By JULIA MOSKIN

Published in New York Times: November 10, 2004

As a Tokyo-based jazz musician, Shigeto Kamada used to book gigs for his band in remote towns in Hokkaido (the Japanese equivalent of, say, northern Wisconsin), just so he could taste the ramen there. "I would hear of a place with a special broth or a new topping, and I just had to taste it," Mr. Kamada said.

"Ramen?" you ask. "That plastic-wrapped block of dry noodles and powdered soup?" But freshly made ramen is another thing altogether. In Japanese ramenyas (ramen shops) a bowl of ramen holds a house-made soup, springy noodles, the chef's own tare (a mix of soy sauce, sugar and rice wine to flavor the soup) and exactly six traditional toppings. The wait at top Tokyo ramenyas can be up to three hours.

Remember the 1985 movie "Tampopo," in which a ramen chef undergoes training as rigorous as a boxer's to create the perfect bowl of noodle soup? That's ramen mania.

And with new and authentic ramenyas opening in Manhattan, New Yorkers are getting a taste.

Places like Momofuku, Minca Ramen Factory and Rai Rai Ken in the East Village offer Berkshire pork, free-range chicken and proprietary blends of organic miso paste. In Chelsea the just-opened Nooch, part of a Singapore-based chain, is raising the fabulousness quotient of ramen with Karim Rashid-designed donburis (bowls) and a D. J. booth. Chikubu in Midtown makes its succulent ramen only on Friday and Saturday, but it draws a loyal crowd of regulars. Sapporo, though it has all the charm of an office cubicle, serves the best goma (sesame) ramen in the city.

The difference between these richly satisfying bowls and packaged ramen, flavored mostly with MSG, is vast. "New York might never have really great ramen, just like Tokyo might never have really great pizza," said David Chang, the Korean-American chef, trained at Craft and now the owner of Momofuku. "But I'm having a lot of fun trying."

In Japan ramen is more than a cheap cup of noodles. It is the national dish, cheaper than sushi, available everywhere and perpetually fashionable. With its rich, meaty broth, ramen is very different from other Japanese soups; in fact the dish is a relatively recent import from China. But since ramen became popular in Japan in the 1950's, it has been a national institution: quick, inexpensive street food, as closely associated with young people and budget meals as it is here. One Japanese name for instant ramen is gakusei ryori, or student cuisine. Ramen stalls cluster around train stations, and vending machines provide customized bowls.

"It's inescapable" said Mark Schilling, an Ohio native who has since 1975 lived in Japan, where he is a film critic. Especially in the winter Japanese diners line up to indulge in the much-loved ramen ritual, wreathed in steam, salt and slurping.

It is fiercely beloved and bitterly missed by expats like Mr. Kamada, the musician, who owns Minca Ramen Factory in the East Village.

"I only started making ramen here because I needed some to eat," he said. "I can't live without it."

He is hardly alone. "There is an insatiable appetite for ramen and ramen culture in Japan," Mr. Schilling said.

Like American barbecue joints, ramen shops close when they run out of their key ingredient: soup, which is always carefully made on the premises, like a French stock. This only adds to the mystique.

In Japan ramen chefs can become famous by playing variations on the ramen formula, like browning the scallions that garnish the soup. Such innovations are covered in magazines like 1 Week Tokyo, which has a column devoted to ramen, and on television. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is often photographed at ramenyas, sitting at the counter along with the regular customers, just as our political candidates conspicuously patronize country diners. Last year an online brokerage firm, Traders Securities, inaugurated an investment fund with returns pegged to the earnings of 200 ramenyas around Japan.

The ramen museum and theme park in Yokohama, which serves all eight major regional styles of ramen, receives more than 120,000 visitors each year. This is not to be confused with the instant ramen museum in Ikeda, a separate tribute to the founder of Nissin Foods, Momofuku Ando, who had the bright idea of deep-frying ramen noodles to preserve them. Nissin produced its first packet of instant ramen in 1958. In 2003 each Japanese citizen ate an average of 45 packets of instant ramen, or almost six billion packets. (Americans ate nine packets a person, or about 2.6 billion.)

