啜るA video museum of ramen
A bowl. A sound. One hundred and twenty-three billion of them a year.
About
This is a video museum of ramen. Sixty-odd clips. Twelve regions. One hundred and ten years of a dish that ran from a Yokohama dockyard to a hundred and twenty-three billion plastic cups, and somehow stayed itself.
This isn’t about authenticity. It’s about a noodle that learned to live in every weather.
“The dish that took a Yokohama dock worker fifteen minutes is now under three.”World Instant Noodles Association, 2024
“Eighty-one packets of instant noodles, per Vietnamese, per year.”WINA per-capita figures
Anatomy
Most arguments about ramen are arguments about one of these four. Get the vocabulary right and the rest of this opens.
01 — Broth
出汁 · スープ
Pork bones, chicken, fish, kelp. Hours of simmer. Clear (chintan) or milky-emulsified (paitan). Tonkotsu is a broth, not a tare. Most menus get this wrong.
02 — Tare
タレ
A spoonful of concentrated seasoning poured into the empty bowl before the broth. Shio, shoyu, or miso. This is what most people taste and call “the flavor.”
03 — Noodle
麺
Flour, water, salt, and kansui. Alkaline water is the magic. Thin and straight for Hakata tonkotsu. Thick and curly for Sapporo miso. Hydration percent is the secret.
04 — Topping
具
Chashu, ajitama, menma, nori, negi. Placed, not piled. The bowl knows it is being looked at.
The three tares
Three concentrated seasonings. Each gives the bowl its colour and its first flavour. Recognise these and you can read 80% of any ramen menu.
塩 · salt
Look for: pale, almost colourless broth. Salt is the most transparent seasoning. The oldest of the three. Hakodate is the canonical home.
醤油 · soy
Look for: amber-brown broth, clear to translucent. The default tare across most of Japan. The first ramen ever served (Tokyo, 1910) was shoyu.
味噌 · fermented soybean paste
Look for: red-brown, opaque, often with a slick of lard on top. The newest of the three (Sapporo, 1955). Strongest flavour, built for winter.
Clear or milky
Two techniques, two looks. The tare tells you the seasoning. The broth method tells you the texture and the mouth-feel. Independent of tare. Tonkotsu is a broth, not a tare.
清湯 · clear broth
Look for: you can see through to the noodles at the bottom. Hours of gentle simmer, never rolling. Light on the palate. Hakodate, Tokyo, Kitakata.
白湯 · milky broth
Look for: opaque, cream-coloured, can’t see through. Rolling boil for hours emulsifies fat and collagen. Heavy on the palate. Tonkotsu (Hakata, Kurume) and most Sapporo miso.
Bowls
A bowl of ramen is in every shot. The regional story is in the card. Click any tile for the founding shop, the year, and the fight on its forums.
At the counter
You can’t finish a bowl politely. You can’t. The noodle goes cold and the broth never finds the egg. So you make the sound and you are part of it.
Counter, by the window22 seats
Tokyo · Saitama · Bangkok
Solo. Head down. Steam fogging your glasses. You came here to be alone for nine minutes. The bowl knows what it is. So do you.
HosomenTonkotsuNo phone
Counter, with someone36 seats
Anywhere, late
You both stop talking. You are not being rude. You are being respectful, to the noodle and to each other. The conversation will be better after. You know this.
ShoyuTsukemenLast train
Friday, 8:47pm
Three deep at the door. The chef has not looked up in an hour. The ticket printer keeps screaming. Someone’s glasses are completely fogged and they don’t care.
Open kitchenIekeiWait worth it
The reason you came
Chopsticks under, lift, breathe in fast through the strands. Air cools the noodle on the way to your mouth and pulls the aroma up your nose. The dish was engineered for the sound. Make it.
ListenDon’t apologise
A small love letter
You can tell a serious shop by the egg. Cooked six minutes and twenty seconds. Peeled while warm. Marinated overnight in soy, mirin, water, and time.
Cut on the long axis. Yolk like a soft sunrise. Half a billion of them are eaten in Japan inside ramen every year.
It is the smallest piece of the bowl that tells you the most.
The wheat trail
Ramen is a Japanese dish made of imported Chinese noodles, American wheat, and one Taiwanese-Japanese man’s refusal to lose a postwar bet.
1880s
Yokohama · 横浜
Chinese cooks from Guangdong run noodle stalls in Yokohama’s Chinatown. They serve shina soba: long wheat noodles in soy-flavoured broth. Dock workers eat standing. There is no word for it yet that you would recognise.
Solt, The Untold History of Ramen, 2014
1910
Asakusa · Tokyo · 浅草
Ozaki Kanichi imports twelve Chinese cooks from Yokohama and opens Rairaiken. Six sen a bowl, roughly ¥2,500 today. Within a year he serves three thousand customers a day. This is the dish entering Japanese popular memory as something Japanese.
Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum
1937
Kurume · Fukuoka · 久留米
Miyamoto Tokio opens Nankin Senryo with a Nagasaki champon recipe. He uses pork bones for broth. It is clear, light, savoury. Kurume, not Hakata, is the home. Hakata only made it famous.
Kurume City tourism records · Nankin Senryo lineage
1947
Kurume · the accident
A wartime shortage. A distracted cook. The tonkotsu at Sankyū roars over the burner for too long and the collagen and fat emulsify. It comes out the colour of cloudy milk. The owner’s wife serves it anyway. The customers come back the next day. This is now the dish.
Sankyū family interviews via Solt 2014
1958
Ikeda · Osaka · 池田
He is forty-eight years old. He builds a shed in his backyard. He spends a year figuring out that if you flash-fry noodles in palm oil they become shelf-stable for months and rehydrate in three minutes. He calls it Chikin Ramen.
Cup Noodles Museum, Ikeda · Nissin corporate archives
1971
Ginza · 銀座
Ando flies to New York and watches American buyers break dried noodles into Styrofoam cups and pour hot water over them. He builds the cup-shape factory. Launches in Ginza for ¥100. Twenty thousand sold in four hours. The dish is no longer Japanese in any meaningful sense.
Cup Noodles Museum, Yokohama · Nissin IR
2024
Everywhere · 地球
China eats the most in total. Vietnam eats the most per person: eighty-one packets a year, each. Japan, who invented all of it, is fifth on its own list. We are still slurping.
World Instant Noodles Association demand report, 2024
Numbers
Things we double-checked. Per-capita figures that sound made up and aren’t.
123.1B
Instant ramen servings sold globally, 2024. WINA, 2024
81
Servings per Vietnamese, per year. The world record. WINA per-capita, 2024
~23k
Ramen-ya in Japan today. The number you usually see (35k) is a decade old. Japan Soba & Udon Association, 2023
18hr
Average tonkotsu simmer at a serious Hakata shop. Shop interviews, multiple
¥6
Price of a bowl at Rairaiken, Asakusa, 1910. Rairaiken history panel
20k
Cup Noodles sold in Ginza in the first four hours, 1971. Nissin corporate archive
Heretics
Three, briefly. Each one learned at the source, then went somewhere else and made it a different dish on purpose.
New York · 2004
Momofuku Noodle Bar opens on East 1st Street. Pork belly. Berkshire bones. A pickled cucumber on top. Never claimed to be authentic. The first American restaurant to make ramen the headline.
Tokyo · 2007
An American Jewish chef opens Ivan Ramen in Setagaya. The Japanese ramen press refuses to review him for a year. By year three the line wraps the block.
Copenhagen · 2017
Ex-Noma, ex-RyuGin. Opens Slurp on Nansensgade with twenty-two seats and noodles milled from Bornholm flour. The site we are quietly imitating.
Notes
If you are about to write us about champon: champon is not ramen. Different alkaline ratio in the noodle, single-pot technique. We love it. It is in a different museum.
If you are about to write us about Hakata: Hakata is famous for tonkotsu. Kurume invented it. Miyamoto Tokio, 1937, Nankin Senryo.
If you are about to write us about the word ramen: it comes from Chinese lā miàn, meaning hand-pulled. The technique is from Guangdong, not Lanzhou. Route via Yokohama, 1880s.
If you are about to ask why your favourite regional bowl is missing: there are at least twenty-five named styles. We picked twelve we could tell the cleanest story about. Forgive us. Slurp them anyway.
sheets.works · May 2026
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FAQ
The broth. Always. The tare is the seasoning, and tonkotsu is not seasoned with tonkotsu. A tonkotsu-shoyu bowl is a tonkotsu broth with a shoyu tare. This matters less to the eating than it does to the arguing.
Because Sapporo gets to minus twenty in January. The thick curly noodle holds heat. The miso tare carries a layer of lard on the surface that acts as a lid. The bowl is engineering for a winter. Aji no Sanpei invented the modern form in 1955.
It depends what you mean by it. The Chinese-style soup noodle reached Japan there in the 1880s. The dish people call ramen, with its tare and regional defaults and name, is later. Asakusa 1910 is a fair candidate for the first ramen-ya. Hakodate 1884 is an earlier candidate for the first ramen-ish soup.
No. Beautifully no. Champon uses less kansui in its noodle and a single-pot technique where seafood, pork, and cabbage are stir-fried before the broth is added. It is a Nagasaki dish. It is delicious. It is not ramen.
The popular figure is from the mid-2010s and was shaky then. The 2023 figure from the Japan Soba & Udon Association is closer to 23,000 dedicated ramen-ya. We picked the conservative number.
Probably because we couldn’t find a free-licensed video that did it justice. Toyama Black, Kasaoka, Niigata Sanjō, Tokushima raw-egg are all missing for that reason. We are not happy about it either.
Click the sound button in the hero to play a short ramen-shop loop. Off by default so the page doesn’t ambush you.
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