Day 16: Kumamoto Ramen

Of all the ramen I’ve eaten so far this trip, this bowl of Kumamoto-style ramen I had (in Kumamoto) may have been my favourite.

Kumamoto prefecture is on the island of Kyushu which is famous as the home of tonkotsu ramen, with a broth made from pork bones simmered over a long period of time. The soup is silky, almost creamy in consistency and opaque in colour; it often smells really strongly of pork (almost so much so that it stinks) but the taste is something completely different, rich, salty, savoury, one of the best things known to man.

It was my first time in Kumamoto and my first time couchsurfing and I’d just spent an afternoon wandering around Kumamoto Castle in the rain with my host, a Salinger-loving, noodle-eating girl around my age called Moegi who loves ramen maybe even more than I do (she earned my respect very early on in our conversation when she said “I could eat ramen every day and be happy!”). I asked her to take me to her favourite ramen shop and we went to this place just off the main shopping street. Stupidly, I forgot to write down the name. I think it was Tatsu no Ya.

We ordered two bowls of their Kumamoto ramen. Big, steamy bowls heaving with oil-laden soup arrived not long after. It was a glorious sight: viscous-looking opaque tonkotsu broth with a layer of rich, dark ma-yu (burnt garlic oil) floating on top. And when we tasted a spoonful of the soup both Moegi and I let out a squeal of ramen-lovers’ delight: holy shit this was good.

Unlike other versions of tonkotsu ramen (which can be intensely rich), this Kumamoto ramen had a broth that was at once kotteri (strong, thick with rich umami flavour) and assari (light, salty, almost refreshing). The garlic oil and fried garlic chips floating atop the soup gave it just the right amount of allium-y pungency. The pork was fattier than any I’ve had in any other ramen – it practically melted into the soup. And the noodles – square-cut, straight, medium-thick, slightly chewy – if I were Moegi and I lived in Kumamoto I’d want to eat them every day, too.

On the table were three jars of condiments: pickled takana greens, ginger and delicious, lightly pickled chilli bean sprouts that we kept greedily adding to our bowls until the jar was nearly empty.

Very good. I’ll remember this one for a long time.

Day 14: champon in Nagasaki

A weird thing happened to me when I got to Nagasaki.

It didn’t take long. I got off the train and something felt a bit funny, a bit familiar, like I’d been there before. (I hadn’t). I looked out the window of the place I was staying, out at some glimmering water and hills in the distance. Again, that funny feeling – what was it, comfort? deja vu? – and then it passed.

I went out for a walk along the waterfront, and remembered someone once told me Nagasaki’s a bit like Wellington. Yep, I could see it: the way the hills wrapped around the glittering harbour, the sun reflecting off the houses stacked up on the hills, a cool wind cutting through the afternoon sun (though it may have just been the weather on that particular day). I went up to the lookout atop Inasa-yama and I swear I could’ve been up Mt Vic: the shape of the harbour below, the houses creeping up the opposite hillside, even a mammoth building of some sort where Te Papa should’ve been, all very much Wellington and not-Wellington all at once. Yep, weird.

To a Wellingtonian, Nagasaki feels so eerily familiar that you’re second-guessing yourself every time you glance over your shoulder: am I really in a foreign place? If I just keep walking along the waterfront this way, won’t I be home? It’s unnerving, though not in an unpleasant way.

Maybe what happens is your subconscious recollection of shapes and colours of city and landscape triggers your muscle memory, puts your mind at ease and relaxes your body a bit, you’re okay, it tells you, you know where you’re going. Except you don’t know at all where you’re going, you’re in a totally new place, a place you’ve never been before. When you then squint your eyes a little bit and look at the details, you realise those houses on that hill aren’t at all the old villas on Mt Vic, that that ship in the harbour isn’t going to Picton, that waterfront cafe is selling takoyaki and soft-serve, not flat whites and gelato, you know it’s not quite right. Then your just-relaxed mind has to work twice as hard to remind yourself: you’re in a totally new place, keep your wits about you, you’re nowhere close to home. It’s confusing. It’s tiring.

And then it happens: a tightening of the heart, a lump in the throat, an overwhelmingly woeful sensation of solitariness. Homesickness. It hit me in Nagasaki, hard, and I haven’t really been able to shake it since then.

