More than sushi, okonomiyaki, or any other recognizably Japanese food, ramen is arguably the most popular food in Japan. It’s inexpensive, you can find it virtually anywhere in Japan, and everybody seems to have their own take on it.

As you might have guessed from my Ramen Survival Guide, between all of the different broths, styles, and toppings, you can find a ton of different varieties of ramen in noodle shops in Japan.

For most people, that variety is enough; but some ramen shops go completely off the map to push the limits of ramen and entice customers with novelty dishes. Strange toppings and unusual broths help noodle shops stand out from an increasingly saturated market.

The strangest thing of all? Most of these strange dishes are actually really, really good. Here are some of the strangest ramen dishes that Japanese noodle shops have cooked up in recent years:

Tequila Ramen

Unsurprisingly, Japan makes notoriously bad Mexican food, so I was a little apprehensive when I first heard about the tequila ramen at Kouno noodle shop (麺や河野). But against all odds, the Tokyo restaurant’s concoction of lime, a shot of tequila, and cilantro work well together.

Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that the combination tastes good—after all, Vietnamese phở also uses lime and cilantro as garnish, so maybe throwing in some tequila isn’t that radical after all.

Ramen Burger

Japanese fast food chain Lotteria is notorious for cooking up some strange, strange hamburgers; past hits have included the oversized shrimp burger named in honor of Japanese comedian Sugi-chan, and a nine patty burger to celebrate an anime movie.

More recently, Lotteria teamed up with ramen restaurant Menya Musashi to create a ramen burger. A batch of ramen is fried up in the shape of a patty, then pork and mayonnaise or added before it’s placed between two buns.

Not quite the traditional way that you see ramen served, but more or less par for the course for Lotteria.

Ice Cream Ramen, Colorful Broth

If you’re looking for strange ramen, look no farther than Tokyo ramen shop Kikuya (菊や). Kikuya offers unusual ramen dishes in all varieties, using all sorts of ingredients and tricks to interest even the most dyed-in-the-wool ramen eater.

For one, there’s the color selection:

At Kikuya, you can get ramen with broth of virtually any color, including purple, red, and sky blue. While it looks pretty unnatural, the colorful broth is anything but; the color comes from natural ingredients like red cabbage, and clever mixing.

Kikuya also offers a ramen dish topped with an ice cream cone slide down the middle. According to ramen lore, a child came into the shop on a hot day and asked for ice cream, joking with the chef that an ice cream ramen would be ideal.

Being the genius that he is, the owner decided to turn this joke into a reality. Before long, Kikuya’s ice cream ramen became its signature dish.

The strange menu at Kikuya is way too long to go through in full here—between the colorful broth, ice cream ramen, and other oddities like cheese (think Kraft singles) ramen, cocoa ramen, and battery (think alkaline) ramen, you could spend weeks sampling Kikuya’s unorthodox offerings.

Pineapple and Strawberry Ramen

Ramen is a very savory dish; you don’t grab a bowl of ramen when you’ve got the hankering for something sweet. Because of that (and the fact that you don’t find too much fruit in ramen to begin with), the sometimes sweet dishes from Tokyo ramen shop Papapapapine (パパパパパイン) are a little surprising.

Papapapapine’s most famous dish is its pineapple ramen, which comes complete with chunks of pineapple and a pineapple-based broth. You can see Papapapapine’s pride in its specialty dish from the pineapple-shaped lantern hanging outside of the shop, its pineapple-yellow counters, and the ceramic pineapples adorning the restaurant.

Aside from its signature dish, Papapapapine also offers a strawberry ramen, aptly named Susususustrawberry. Like the pineapple ramen, Susususustrawberry has chunks of fruit floating in the soup, and the broth is strawberry-based with a little cream.

You can add condensed milk to taste, for a combination that seems more like a dessert than a meal. Despite the unorthodox combinations, reports are that both dishes are actually pretty good.

Taco Ramen

Ivan Orkin is a New Yorker who’s famous around the world for being one of the few gaijin to open a successful ramen business (アイバンラーメン AKA Ivan Ramen) in the fiercely competitive Japanese market.

