How to Eat Ramen
My brain always retreated to its reptilian roots for the swamp-like summer, when the only happy creatures in Kyoto were lazy frogs and darting skinks. Now, seduced by the cool fall evenings, my frontal lobes emerged from the mists. The sludge of summer fell away and the air — crisp with energy — braced me like a mountain goat on a cliff face.
In November the chill arrived, trampling the perk-me-up briskness with all the finesse of zombies in wet T-shirts escaping a meat refrigerator.
I shivered along an oh-so-picturesque backstreet north of Nanzenji Temple when my stomach signaled dinner time. Down a narrow alleyway I glimpsed it, a red lantern, an akachochin, and a word that tugged at me like an impatient child.
Ramen.
The door rattled on its brass rails. I poked my foreign head into the tiny noodle joint. Three people stared back, expressionless, two white-aproned men behind the counter and one woman on a stool. What conversation had I interrupted? Was she a regular customer who had finished her dinner and was passing the time with the chefs? I guess that’s what you’d call them.
The place looked clean enough.
I took a seat at a table, not the counter. I didn’t want to butt in on their conversation. My back was to the wall by the door I had entered from.
The woman stood and approached my table. I picked up the menu. “Gomoku soba kudasai.” Gomoku — 5 items — with ramen noodles (called “soba” in Chinese restaurants) in a light broth with vegetables and bits of meat and fish cake on top, plus a hard-boiled quail egg, always.
Boiled quail eggs came in jars. Fresh speckled quail eggs were for toppings, like in the middle of grated mountain potato goo on hot rice, for the eater to whip with shoyu into a yellow-streaked grey froth and pour down the gullet in one unchewable stream. They said this dish was a “performance” enhancer. If you liked eating it what wouldn’t you enjoy eating?
I had seen quail eggs in the shopping streets. Kyoto in the early 70s had few supermarkets. Instead, it had arcades lined with family-owned stores, some of them centuries old. You could find nearly everything there except real bread, real wine, real cheese, real bacon, and real yogurt. You could find (real) butter if you knew how to pronounce it: not batta (grasshopper), not ba–ta– (barter), not batta– (baseball batter), but bata–. You could also get real milk in tiny glass bottles and, if you were lucky, cream. Real cream. Not the white sticky stuff or powder they gave you in coffee shops.
I was the only customer in the joint.
The chefs were chopping veggies and boiling noodles. The woman server, probably family, maybe the younger guy’s wife, stood between me and the counter watching the TV suspended from the ceiling in the corner opposite the door, the standard location in all such shops. It was a game show, the Sakasama Show, the Upside-Down Show. I checked my watch to confirm the show’s slot of 7:30 to 8:00 p.m. on Saturday evenings, prime time for Japanese families finishing their evening meal.
The show’s opening song reminded me of the Adams Family intro.
Enter the contestants, three men and three women. If it was your first time to watch, you wouldn’t know they were all cross-dressing.
The contestants stood on the right. The judging panel sat on the left: soft-core film director, famous manga artist, political commentator, comedian ….
The format was simple. One by one, the contestants were quizzed about their backgrounds and jobs. Then the judges asked each to perform a task as if they were the gender they were dressed as.
The delicately built ingenue in the candy-striped skirt turned out to be a car mechanic named Kenji Yokoyama. Judge: “Your boyfriend is late for your dinner date. You suspect he’s having an affair with your best friend. Here he comes! Action!”
Turning away from the TV, the woman picked up my steaming ramen, walked over and placed it on my table. Then, as if remembering something important, she went back to the counter and returned holding a fork which she plopped down next to my noodles.
I knew how to use ohashi. I had been taught by a waiter in a Chinese restaurant in NYC when I was ten.
I could pinch pieces of food and carry them to my mouth. I could cut things in two. I could shovel rice. I could even pick up a chunk of tofu without breaking its perfect cubic shape.
But they had given me a fork.
Okay, I know. Foreign barbarians can’t be expected to use ohashi. It was an act of kindness not to force the gaijin to make a fool of himself. Like bringing out the children’s meal after I had ordered a Big Mac with a giant Coke. Like bringing out a highchair for short people. Acts of kindness, my ass.
It sat there. The fork. Not the fork I would have chosen if I was going to eat ramen with a fork. There are forks and then there are forks. This was the former.
