My love for ramen started at an early age. I was three when my parents moved from the States to Tokyo and later to Kobe where we spent the better part of eight years, and while I can't remember my first bowl, I know it was early on and it must have been fantastic.

Throughout middle school and high school, I lived in either convenience stores where each new type of ramen that came out was an exciting discovery, or in ramen shops across Kobe and Osaka. Paired with canned coffee or royal milk tea, gyoza, kimchi, and all other things salty, spicy, garlicky, oily, fatty, ramen was an unbeatable dish. Between my brother and I, I think we had the entire city of Kobe covered - we had been to places that served shio (salt), miso, tonkotsu (my personal favorite), tomato ramen, cheese ramen, garlic ramen, kimchi ramen, and every other imaginable combination. Our entire family was into it as well, if not just through our Sunday afternoon trips to a place called Osho that had incredible gyoza.

An all time high for me was waiting an hour in the burning sun in a suburb of Tokyo, at two in the afternoon, to get into a place called Ramen Jiro that could not have fit more than ten people at a time. The walls were blackened from fire, everything in the place gave away decades of use and neglect. The owner cooked himself and would throw you out if you couldn't say what you wanted as soon as he called out for the next customer, which was difficult given there were no menus. It took half an hour of prepping me by my friend for me to get the order right, and to instill in me the sense of pride that one would attain if they were able to finish the huge bowls that were served.

Moving back to the US for college, there were a lot of things I found upsetting about America. The obsession with large portions of food, the amount of variety offered at grocery stores, the inability to get around without a car, the loud and obtrusive nature of Americans, and most importantly the perception that ramen meant Nissin Cup Noodle. Going to school in North Carolina, there was not much I could do about this besides anecdotal evidence, pleas even, that ramen was so much more, that it was a legitimate meal in and of itself.

In the four years I spent in college, I came to believe that across America this was the case and settled into a fate of instant cup noodle and jokes about poor college students whenever ramen was mentioned. It wasn't until a summer internship around New York that a trip to Yakitori Taisho gave me a taste again of what I had been missing, renewing my excitement for Japan and this delectable dish. Now, living in Manhattan, it is my aim to visit every ramen shop I am able to make it to, to consolidate the various snippets of articles, reviews, blogs on ramen, and to document and publish this for the good of America to aid in the valiant effort to change people's perceptions.

So, there is the background and my purpose in publishing this blog. I don't profess to be fluent in Japanese, the language, culture, or food, and claim no special abilities or training in the review of food - however I will say that at the very least, these pages should make someone's mouth water.