While being a gaijin has been more than enough to make Ivan Ramen stand out, Orkin’s uses some unusual. In addition to using rye, an unorthodox ingredient by Japanese standards, to make the noodles themselves, a few years back Orkin created his own take on taco rice—taco ramen.

Taco rice is actually a pretty common dish in Japan, but it’s unusual for ramen to be used as a substitute for rice, and Orkin, an American from New York City, adds his own American touch to the dish.

In addition to the house-made noodles that Ivan Ramen has become known for, the taco ramen has lettuce, tomato, and beef with taco seasoning. No broth, whatsover, nor any of the typical toppings you’d see on your average bowl of ramen.

It was a seasonal special a few years ago, so you won’t be able to get it anymore; which is unfortunate, because it sounds delicious (and would probably go well with the tequila ramen).

Ramen has changed a lot over the last century as it’s come to almost dominate Japan’s culinary landscape. New techniques and approaches, like miso and double soup ramen, have become commonplace.

So while you probably won’t find chunks of pineapple in purple broth in your typical ramen shop anytime soon, I think that it’s great that ramen chefs across Japan continue to dream up new dishes that push the boundaries of ramen.

A hamburger in Japan is many things. People in the US tend to have a pretty narrow view of the food—all you really need is two buns with a beef patty in between. Maybe if you’re feeling especially adventurous, you have something more unusual, like barbecue sauce, brioche bun, or blue cheese, but that’s really about the size of it.

I’ve found that in Japan, you can find a lot more unusual and various types of hamburgers, ones that you would never, ever find here in the US.

When a Hamburger is Wild

A hamburger in Japan can be wild. Japanese fast food chain Lotteria recently offered a “wild burger” in honor of comedian Sugi-chan. Sugi-chan is one of the biggest celebrities in Japan right now (for who knows what reason), and his catchphrase ワイルドだろぉ？ (“wild, right?”) was one of the biggest buzzwords in Japan last year.

In Lotteria’s case, a “wild burger” was an oversized shrimp patty on two comically small buns. Wild, right?

More recently, Lotteria is offering a burger with nine patties. In celebration of the release of the newest Evangelion movie on DVD and Blu-Ray, Lotteria is currently offering a $13, nine-patty burger, after the name of the movie (Evangelion 3.33—3 + 3 + 3 = 9). That seems pretty wild.

When a Hamburger is Candy

A hamburger in Japan can be a candy. A popular type of Japanese candy (popular, at least, with people abroad) is a kind of DIY kit. The kit usually provides you with some powders, some molds, and instructions on how to turn it all into the final product.

Japanese YouTuber RRcherrypie is internet famous (the best kind of famous) for creating step-by-step guides on how to assemble these kits, and one of the most popular (and relevant to this post) recently has been a hamburger candy.

I can’t vouch at all for the taste, but it’s definitely a cool process to watch and, presumably, to try yourself.

When a Hamburger is a Billionaire

A hamburger in Japan can be Facebook founder and hoodie enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg. At least, that’s what some Japanese women think. The way that Zuckerberg’s name is transliterated into Japanese (ザッカーバーグ) sounds a lot like the Japanese word for a hamburger steak (ハンバーグ) which, to add to the confusion.

Fortunately, I don’t think that you’ll be set back too much by these two similar words. But if you somehow are served a live, confused Mark Zuckerberg instead of a delicious hamburger, then you’re on your own.

When a Hamburger is Black

A hamburger in Japan can be black, or contain pumpkin. Japanese fast food chains like Lotteria aren’t the only restaurants that serve bizarre hamburgers in Japan. International chains like Burger King or McDonald’s also cater to Japan’s local, sometimes eccentric tastes.

As we wrote about before, last year Burger King rolled special promotional items like an all-you-can-eat meal, a burger with black buns (dyed with bamboo charcoal and squid ink), and Halloween burgers that included a thick slice of kabocha.