If that was the road we were going down then I wanted a full place setting: Riedel crystal water glass, sterling silver flatware in a feather-edge pattern by Tiffany, Wedgwood bone china ramen bowl — all meticulously arranged on starched white linen, thank you very much, with a linen napkin folded into an origami image of Mt. Fuji.
But all I had was this fork. This old, cheap, soft steel alloy, too-small-for-my-hand fork.
The woman had gone back to watching the Sakasama Show. She most likely considered her heinous deed “less important than a fart,” as the Japanese idiom goes.
It was as if I had been told to use the “gaijin toilet,” or denied service at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960. Racial bias, stereotyping, discrimination …. That was when I noticed the glass-lidded case on my table. They were on every table. And there, through the glass lid, I saw the chopsticks.
Now we’re talking! I may be the uncivilized gaijin — “Did you know, they wear shoes indoors?” — but I’m going to teach them the right way to use ohashi.
I opened the lid, took out a disposable chopstick pair, pulled it apart and was all set to reveal to this captive audience how a pro handles Japanese cutlery, when applause erupted from the TV. I looked up. Everybody was watching the show, paying no attention to me.
How disappointing! Who would want to miss the spectacle of yet another gaijin’s futile attempts to grasp slippery noodles and carry them mouthward without dropping half on the table and themselves? No doubt they’d seen it before and found it hilarious, but the fun times ended when someone had requested a fork which they eventually found one of, bringing it out like a trophy which it no doubt was — a “special gift” for filling up a customer loyalty card with red chop marks at one shop or another.
I would not give them the satisfaction of admitting I could only eat with a fork. I’d tackled every kind of food possible with chopsticks. I held the sticks correctly, unlike so many Japanese who never rectify the bad habits they picked up as a toddler — the way some people lock a pencil between thumb and knuckle, losing the dexterity of holding it correctly, between the tips of the thumb, index, and middle fingers. Correct ohashi usage combines these two finger holds. Lock one stick near the base of the thumb and forefinger; hold the other stick in the “correct” way.
Did I mention I’d eaten everything with chopsticks? I’d eaten plenty of ramen before, too. But this time I was going for the full sound effects. Inhaling the noodles and swallowing with hardly a chew in between. Like in the film Tanpopo.
I’ll teach these people a lesson, I thought. I’ll wipe that smug look off their mugs, that expectation of a hilarious farce.
I went through the steps using visualization, the mind training technique of champions. Grasp noodles, lift and transfer to mouth, release noodles, inhale noisily, masticate if that’s your thing, swallow. Repeat.
It was now or never. I felt pumped, confident. I had a point to make.
I dipped my throwaway ohashi into the water glass as I’d seen others do. I pinched together a wad of noodles, brought them to my waiting mouth, and released the noodles as I inhaled full-force to issue the audio accompaniment.
Because I was sucking in the noodles at high speed, I was certain my audience couldn’t help but be impressed by the masterful sluurrrrppping sound.
Along with that thought, I felt hot wet noodles slapping into my cheeks, chin and nose. I wanted to disappear. The laughter was deafening. It sounded like all of Kyoto was howling at me.
I dared to look up. TV audience: canned laughter.
Despite all my slurping and whiplash injuries, nobody had noticed?
I tried to visualize what went wrong. And there, in my mind’s eye, I saw my error. The fatal flaw in my ohashi technique.
Yes, I had eaten soup noodles: ramen, soba, udon. But I had never sucked them in so hard that the loose ends defied gravity, whipping upward and outward and, since there was no place else to go, ending their short flights by crash-landing all over the gaijin’s smug face.
Lesson learned. When you release the noodles, keep the chopsticks raised to form a closed pathway, forcing the loose noodles to behave in a civilized fashion.
My next inhale was accident-free. By the time I finished the bowl, I was vacuuming up ramen like a pro.
I thanked the gods of Japan, all eight million of them, and the Sakasama Show, for my good luck in not being the only entertainment in the restaurant.
But what if my “audience” in fact had noticed but quickly looked away? Then I was also thankful for a code of manners that frowns on laughing at the idiocy of some foreigners — at least while they are within earshot.
And … okay … I’ll admit it … I was most grateful for the lesson in humility.
The ramen, by the way, was excellent.