In Japan there are more ramenyas than any other kind of restaurant, over 200,000 at last government count, in 2002. Each one holds only about eight customers (hence the long waits). As at a sushi bar, part of the ramen experience is sitting at the counter, watching the cooks and directing them to add a little more of this and a little less of that. The Japanese do not cook this complicated dish at home, but leave it to the ramenyas. The classic ramenya meal starts with a plate of gyoza (crisp fried pork dumplings, also of Chinese origin) and a beer, followed by a big bowl of soup and noodles, eaten with as much slurping as possible.

The manager and chef of Rai Rai Ken, Hirokazu Yoda, has been (figuratively) immersed in ramen all his life. His parents own a ramenya in Tokyo. He says that each element of a bowl of ramen deserves equal attention, especially on non-Japanese terrain. "The soup alone took two years to develop here," he said. Ramen is definitely fast food in that it is served and eaten quickly, but making the different elements of the bowl is a full-time commitment.

First into your donburi (bowl) go a few spoonfuls of the chef's tare of intense seasonings. The tare is stored in a terra-cotta pot and aged to mellow its flavors: more ingredients are added as needed, but the pot is never emptied or cleaned. According to Satoru Chida, the manager of the Midtown restaurant Onigashima, some noodle shops have been replenishing the same tare pot continuously for more than 300 years.

To the tare flavorings like ginger, garlic and miso are added. This is where the flourishes of the chef have the most play. At Minca, Mr. Kamada uses a pungent purée of fried garlic and oil. At Rai Rai Ken, Mr. Yoda blends five kinds of miso.

A big splash of soup, enough to keep the noodles hot for at least 10 minutes, comes next. The soup can be based on pork, chicken or a combination of seafood and kelp, which is traditional, but not very popular in New York ramen shops. Mr. Chang said: "I use bacon, ham hocks, dark chicken meat and roasted pork bones, and then I deglaze with sake. In Tokyo I would probably be run out of town, but this is my own creation."

Now the noodles. Ramen belongs to the family of Chinese mein, meaning noodles. (The word "ramen" is a Japanese pronunciation of the Cantonese term "la mein.") Oil is added to the dough and also sodium bicarbonate, to make the noodles springy. Resistant noodles, not soft ones, are the ideal, though many New York ramen chefs admitted to cooking them longer for American customers. "We like them to be ha gotai," Mr. Yoda said, a phrase that translates as "responds to teeth," or al dente.

The toppings are sliced and readied: traditional ones include cha-siu, roast pork; tamago, a hard-cooked egg, with soy sauce added to the cooking water, which turns the egg white a pale brown; naruto, a slice of white fish cake with a spiral of pink; scallions; black mushrooms (known to Chinese food fans as tree ears); and bamboo shoots. Butter and corn, oddly, are also popular toppings. (Both are rare in Japanese cooking.) Another garnish is a poached egg, which transforms the dish into tsukimi ramen, or moon-viewing ramen, with the deep yellow yolk representing the autumn harvest moon.

Japanese diners start with the noodles, lifting them with chopsticks and sucking up the strands whole. (Biting noodles is considered unlucky in most Asian cultures, as they represent longevity.) The toppings are eaten between mouthfuls of noodles. And last comes the broth, which grows richer and more flavorful as it cools, because the starch of the noodles and the flavors of the toppings have been released into the soup.

By phone from Tokyo, Mr. Schilling offered an illustration of the stature of ramen in Japanese culture. "I just got back from a screening at the Tokyo Film Festival," he said. "And guess what Kadokawa — it's a major media business, like the Japanese equivalent of Time Warner — gave to the audience as a perk? Five packages of instant ramen."