It may be surprising to see these items offered by Burger King when the company’s offerings in its home country (the US) are so tame, but foreign companies have to adapt to Japan’s tastes and culture if they have a hope to survive.

Sometimes a Hamburger is Just a Hamburger

A hamburger in Japan isn’t always wild and wacky, or out there. You can always get a pretty normal, regular burger at virtually any Japanese fast food chain (like MOS Burger or Freshness Burger), foreign chains, or local restaurants.

But every time I go to a restaurant in the US that only offers a regular-ol’, everyday hamburger, I wish that it could be something more. Maybe I should start bringing my own squid ink.

Japan and vegetarianism have kind of a strange relationship.

Buddhism is deeply intertwined with Japan culture and, with it, the respect for all life. The most devout Buddhists observe this reverence towards life in their diets, avoiding eating meat entirely. As we’ve covered before, there’s even a type of vegetarian cuisine meant just for Japanese Buddhist monks.

At one point in Japanese history, the Buddhist Emperor Temmu declared that the entire country should stop eating meat, a ban that lasted about a hundred years.

That ban had a profound impact on Japanese food. Without the rich, savory flavors from meat, the Japanese found other ways to get their umami fixes using vegetable flavors.

Oddly enough, despite all of this Buddhist influence, it’s actually pretty hard to be vegetarian in Japan. Japan’s definition of “vegetarian” is different from the one that you know.

Japan: Not Very Vegetarian-Friendly

There’s actually two different words that mean “vegetarian” in Japanese: the native word, 菜食主義者, and the foreign word, ベジタリアン. The two represent two different views on what the concept means.

The Japanese concept of vegetarianism isn’t as strict and rigorous as the Western concept. That ban on meat I mentioned earlier? It was actually pretty limited and didn’t cover fish at all. What can I say? The Japanese love seafood.

As a result, if you go to Japan today and say that you’re vegetarian, the meaning of what you’re saying might be lost in translation.

Add on top of that all of the different diets people have nowadays—pescetarian, vegan, gluten-free, low-carb, dairy-free—and you can face almost complete misunderstanding.

Japanese food isn’t always obvious about whether or not it contains animal products, either. Even if the food you’re eating doesn’t have a huge slab of meat, it’s very likely that the broth, the seasoning, or some other part of the meal has some sort of meat or seafood in it.

What To Do If You’re a Vegetarian in Japan

Let’s say that you’re a vegetarian, and you want to visit Japan. The cultural issues I talked about might scare you off, but it’s not the end of the world.

If you just say that you’re ベジタリアン, then things probably aren’t going to go well for you. But if you are a bit more nuanced about it, then you’ll be okay.

The important thing to remember is to be extremely specific about what your dietary restrictions are, and spell them out in as much detail as you possibly can. It might be hard if you have limited Japanese language skills, but fortunately, others have done the work for you.

If you look around, you can find set phrases and even print-outs that detail your dietary needs in Japanese that you can hand to people at restaurants. They can be a lifesaver if you don’t speak Japanese, and still incredibly useful if you don’t.

Are you a vegetarian? What have been your experiences eating in Japan? Tell me in the comments!

When’s the last time you walked away from a movie hungry?

It’s pretty rare for me. American movies about food seem to be few and far between, and the ones that are around are usually socially-conscious documentaries that bum me out more than anything.

Japanese movies about food seem to do exactly the opposite. Most food movies out of Japan focus a lot on the role of food in bringing people together, the journeys people go through for food and, most importantly of all, always make me really hungry. Would you expect anything less from the country that brought us Iron Chef?

I gathered up some of the best Japanese movies about food I could find. If these don’t rouse your apetite, then you might not have a stomach.

Tampopo (タンポポ)

Tampopo is the be all and end all of Japanese food movies. Period. Full stop. If you say that any other food movie is better then sorry, but you’re wrong.

Billed as a “Ramen Western” (a play on the “Spaghetti Western” genre of movies), Tampopo is, at its most basic, the story of a woman trying to turn her ramen shop around to save it from its own mediocrity.

