Japan Photography: Shrines and Gardens
Japan Diary: Field Trip to Ramen School
Our first morning in Japan, after a jet-lagged 6:30 a.m. breakfast at Denny’s surrounded by a room of solo-dining salarymen, we took a train from Tokyo to the hinterlands out in Chiba Prefecture. A bus ride from the train station led us to our destination, Shoku no Dojo, a ramen school run by Shigekatsu Akimoto. On its English website, the school calls itself Tokyo Ramen Academy. Hiroko spent ten days there last fall, learning from Akimoto-san and a number of well-known ramen chefs. We wanted to get Akimoto-san’s advice about the finer points of designing Shiba Ramen’s kitchen, which has been an active item for us this spring. We took the opportunity to sit down with him for a talk about ramen.
Ramen School Chief. Shigekatsu Akimoto of Shoku no Dojo, explaining some of his kitchen designs.
Akimoto-san cuts an interesting figure, decked out in a black v-neck t-shirt and gold chain, and driving a long white sedan with black-tinted windows. He’s not a chef, let alone a ramen chef. He started off years ago selling restaurant equipment for a big company. He was pretty successful, and eventually struck out on his own. Over time, he built a business that not only supplied equipment, but also designed kitchens and restaurant spaces. As of today, he’s overseen some 3600 kitchen design projects, including 1000 ramen kitchens. He and his team sell the equipment, do the kitchen layouts, and often the aesthetic designs too.
In 2011, the day after the earthquake and tsunami devastated part of northern Japan, Akimoto-san led a group to the heart of the disaster zone to serve hot ramen to survivors. It must have been a shocking, searing sort of experience. Akimoto-san explained to us the scale of the destruction and the proximity of widespread death, the landscape still strewn with bodies when he arrived. He was accompanied by his friend, the well-known Japanese ramen critic, Hideyuki Ishigami. Along the way, they got to talking about why so many ramen restaurants fail. According to Akimoto-san, more than 600 of the 1000 ramen restaurants he designed are no longer in existence. Akimoto-san and Ishigami hypothesized that too many owners lack sufficient understanding of the product and are unable to adapt as trends and tastes change. Remember that with 35,000+ ramen restaurants, competition in Japan is fierce.
This conversation resulted in the founding of Shoku no Dojo. Akimoto owns the school and oversees its operations, but a gigantic picture of Ishigami is featured on the the front of the building. The school is housed in the same building as one of Akimoto’s equipment showrooms, next to a gas station, in what seems like the middle of nowhere. For two weeks every month, a handful of students come to the Dojo and learn how to make ramen like a professional. Some 95% have no previous restaurant experience! But when they finish the course, they're prepared to make above-average ramen by Japanese standards.
Akimoto-san brings in a series of notable ramen chefs to teach the ramen 101 basics, as well as their own advanced styles and techniques. There is a segment on noodles with a field trip to a noodle factory, and a segment where the students design and develop their own recipes. There is even a segment about the basics of running a small business taught by an accountant. The course concludes with the students making their recipes and serving them to real customers (at a deeply discounted price) at the bar in the Dojo.
So far, about 150 students have graduated from the Dojo. Roughly half of those have already started their restaurants, and the rest have restaurants in the works. Many of those end up using Akimoto-san's design and equipment services. Some students are thinking about big business outside of Japan. One student has opened three successful shops in Toronto, and others are targeting China and India. And, of course, Shiba Ramen here in the East Bay.
Hiroko and I are really grateful that we found the Dojo. The price of attendance was low, and Akimoto has made himself available to us, by email and in person, when we’ve had questions about ingredients, equipment, and kitchen design. It’s a great service for people like us, although you do need to speak Japanese for this to be a viable strategy for ramen education. There are only a couple of other schools like this in Japan. When we were vetting options for professionalizing our ramen, we talked to one ramen ingredient supplier who consults for startup ramen businesses. He told us that he’d recently gone to China to help someone there get started. For this service he charged $50,000 plus a percentage of the business’s profits. That kind of money is crazy talk for basic technical know-how that isn’t exactly secret intellectual property. The Dojo was an infinitely better alternative.
Next time, I’ll tell you about a different Akimoto-san, a mechanical engineer who has given up his day job at Nissan to pursue his dream of making it big with ramen in India.
Japan Diary: Tokyo Owl Cafe. So Magical.
Last month in Tokyo, in between one bowl of ramen and the next, Ramen Chemistry stopped by an "owl cafe." It was possibly the most amazing hour we've spent. Like ever. Words like "transcendent" and "magical" come to mind. You'd be forgiven for thinking I'm given to hyperbole, but let me be clear: this is no exaggeration. The owl cafe is a parallel plane on which Japanese sensibilities fuse with live owls, and it's completely hands-on. Could anything be more fucking awesome? Obviously not.
Small Owl Area. Behind are two owls taking the day off. Left one is on a diet and is "cranky."
