Tomek’s incidental ramen tour Japan 2025

Thoughts

I had a great time in Japan in November 2025. My goal was to try a couple of good ramen bowls while there, but I wasn’t going to go out of my way to eat ramen. However, I ended up eating 18 bowls, which makes for one bowl per day of my stay. Below are my notes and observations. I likely got some of this wrong and I am happy to be proven wrong, go visit again and broaden my perspective.

Availability

As it turned out, there were more ramen shops than I anticipated, outdoing other types of food in terms of availability and opening hours. So even when I wasn’t planning to eat ramen, ramen was often the most convenient option or at least I didn’t have to make special effort to find one. Also due to the speed that ramen is served and consumed, even very popular shops with lines were often a matter of about a 20-minute wait (with some exceptions).

Ordering

I really love the experience of ordering ramen through a machine and passing the ticket to the staff while sitting down. High-traffic shops always had a person managing the queue and guiding people to seats. A differentiating factor among the highest quality shops was that the person would also take the ticket and the ramen would arrive at the counter in front of me without any other interaction needed.

Quality vs fine-diningness

I enjoyed and appreciated the high quality, high traffic shops like Kaneda or Kamo to Negi. I also like how their bowls remain simple and focused on the core components. I am not a big fan of toppings slowly changing the soup as they gradually blend in. I totally respect chefs who decide to do that but it’s just not for me. My perfect ramen experience starts with admiring the soup, trying the first spoon of the broth. If the broth is great, I can’t resist eating the rest of it with the spoon towards the end. And it’s just not the same if the broth transformed into something else.

Not always great

Ramen in Japan can actually be bad and I would even risk saying that you can’t just go to any random ramen shop and expect to have a great meal there. I did a mix of well-planned visits and random walk-ins from the street. Had positive and negative surprises in both. For most shops there was no correlation between how much I enjoyed the meal and how long the queue was. That was with the exception of Kamo to Negi and Kaneda which both had queues even when I visited in the late-ish evening. While of course the best ramen bowls I had in Japan were some of the best ramen I ever had, the great bowls of ramen I had in other countries were also amazing and by no means inferior.

Styles

I tried several styles of ramen: Tokyo shoyu, iekei tonkotsu, Sapporo miso, classic tonkotsu, classic chuka soba type, shio, tsukemen. I missed out on having Jiro and tantanmen. I don’t have a clear preference for which style I like the most. Each of the ones I tried has its own unique appeal and hits the spot where it aims to.

Pairing

Before this trip I had a clear preference for the noodle type and wasn’t really a fan of pairing noodle type/thickness with the soup. Now I started to appreciate it and I fully buy into the idea of serving thin low hydration hakata style noodles with tonkotsu, also rather thin noodles with shoyu, thicker and curly high hydration with miso and iekei. Hard to say what changed but it definitely clicked.

My misconceptions about ramen in Japan

In terms of toppings, chashu in Japan in the vast majority of places I personally tried I tried is pork loin or pork leg. The iconic rolled pork belly is actually quite rare and I haven’t seen it anywhere, while I tried thick pork belly slice just once. Which is a big plus for me as I don’t like chunky greasy and overwhelmingly porky pieces. On the other hand, the chashu commonly served is thin, has great mouth feel and is delicious.

I heard it claimed several times that marinated egg is not the default in Japan and has to be paid for extra. This is technically true, but in practice in my experience the most prominent/highlighted menu item will be a 'premium' or 'special' that includes the egg and more chashu and maybe some other topping, and more simple, cheaper bowl will also be somewhere there. So while it’s almost always possible to skip the egg, I never had a situation where I felt I was missing out on an egg because I did not order it.

Summary

Japan is much more of a ramen country than I anticipated. Much more than sushi, much more than anything else. I did not plan this trip to be about ramen and I promise it wasn’t! It was still an afterthought after all the other things we did. And yet, so much and so great. Good soup.

Tomasz Czajęcki