But that simle description does such disservice to the movie. Tampopo jumps around, exploring different topics, settings, and stories, culminating into a movie that encompasses life, death, love, and all of the big questions in life.

If you’ve never heard of or seen Tampopo before, then see it as soon as you can. But in the meantime, you can read our post on Tampopo and philosophy.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary all about Jiro Ono, chef at the best sushi restaurant in the world, Sukiyabashi Jiro. How do you get to be the best sushi chef in the world? Jiro Dreams of Sushi tells Jiro’s life story and explores his philosophy on sushi and life in general.

This movie is the definition of food porn, full of close-up shots of freshly-made sushi glistening with soy sauce, moments before it’s delicately gobbled down by a appreciative diner. Even if you can’t go to the best sushi restaurant in the world, Jiro Dreams of Sushi will give you a very personal view of the sushi.

You also get a glimpse into the inner workings of the Japanese restaurant industry, all the way up and down the supply chain. It’s a behind-the-scenes tour that not many people get.

You can watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi on Netflix, and read our write-up about Sukiyabashi Jiro here.

Udon (うどん)

In Japan, udon noodles plays second fiddle to ramen. Not only is the greatest Japanese food movie, Tampopo, about ramen, but ramen has taken off in the Japanese food world the way udon never has.

People in Japan are always tinkering with ramen, coming up with new and exciting ways to serve it. There are so many variations when it comes to broth, noodles, and toppings, that it’s hard to keep track of it all. (Although we’ve written a guide to ramen to help keep track of it all.)

That doesn’t mean that you should ignore udon. Not only is it delicious in its own right, but it even has its own movie, appropriately titled Udon.

Udon, like Tampopo, is a bit of an underdog story, but is much different from seminal classic. It follows a washed-up comedian who returns home to help construct an udon pilgrimmage of sorts.

Ironically enough, one of the members of the comedy group the Rahmens appears in the movie. Maybe ramen and udon can be friends after all!

The Antarctic Cook (南極料理人)

When you’re stationed at a research facility in Antarctica, it’s easy to get homesick. Surrounded by vast stretches of impossibly cold desert, you long for more hospitable surroundings.

Fortunately, some familiar food can go a long way. The Antarctic Cook follows the crew at Antarctica’s Dome Fuji Station and, more specifically, Nishimura, the crew’s chef.

You can read our full review of the Antarctic Cook here.

Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し)

You might think that Spirited Away isn’t really a food movie. After all, isn’t it one of those Studio Ghibli movies about magic and wonder?

And you’d be right. But, Spirited Away also happens to feature enough tasty-looking food to make your mouth water. Even though the food is all illustrated, the variety and serving sizes of those foods still provoke your appetite.

You can read our article about how Spirited Away is the perfect foodie movie for more.

Honorable mention: eatrip

eatrip (a portmanteau of “eat” and “trip”) is a simple documentary about how food bring people together. Despite featuring dreamboat actor Tadanoba Asano and coming out pretty recently (2009), I couldn’t track it down through either legitimate or not-so-legitimate means.

The trailer makes the movie look promising, but every review site I’ve come across gives it pretty mediocre ratings. Just as well, I suppose.

What food movies make your mouth water? Did I miss you favorite Japanese food movie on this list? Do you want to try to make the argument that Tampopo isn’t the best (rofl)? Tell me in the comments!

There’s no arguing that a lot of what we consider stereotypically Japanese actually came from elsewhere.

Japan has China to thank for the Japanese language, which is also where ramen is from. Tempura, konpeito, and castella cake came by way of the Portuguese; likewise, curry was introduced by the British. The gakuran and the sailor uniform were modeled after European military and naval uniforms, and radio calisthenics is from the good old US of A.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found out the reverse has also happened: fortune cookies, that staple of Chinese restaurants in the US, is almost certainly Japanese.

Japanese Fortune Cookies…

In Japan, fortune cookies go by the names tsujiura senbei, o-mikuji senbei, and suzu senbei. They’re slightly bigger, and the addition of miso and sesame makes them browner and savory instead of sweet. Otherwise, though, Japanese fortune cookies are pretty much identical to the mass-produced stuff.