Five days a week, at 1:00 p.m., curious customers line up in front of Fukuro no Mise (literally "Owl Show"), one of Tokyo's animal cafes. The cafe's exterior is completely unassuming, just a space on the first floor of some anonymous apartment block in the vast urban expanse of Tokyo. Its identity is marked by a small fence, which creates a buffer space around the entrance, and an assortment of owl images stuck on the window. Reservations are taken at 1:00 for hour-long blocks later that day, the first of which doesn't start until 2:00, an hour later. Once the reservations are made, everyone is reabsorbed into Tokyo until returning at each's appointed time.
Entering the owl cafe feels like stepping through a portal into a another dimension. Once through, we found ourselves in a little and very crowded room, the size of a small studio apartment. Ikea owl curtains kept the space in relative darkness, even in midday. Immediately inside the door, five large owls sat tethered to a long perch, at the end of which sat a barn owl on a concrete pedestal.
Another perch (with 2 midsize owls) sat perpendicular to the first, separating the large owl area from the small owl area (seated apart because the large ones might harm the small ones). Here sat seven tiny owls on a long perch, with a few more owls sitting off to the side, taking a day off from being manhandled by delighted young Japanese girls and foreign tourists. The walls were covered in a wild assortment of random crap and owl kitsch.
Three owl handlers-baristas directed the thirteen customers, each having paid ¥2000 (a bit over $15) for admission, to a little circle of seats around a coffee table. After each customer submitted a drink order, a handler gave a short demonstration, then liberated us to wander around in very close quarters and hang out with the owls.
Not only were we free to pet any of the owls but, upon request, the handlers would place your owl of choice on your arm or shoulder. You could walk around with them, and you could hold as many owls as you wanted over the course of 40 minutes or so. The handlers spent the entire time moving owls from one person to another. We each held around five owls. At some point, the group's drink order was placed on the coffee table. Not a single person touched the drinks (mostly hot tea) that were served; nobody wanted to compromise a second of their owl time. The only exceptions were me and Hiroko. Our view is that, if we could drink beer while holding owls, why in the world wouldn't we?
The customers seemed uniformly transfixed and amazed by this bizarre experience, confined for an hour in a tiny room with sixteen people and seventeen owls. Cameras and smartphones (ours included) were out everywhere. As the hour drew to a close, we returned the owls to their perches and sat down to consume the drinks, some thirty minutes after they were served. Time was short and we were forced to pound the rest of our beers; the practical reality being that it's hard to seriously consume beer when you have an owl on one hand and a camera in the other. Before we left this urban owl cave, the handlers gave us owl souvenirs. I got a stuffed purple owl on a string.
If you're wondering, the owls were great. Completely serene; accepting, and even seeming to appreciate, affection. They were lighter than we expected. We were exhausted and jet-lagged that day, pretty run down, but the owl experience acted like some curative force, really holding us in the moment and surprising us with how quickly the hour passed.
There are apparently a few of these places in Tokyo. The one we went to was the first, and supposedly is the best experience. The Japanese have a lot of these kinds of things; cat cafes, reptile cafes, falcon cafes. These animal cafes seem to be catching on outside of Japan. Here in Oakland, we have a cat cafe, and a few months ago a pop-up owl cafe opened briefly in London.
So I'll close by saying that we need to have an owl cafe here in the U.S., preferably here in Oakland/Berkeley so that I can be among the owls again, as soon as possible. But I doubt that this kind of setup--birds, drinks, together--would fly with American health departments. The owls do shit on the floor periodically, gloved handlers swooping in with paper towels to clean up the mess.
Shiba Ramen Has a Space! Emeryville Public Market
Big News this week for Shiba Ramen! After six months of hard work, we closed a deal to open later this year in Emeryville's redeveloped Public Market. We'll be part of a newly renovated international food hall, featuring a ton of new and diverse food concepts. There will be around 15 new food kiosks, a few vendors housed in outfitted shipping containers, and a couple of anchor restaurants. There are a few pre-existing tenants (Urban Outfitters, Guitar Center, Peet's, Hot Italian). Long-term plans for the project include expansive new retail and residential space.
There is a serious unmet need that the Public Market is going to fill. Emeryville has tons of retail (Ikea! Home Depot!), corporate offices, and multifamily residential. But there's practically nothing to eat there, setting aside a few chain restaurants and Swedish meatballs. I think this place is going to have a lot of energy, so it's a good launching pad for Shiba Ramen. And, I'm happy to say, the Public Market's kiosk model fits nicely with our no-tipping policy.
Right now, we're in the midst of the design and architectural process for our space. Then we're off to permitting and on the hunt for general contractors. We'll be doing our buildout later this summer. I'll write all about the process here at Ramen Chemistry. Here and here are links to press reports of our joining the Public Market, and here and here are reports about the Public Market project.
