Like many of us, Grant Achatz spent his college years surviving on ramen. “I would live off those packages,” he says. “To me ramen was just a dry noodle cake you rehydrated in water, dropped this dry spice packet into, and slurped down. It’s college-kid food. But there’s a long history of ramen that’s completely lost on college kids.” Today the 32-year-old Achatz is arguably America’s most exciting and influential chef, whose culinary creations at Chicago’s famed 
Alinea restaurant landed him Outstanding Chef in the United States honors at the 
2008 James Beard Foundation Awards. And like a growing number of foodies, he’s become a ramen-iac.

Right now ramen stands as the food world’s ultimate expression of high-low cuisine. Nissin Food Products churns out nearly 100 billion packets of instant ramen a year, while high-end ramen joints sprout up with ever-increasing frequency in cities throughout America. Japan has more than 200,000 
ramen shops, as well as ramen books, ramen 
magazines, and ramen chefs who have become ramen celebrities by hosting ramen TV shows. In America, ramen has gone gourmet with rich, flavorful broth served in deep 
ceramic bowls floating beneath slices of pork, clusters of diced scallions, and perhaps 
shoots of bamboo, kernels of corn, or a halved hard-boiled egg. Japan’s cousin to chicken noodle or matzo ball soup, it’s the 
ultimate comfort food: hot, easy, cheap, and—when done right—utterly delicious.

Nowhere is this dichotomy—the cheap-as-hell junk-food staple that world-renowned chefs rhapsodize over—more apparent than in New York City’s East Village, where undergrads rub elbows with Japanese immigrants and where dozens of ramen shops have 
materialized in the past few years. Sitting at Ippudo NY on Fourth Avenue, I chopstick up a steaming heap of succulent noodles under the watchful gaze of George Solt, an NYU 
history professor who wrote his dissertation 
on ramen. Between mouthfuls, Solt unwinds the ramen backstory. An early version of the dish was first brought to Japan from China in the late 1800s. As ramen evolved, vendors 
began selling the dish from pushcarts. “It was famous among the working masses 
for being cheap, filling, and tasty,” Solt says. 
“It’s like the hot dog in America.”

But it was the invention of instant ramen in 1958 that doomed Westerners to addiction. 
Instant ramen was the brainchild of an awesomely quirky entrepreneur-philosopher named Momofuku Ando, who rightly spoke of noodles as if they were sacred objects. As recounted by Andy Raskin in his book The Ramen King and I, Ando sequestered himself for more than a year in a backyard shed in Osaka, experimenting with ways 
to rehydrate ramen. Nothing worked. “I thought and thought about how to do 
it right,” Ando once said. “I thought so hard that I began to piss blood.” After watching his wife fry tempura one day, Ando tried flash-frying his cooked noodles. Amazingly, water brought them back to life. Success! 
By 2000, his countrymen had voted Ando’s creation the number one invention of the 20th century, beating out Sony’s Walkman, the compact disc, and the PC.

To understand the reverence ramen commands in its homeland, I turn to Ivan Orkin, a quick-talking New York chef who became the only Westerner to open a ramen shop in Japan. Improbably, the soup he brews at Tokyo’s Ivan Ramen has since been declared among the best in the country. “You might look at a bowl of 
ramen and think, What’s the big fucking deal? It’s noodles and soup and some shit on top,” he says. “But you have to balance everything. Good ramen somehow inexplicably 
all works together—the 
flavor, balance, textures, 
everything really works.”

New York chef David Chang, who rivals Grant Achatz in the Hot-Shit Young Chef sweepstakes, launched his restaurant
empire in 2004 with Momofuku Noodle Bar 
(named after the ramen king). No traditionalist, Chang makes his broth from a stock that calls for 70 pounds of roasted 
pork bones, ham hocks, chicken legs, and bacon, then packs the bowls with slabs of Berkshire pork belly, noodles, scallions, snow peas, preserved bamboo shoots, a poached egg, and Greenmarket corn. “I had spent time in Japan and had always been a big fan of ramen. I didn’t think I had the chops to make it in fine dining, so I opened a noodle shop,” Chang says. “But I still have no idea how to make authentic ramen. We’re just trying to make something tasty.”

 


Just blocks from Momofuku in the East 
Village stands Ippudo NY, the American outpost of a highly regarded Japanese chain that arguably serves the best ramen in New York City. Waiters hand noodle novices an illustrated how-to pamphlet headlined “Zuzutto!” the Japanese word for the noise made when slurping—an essential aspect of the ramen ritual. “We 
actually shortened our noodles in the U.S. 
because Americans can’t slurp very strongly,” confides assistant manager Lightning Yumeku.

For many months I had been awkwardly wrestling a few long noodles onto my spoon with my chopsticks, then shoving the whole mess toward my mouth as quickly as possible, hoping not too many of the dangling strands would slip off and splash broth in my face. According to Chef Orkin, the Japanese technique is to grab a clump of noodles with your chopsticks, deposit one end in your mouth, then hoover away, sucking in the long strands laced with droplets of broth. 
At Ippudo, I test Orkin’s advice: I slurp away wildly and…nothing happens. 
The noodles don’t move. 
I realize the tail ends are still anchored by the in-gredients left in the bowl. The professor actually laughs at me.

“I think your slurping’s good,” Solt lies. “But you want to pull the noodles all the way out of the soup.” He demonstrates by lifting a tangle into the air, freeing the noodles of everything in the bowl so they’re not weighed down when slurped. Good tip.

Last May, Grant Achatz made a pilgrimage 
to the noodle mecca. “Finally ate at Ippudo 
last night. The broths were almost too flavorful, if that’s possible. Delicious,” he tweeted. “Ramen is what everyone’s talking about in 
the industry now,” he says. “The last three times I’ve been to New York, ramen has been the major eating priority.”

It was on a trip to Tokyo several years ago that Achatz achieved ramen-lightenment. “As soon as I arrived, I was asked, ‘What do you want for dinner?’ I said, ‘Ramen,’ and the guy from the local culinary school looked at me funny. He expected me to say, ‘Take me to your high-end sushi!’ So he goes, ‘Well, in Tokyo 
a lot of ramen shops are like fast food. Like McDonald’s.’ ” Achatz laughs. “I looked at him after my first few sips, and I was like, ‘This is 
not McDonald’s.’ Good ramen has this luxuriously silky, mouth-coating texture and body and viscosity. It’s comfort food,” he says. 
“And it hits you in the middle of the chest like only comfort food can. The whole experience can be pretty profound.” Bet you didn’t know that 10¢ bowl of noodles was a spiritual experience, did you?