hokkaido fairs.
Q 27Narutomaki, the white disc with a pink spiral, is a slice of what?
Fish cake
Fish cake is made by rolling pink-dyed fish paste inside white paste, which is why every slice of narutomaki shows a spiral.
Q 28What does a customer receive when ordering kae-dama at a tonkotsu ramen shop?
A noodle refill
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.
Q 29Ie-kei ramen's standard toppings include nori and which boiled green vegetable?
Spinach
Spinach sits beside chāshū and nori, and Ie-kei diners traditionally choose how rich and oily they want the broth.
Q 30Hakata ramen takes its name from a district of which city?
Fukuoka
Fukuoka's Hakata district gives the style its name, and Fukuoka-born chains such as Ichiran and Ippudo carried it across Japan and abroad.