How did a bowl of noodle soup imported from China come to define Japanese food culture? In an extract from his new book, Matt Goulding finds the answer
Toshiyuki Kamimura eats 400 bowls of ramen a year. That’s a bowl every day for lunch or dinner, plus one for breakfast about once a week. For that weekly breakfast bowl he usually goes to Ganso Nagahama out toward the ocean, housed in what looks like an auto-parts warehouse that stays open 20 hours a day. “Sometimes I can’t wait until lunch,” says Kamimura, who consumes his ramen with a sense of urgency, conveying thick ropes of noodles into his mouth and sliding them down his throat like a duck, barely pausing to chew, “so I eat with the taxi drivers getting off the late shift.”
His first memories of eating ramen come from his childhood in Kagoshima, the city at the southern tip of Kyushu famous for its fat-strewn pigs and potato-based liquor. Back then, Kamimura’s parents would have ramen delivered from a local restaurant as a treat for the family. Even with the distance of time and the warm mist of nostalgia, Kamimura can’t help but put a critical spin on those infant ramen moments. “By the time it got home, the broth was cold and the noodles were compromised. It wasn’t impressive ramen.”
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