Monday, March 12, 2012

Ramen Museum in Yokohama

Once I arrived at Japan, I visited one of the local tourist offices to pick up brochures to find things to do.  In one brochure detailing the cool hings to do in Yokohama, I found this fun little museum.  

There are two floors, we'll start with the bottom floor first.  What you'll find here is a recreated 1950s town in Japan, with the top nine most famous Ramen houses throughout Japan.  Each of these ramen restaurants puts a different spin on ramen and their soup (shio/shoyu/tonkatsu/miso).  Once you get there, you order from the vending machines outside, then they seat you.  The cool thing is that they offer smaller versions of all their ramen bowls so that you get the opportunity to try out multiple bowls.  I have a pretty small appetite, so I opted for a 3 month membership so that I could go back at a later date.  It was a 2 dollar premium OK?!

This is from the top of the stairs, looking down at the venue.  Cute.


Even the security guard was dressed up in costume, with circular blush marks to match.  He was playing some  johnny-can-poh game with folks, I'm guessing it's some Japanese spinoff version.



You order from one of these.  No english whatsoever on these damn things.  It took me a while to figure out which one was the "mini" size.  This one was from the first ramen shop I went to.  The noodles were fine, the tonkatsu broth was average, but the meat, IT WAS ASTOUNDING!  The pork was so tender, it was such a thick cut, it melted in my mouth!


I LOVE YOU THICKLY-SLICED PORK <3


This was the second restaurant I went to.  I got a little too excited and I forgot to take a picture, sorry!  I'll get to it next time!  The ramen at this place was average at best.  I just don't think I'm a shio soup fan.


And here's a GIF walk-through.  Halfway through I figured that a vertical shot would capture more of the details as the hallways were pretty narrow.  Woops.


And here's the first floor.  It wasn't as fun because it was all in Japanese =/  I figgur these things were teaching you about what it takes to make good ramen and such...


Oddly enough they also had this little toy car exhibit.  Why, I dunno.  What I do know is that this poor lad here has the worst job in the world.  I don' know how he could hold a smile doing this the whole day!



Anyways, ramen museum, I will be paying you a visit in the near future.  If anybody plans to ever go, get there before 12-1230 ish.  The lunch rush is nasty, even on sunday.

No comments:

Post a Comment