Slurp. A Video Museum of Ramen.

About

Walk past a ramen counter at nine on a Tuesday. The first thing you hear is not the kitchen. It is the eaters.

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

Four things in a bowl.

Most arguments about ramen are arguments about one of these four. Get the vocabulary right and the rest of this opens.

01 — Broth

The water.

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

The salt.

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

The wheat.

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

The stage.

具

Chashu, ajitama, menma, nori, negi. Placed, not piled. The bowl knows it is being looked at.

The three tares

What you actually taste.

Three concentrated seasonings. Each gives the bowl its colour and its first flavour. Recognise these and you can read 80% of any ramen menu.

Shio

塩 · salt

Look for: pale, almost colourless broth. Salt is the most transparent seasoning. The oldest of the three. Hakodate is the canonical home.

Shoyu

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.

Miso

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

How the broth was cooked.

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.

Chintan

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.

Paitan

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.

At the counter

The eaters.

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

Shop, busyThe rush

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 slurpThe point

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

The wheat trail

From a Yokohama dock to a hundred and twenty-three billion.

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

The dish before it had a name.

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

The first ramen-ya opens.

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

Tonkotsu is invented, and it isn’t milky yet.

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

The pot overboiled.

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

Momofuku Ando invents the instant noodle.

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

Cup Noodles.

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

One hundred and twenty-three billion servings.

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

By the bowl.

Things we double-checked. Per-capita figures that sound made up and aren’t.

123.1^B

Instant ramen servings sold globally, 2024. WINA, 2024

Servings per Vietnamese, per year. The world record. WINA per-capita, 2024

~23^k

Ramen-ya in Japan today. The number you usually see (35k) is a decade old. Japan Soba & Udon Association, 2023

18^hr

Average tonkotsu simmer at a serious Hakata shop. Shop interviews, multiple

¥6

Price of a bowl at Rairaiken, Asakusa, 1910. Rairaiken history panel

20^k

Cup Noodles sold in Ginza in the first four hours, 1971. Nissin corporate archive

Heretics

People who broke the rules elsewhere.

Three, briefly. Each one learned at the source, then went somewhere else and made it a different dish on purpose.

New York · 2004

David Chang.

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

Ivan Orkin.

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

Philipp Inreiter.

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

A few things, for the forum.

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

FAQ

Things people ask.

Wait, is tonkotsu the broth or the tare?

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.

Why is Sapporo’s bowl so different?

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.

Did the Yokohama Chinatown really invent ramen?

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.

Is champon ramen?

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.

Why “23,000 shops” instead of the 35,000 I’ve seen?

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.

Why isn’t my region’s bowl on the map?

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.

Where’s the audio?

Click the sound button in the hero to play a short ramen-shop loop. Off by default so the page doesn’t ambush you.

Slurp.