Left: Japanese fortune cookies; Right: “Chinese” fortune cookies, made in Hong Kong, from a Korean grocery store down the road

If old tales are anything to go by, Japanese fortune cookies have been around since at least the 19th century. The following illustration, for example, was found in a book of stories that dates all the way back to 1878. Check out the unmistakable C-shaped cookies on the grill – and even more tellingly, the noren at the top that reads tsujiura senbei.

The sign is really old school; read it from right to left.

The other name for fortune cookies, o-mikuji senbei, is also a clue. Those little paper fortunes that you can get for a small fee at shrines and temples? Yep, they’re called o-mikuji. Kyoto literally has thousands of shrines and temples – one of the more famous being the Fushimi Inari shrine. Now is it mere coincidence that there are several shops in the area that still make fortune cookies by hand? I think not.

Spooning batter into the mold, lifting out the cookie, tucking in the fortune, and folding up the still-warm cookie.

But this is only half the story.

… and How They Became “Chinese”

The person who invented the “Chinese” fortune cookie is up for debate. Several people have put their hand up, but I reckon only two claims are worth serious consideration: some people believe it was Kito Seiichi of the Fugetsu-do shop in LA, and others believe it was Hagiwara Makoto of SF’s Japanese Tea Garden.

Both men were Japanese immigrants and likely knew about fortune cookies and how to make them – but my money’s on Hagiwara Makoto. As the story goes, he first made and served it alongside green tea in 1914. This modified, sweetened version was so popular that Hagiwara decided to get them made on a commercial scale. In 1918, Benkyodo stepped in to become the Japanese Tea Garden’s exclusive supplier of fortune cookies. Descendants on both sides corroborate the other’s story, which I think is as good as it’ll get in terms of evidence.

Left: the tea house at the Japanese Tea Garden; Right: Benkyodo Candy Factory

Soon, several other bakeries began to make and sell fortune cookies; Umeya, for example, supplied them to both Japanese- and Chinese-owned restaurants. The bombing of Pearl Harbor really put a spanner in the works though. Japanese-Americans were sent away to internment camps, which basically meant the end of many Japanese businesses.

Now that the competition had been taken out, Chinese businesses experienced a huge boom. Chinese restaurants still served fortune cookies, of course, and people just began to think of them as a Chinese thing. There was a strong anti-Japanese sentiment at the time, so I really don’t blame the Chinese for keeping mum and letting their customers believe what they wanted to believe.

In any case, although several Japanese bakeries did make a comeback after WWII, by that point fortune cookies were irrevocably Chinese. They were still as popular as ever, though: it was only a matter of time before it spread all over the US, and then all over the globe. Well, except for China, anyway. “Too American,” apparently.

Oh delicious irony.

Fortune Cookies Remixed

Nowadays there really aren’t any rules when it comes to fortune cookies. Just look at some of the varieties I found:

Purists, look away.

Well… not my thing to be honest, although I suppose there must be a market for them.

So, did you already know that fortune cookies are actually Japanese? Have you tried both Japanese and “Chinese” fortune cookies? Which did you prefer? What was the last fortune you got? Let us know in the comments!

OK, so we already had our grown-up, philosophical talk about authenticity and ethnic food earlier this week. Blah blah blah, boring.

Now that it’s the weekend, we can take a more fun approach to things. That’s why today’s post is about the YouTube series “Rino which eats world various dishes”

“Rino which eats world various dishes” is part cooking show, part Japanese parents using their adorable children for internet fame. The basic premise of the show is that the mom of two little kids (Rino and Yuuma) makes a bunch of famous dishes from around the world for her children.

She’s not a pro chef by any means, and the food probably isn’t 100% authentic (whatever that means); but it’s fun to watch her cook up these very different foods and to see the kids’ reactions.

The show covers all types of food, from Southeast Asian foods like Pad Thai, satay, and pho; to European foods like Zuccotto, Wiener Schnitzel, and Berliner; and even a few foods from home, like natto okonomiyaki and Nagasaki chanpon.

