Umami Mart

Japan is noodle crazy. Each station in each town of each prefecture have their own noodle specialty. Being noodle fiends ourselves, Kayoko and I researched some of the regional noodles of Niigata prefecture before setting foot there last month. As soon as we arrived, we noticed a lot of ramen and soba. We wanted to […]

Oh Ichiran. I was very anti-you for a long time because of your bizarre seating arrangement. It just seems so weird that we, the customers, have to sit at a private booth, in silence, without speaking to the chefs — instead ordering by placing our ticket next to a sliding wooden curtain and filling out […]

By Anna de Castro Just when I thought February in NY could not get any dreamier (and by dreamy, I mean cold, slushy, and awaiting 6-8 more inches of snow), word came that a Bay Area favorite was making its way east, to shed a bit of light on our blustery season. Ramen Shop Oakland […]

My new neighborhood in Tokyo is called Yayoicho, just a mile west of Shinjuku, one of the biggest entertainment and nightlife spots on planet earth. It’s like Times Square, only if New Yorkers hung out there all the time instead of clueless tourists and touts. My part of town is pretty suburban, with a cluster […]

Last week a reader asked if I had tried Chibiscus. Apparently it had been compared to Tsujita — a bold statement. I promised I’d check it out. I assumed it was the random shop that opened on Sunset Blvd earlier this year around the same time as Maki Maku on Hollywood Boulevard. I tried it […]

I may have missed the recent LA Ramen Yokocho Fest due to an unavoidable trip to Ohio, but I lucked out into finding out about Mitsuwa Market’s Hokkaido Festival in Torrance. It was this past weekend and the next best thing to actually being in Hokkaido — which I was, just a few months ago. I’ve […]

When it comes to waiting for food, New York is turning into Japan. The Cronut for example, a pastry mashup of croissant + donut created at the Dominique Ansel Bakery, is apparently so good that people line up at 6am to score the precious two pieces per person. There is even a Craigslist black market […]

This was one for the ages. Jiro is legendary. It’s spawned a slew of imitators, one of which crossed an ocean. Many think it’s an entity unto itself, like tsukemen, rather than a type of ramen. I’ve known about Jiro since the very beginning of my ramen journey and although I’ve visited a few jiro-kei (aka […]

I went to the future the other day and found this synopsis on an IMDB page from 2018: A lonely Tokyo ramen shop proprietor secretly pines for a local bar owner and former model. His three most devoted customers, two wacky foreigners and their Japanese friend, fear the ramen master will die without passing his […]

Two years ago, bored at work with nothing better to do but read through American ex-pat ramen journals, I decided to start my own ramen blog. I didn’t tell anyone about it for a year because I was only using it to learn more about ramen and chronicle the bowls I downed. I never would […]