The good thing, though, about being homesick, tired and cold, is that it’s the perfect state to really enjoy a good bowl of noodles. They’re hot! Comforting! Delicious! All very good things for a weary traveller.

Nagasaki is famous for its champon noodles, a kind-of-Chinese noodle soup with seafood and stir-fried vegetables in an almost creamily opaque soup. The story of its origin goes something like this: sometime around the late 19th century, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in Nagasaki invented the noodle dish as a cheap, filling student dish for the influx of Chinese students in Nagasaki at the time. It grew in popularity and is now one of the foods that is synonymous with Nagasaki.

Because of the dish’s Chinese roots, a lot of the places serving champon in Nagasaki are Chinese restaurants, especially concentrated in Nagasaki’s little Chinatown district that spans a few blocks not far from the harbour.

It’s hard to differentiate between each restaurant – they’re lined up one after the other – but I picked this one called Kozanro, after reading about it on a few Japanese websites (also, many of the other places had already closed for the night).

I slipped in three or four minutes before last order was called. It was a Chinese restaurant in the old Japanese style of Chinese restaurant, like all the rest in the area: big garish gate over the entrance, formal, hotel lobby-like reception area, starkly lit dining room that smells of stale newspapers and soy sauce, baroque music piped in through the stereo. Almost everyone around was slurping bowls of noodles. Excellent.

My bowl arrived pretty quickly. As I jotted in my little notebook after tasting the soup: “first impressions: holy shit this is good.” The soup is opaque, milky, more substantial than a broth, it has an almost-silky texture. It’s rich and salty and packed with umami, I thought I detected hints of pork and maybe chicken. I’d never had anything quite like it before, but it somehow tasted familiar. Curious.

On top of the noodles were fish cakes, pork, prawns, littleneck clams, squid, a fried pork meatball, a mix of stir-fried vegetables like bean sprouts, cabbage, shiitake. The noodles themselves were chewy with a reasonably high moisture content, round and a bit thicker than spaghetti.

Unlike a lot of noodle places in Japan, here there were no condiments at the table except a lone shaker full of finely ground pepper, which added an almost smoky complexity. Very good.

It’s an interesting dish. I’d never had anything quite like it before, but at the same time it tastes oddly familiar, almost like ramen, but still quite a thing of its own class. It was a bit confusing, like Nagasaki itself, but really, really good.

Day 13, part 2: aasa soba at Nakamura Soba

Before I came to Okinawa I’d looked up this place as they’re meant to be pretty famous for their Okinawa soba. But I’d completely forgotten about it. We were driving back from Sesoko Island to Naha and, on a whim, I turned off the Route 58 bypass onto a little road heading down to the sea, to the old Route 58, thinking it’d be more scenic, and right there as we rounded the corner to a view of sparkling azure waters was a generic squareish building with big lettering on the front: なかむらそば. I didn’t even remember the name of the place but something about the façade looked familiar so I swung the Vitz* around. This was the place, exactly where I wanted to be on my last day in Okinawa, last chance for Okinawa soba.

You order at a ticket vending machine (hadn’t seen one of those since Tokyo!) and there was a choice between a few different kinds of soba: regular Okinawa soba, with sliced, stewed pork, so-ki soba with slow-cooked ribs, Nakamura Soba’s specialty, a soba topped with bite-sized pieces of pork, chilled Okinawa soba. But I saw a sign recommending the aasa soba, made with a kind of light green seaweed that’s common around these parts. So I put in my coins, got my ticket, a few minutes later I was sitting at a window overlooking the East China Sea with a steaming bowl of noodles.

Floating on top of the soup was a thick layer of what sort of looks like algae but, I can assure you, tasted just fine: fresh and slippery and a little bit briny. Aasa is a type of seaweed I hadn’t heard of before coming to Okinawa but it featured heavily in a lot of the food we ate there, in salads and miso soups and sauces. Texturally, it’s not substantial – it’s almost ethereal, almost disappearing into each mouthful – and taste-wise, too, it doesn’t have a huge presence. But it adds a little something, a little freshness that goes really well with stronger flavours. Plus it’s really good for you. So, there’s my long explanation of aasa.

The noodles themselves were jikasei, or made in-house, and for this particular dish only, they make a special soba with aasa kneaded into the dough. The noodles were pale green and flat, a perfect texture, a normal flavour with just a little hint of weediness.