Ramen Chemistry's Japan Diary: The Ramen Scene
Our flight took off from Narita an hour ago. Ramen Chemistry is heading back to Oakland after six nonstop days of Japan. Seven ramen restaurants, thirteen different ramens tasted, two sushi dinners, one sushi breakfast, and plenty of culinary exotica consumed, the most foreign—and the most delicious—being shirako soft roe, sacks of fish sperm (shirako means “white children”) in ponzu sauce. Copious amounts of beer and sake were downed in the process. And we had breakfast at Denny’s not once, but twice—twice more than I’ve eaten at an American Denny’s in the past 30 years.
Tokyo Scene. Hama-rikyu Gardens, a former preserve of the Tokugawa Shoguns, backed by the high-rises of Shimbashi.
Along the way, we toured Hiroko’s ramen school and interviewed both the owner and a current student, a former Nissan engineer who is set to open his first ramen restaurant in Chennai, India later this year. We ate at the restaurant of a renowned ramen chef (and one of Hiroko’s ramen senseis), Keiichi Machida, and interviewed him about his life in the ramen world. We walked mile after mile through Tokyo, passing through gardens and shrines, visiting the fabulous Sky Tree, and finding ourselves in the parallel (and fucking amazing) universes of an owl café and a maid café. We finished with a trip to Hiroko’s hometown, where her parents live in a traditional Japanese house—tatami floors, shoji screens, and no furniture—farm their own vegetables, make their own charcoal and salt, and (to our great fortune) catch their own oysters. We took about a thousand pictures.
Ramen chemistry clearly has a lot to talk about. Ramen chemistry also has a day job that starts again in about 30 hours, so let’s see what we can accomplish on this flight before we become delirious. Naturally, we’ll start with ramen.
Tokyo Owl Cafe. Magical experience.
Ramen in Japan
The Japanese eat a lot of ramen. A lot of ramen. There are estimated to be between 30,000 and 40,000 ramen restaurants in Japan. More than once on this very short trip, we encountered a “ramen street” where every shop sells ramen. When we asked a Japanese friend how often she eats ramen, her response spoke volumes about the local baseline. “Not much,” she said, “only about every two weeks.” Compared to this, ramen in America is little more than a culinary parvenu, a novelty item.
That’s rapidly changing, of course, but the reality is that the clusters of ramen restaurants in the Bay Area, NY, and LA—places that have something of an established ramen scene—and the rarefied smattering in the American interior are nowhere near the critical mass in Japan. So while I’ve often thought that San Mateo, CA has a ton of ramen restaurants (there were around five when I lived there a few years ago) compared with my hometown Akron, OH (there are unequivocally zero), San Mateo’s total is only half of that in the underground mall at Tokyo Station. This is all to say that there’s context here: ramen may be hot and trendy in America; in Japan it’s an ingrained part of life.
Tokyo Station "Ramen Street." Restaurant choices (left). Ramen ticket machine (right). This is how you pay at most ramen shops in Japan: pay the machine, get a ticket, hand it to the restaurant staff. The ramen comes to your table. You eat it, then walk out when you're done.
The sheer scale of the ramen industry in Japan and the sheer volume of competition, drive market dynamics in a pretty interesting way. There’s around 10% yearly turnover in the industry. That’s around 3000+ ramen restaurants closing, and 3000+ new ones taking their place. Every year! In the U.S., a ramen shop can often distinguish itself merely by existing. In Japan, more is most definitely required. The outrageous quantity of ramen eaten in Japan gives rise to a commensurate level of ramen sophistication in Japanese ramen consumers.
One consequence is that Japanese ramen restaurants often distinguish themselves by focusing on a single type of ramen, or a single dominant flavor profile. We went to one restaurant that specializes in clam ramen, one that specializes in spicy ramens with over-the-top use of high-flavor additives like bonito powder, and one that sells 1500 bowls a day of Yokohama iekei-style ramen (tonkotsu shoyu)—there is literally one item on the menu. On the other hand, there are plenty of chain-style places that serve a wide variety of styles.
The Ramen Scene. Keiichi Machida's Kyouka in Tachikawa.
Another consequence of having such a well-developed and massive industry is that large-scale trends come and go over time. At one time in the 20th Century, ramen trends tended to focus on regional styles, i.e., Sapporo miso or Kyushu tonkotsu. Machida-sensei explained to us that when he started in the industry 15 years ago, ramen trends were driven by the Japanese media’s fascination with—and focus on—celebrity ramen chefs. In subsequent years, thick and rich ramens boomed, but that trend gave way to lighter styles as the costs of ingredients increased (thicker = more bones = more $$). Today, trends favor more minimalist ramens, with tastes that are more unique and individualized.
The point here is that ramen in Japan is as diverse as it is ubiquitous. We went to seven restaurants and had seven very different experiences, and we hardly scratched the surface.
In coming posts, I’ll tell you all about the ramen we ate and the ramen people we met, with lots of pictures. Don’t worry, though, we’ll stop by a maid café soon enough.