There’s a lot of variety, and it all looks incredibly delicious. Here are some of the more popular episodes from the series:

You can find the whole playlist of “Rino which eats world various dishes” here.

Right before the whole Tofugu team left for Japan, we decided to try a nearby Japanese restaurant right here in the US. Even though we were a little apprehensive about eating there, we decided to give it a try anyway. What was the harm?

It turned out we should have listened to our instincts. This restaurant violated practically every laws of finding a “real” Japanese restaurant, and was one of the worst Japanese restaurants I’d been to in a while.

Fast forward about a month or so later. We’re in Tokyo, hanging out with the Gakuranman. It’s early afternoon, and we’re hungry for lunch. We eventually settle on a Mexican restaurant, and it’s promising: the decor looks right, the menu doesn’t look too bad, and they’re playing Tequila.

The food was bad. I’d been really craving Mexican food during the month we were in Japan, but this didn’t help at all.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about those two lunches, and what they have in common. Even though they were weeks apart and thousands of miles away from each other, the similarities between the two got me thinking about authenticity.

Why Is It So Hard to Get Authentic Food?

Both of those lunches were a disappointment because neither of them seemed to have really authentic food, whether it was Japanese nor Mexican. I started to wonder why it’s so hard to get authentic food in the first place.

There are lots of reasons it can be so hard to get authentic ethnic food. Even though you can get a Big Mac served identically anywhere across the globe, it’s not always easy for food to be copied so perfectly.

There are lots of barrier between you and authentic food. What local tastes are like, availability of ingredients, and all that. Believe it or not, it’s hard to find a bodega in Japan.

I’m not completely astonished that Mexican food isn’t great in Japan. There’s no Latino population to speak of in Japan, and most Japanese people haven’t ever had Mexican food. Given that, how can Japanese people really know what Mexican food is supposed to taste like?

What Is Authentic?

As I thought more and more, the word “authentic” kept coming up and coming up and I began to wonder what it even meant. It was a word that was so critical to what I was trying to figure out that it was hard to ignore.

At the Mexican restaurant in Tokyo, I told the Gakuranman that he’d never had a real, authentic burrito, even though I’d literally seen him eat a burrito minutes before.

It wasn’t as if the burrito were fake or imaginary or something like that. It’s just that it hadn’t met my standards of authenticity, whatever those were.

Unfortunately, the standards of authenticity are very subjective and malleable. There’s no objective checklist for you to cross reference if you wonder whether or not some food is “authentically” Japanese.

Sure, there are signs that point you in the right direction, but the finer details of what, say, constitutes as authentic Japanese or Mexican foods is up to interpretation.

As one Supreme Court Justice said, “I know it when I see it.”

Copy of a Copy

As I kept thinking about it, I realized that most of the Mexican food I’ve had in my life has actually been more Tex-Mex than proper Mexican food. More a localized copy than the real M^cCoy.

And when I think about it, a lot of the Japanese food I know and love isn’t really “Japanese” anyway. Tempura is from Portugal, ramen is from China, and sushi is from southeast Asia. But Japan has managed to absorb these foods into its culture and make them its own.

We like to think that there are clean, distinct lines between cultures, but they all sort of mush together after a while, even a culture as supposedly homogenous as Japan’s.

Bucking Authenticity

I’m not going to claim that you can get authentic, Japanese sushi in some landlocked place in the US like Iowa (sorry Iowans). If anything, I’m saying that you shouldn’t expect food to be the same in Japan as it is abroad.

But as much as we like to joke about sushi abominations, that doesn’t mean that Japanese food abroad has to be bad, or that different interpretations of Japanese food is wrong. Earlier this month, a Danish chef won first place in the World Sushi Cup in Japan. Instead of being penalized for going against tradition, judges were impressed that the chef embraced ingredients and techniques from Scandinavia.

I’d like to think of eating ethnic food a bit like watching a horror movie. You might be able to see the zipper on the monster’s costume, but if you suspend your disbelief, you might actually enjoy yourself!