The pork was really excellent: falling-apart tender, slightly sweet, a little bit fatty, a little bit juicy. Next time I think I would add on extra pieces. Very good.

The soup had a clean, assari flavour, a little salty and a little mellow all at once. I added a splash of the bottled kooreeguusu (chilli vinegar) at the table and it added a little sharp acidity and just a tiny bit of heat that offset the sweeter tones. It was meant to be.

Now I’m off to Kyushu where there is no more Okinawa soba (but there will be plenty of ramen!!). Pretty happy I came across this one last bowl before i left. It was a good one.

Sayonara, soba. Until next time, Okinawa. Farewell, you beautiful place.

*our trusty rental car. It was my first time driving in Japan. I didn’t crash once (though there were a few near misses between Vitz and some concrete walls when I got stuck in the narrowest of streets in a little village at the tip of Okinawa)!

Day 12: somen champuru

I wasn’t that excited about this somen champuru when it arrived at the table a steaming lump of gloggy, pale noodles.

I’d ordered it because I’d tried a couple different kinds of champuru – Okinawan stir-fry, often made with goya (bitter gourd) or tofu or green papaya – and wanted to see how the angel-hair-thin somen noodles stood up to the treatment. Also I’m a big fan of somen in its more common forms: served cold and dipped in a soy-dashi broth, or warm in a noodle soup.

Other champuru I’d eaten had a mix of vegetables and meat, but this just came out dotted here and there with a bit of green, a bit of canned tuna. Okay then. It looked like the noodles were all clumped together, maybe a bit mushy, and at first it tasted exactly how it looked. A bit… unexciting.

So I pushed it aside for a little while and focused on the rest of the food we’d ordered at this local izakaya we’d come to on the recommendation of our innkeeper. Everything else was delicious: a platter of incredibly fresh, tender sashimi, a little bowl of mozuku seaweed in rice vinegar, a plate of mustard greens stir-fried with tofu and kamaboko, some “it’s not on the menu, but since you asked” chawanmushi that was exceedingly soft and creamy and full of chicken and mushrooms and prawns: very very good.

And then, towards the end, I started picking at my noodles, now cold. And! What a marvel! They were not only perfectly edible, but almost kind of good. Cooled off, they’d lost some of their steamy glugginess; they were no longer stuck together in a big gluey clump, but rather, each noodle existed as its own individual entity, coated in a delicate seasoning of salt and white pepper and sesame oil. Yes, quite all right, actually. I finished the lot.

Day 11: a close one

This was a close call. On this day, only 11 days into this strangers and noodles project, I didn’t talk to any strangers. I almost didn’t eat any noodles. I almost failed at this blog. (yikes!)

What I’ve realised about travelling around in a rental car, with someone else: it’s really easy to get into a happy little observe-y bubble where you look a lot but don’t talk to anyone else except each other, and the odd waiter or cashier. It’s hard to strike up a conversation with someone who looks interesting when you’re not-quite-whizzing by them at 40km/hr (some of those speed limits in Okinawa, man…). And when you’re in a kind of touristy place most people tend to stick together in their own little bubbles, too.

On this day it was raining in the far north of Okinawa, the weather had changed, a bit stormy for swimming, so we drove around all day in our rental car bubble, to the wild northern tip of the island and back to the semi-metropolis of parking-lotted and pachinko-parloured Nago. And because the place we were staying (more on that later) came with two extravagantly-portioned, incredibly delicious meals a day, I really could not find it in me to stop for lunch. (Neither could mum, don’t worry, I wasn’t forcibly trying to starve her.)

But what I did feel like was pineapple, even if it meant going to a highly kitschy pineapple theme park (once your eyes get used to all the yellow and green, it’s kind of okay – the tackiness is definitely part of the attraction) for their all-you-can-eat pineapple. So we did that. And ate our fill. And didn’t talk to anyone, really (the other visitors were mostly tour-busloads that got whisked along, anyway).

But at the very end of the pineapple park there were a few stands selling local produce – the usual mozuku and sea grapes and the like – and one of the guys there was offering samples of mozuku udon. Phew. No longer failing at the blog.

I didn’t really pay attention to the taste, or texture, or anything like that. What I do recall is that it was hot, savoury relief after eating two platefuls of fresh pineapple and sampling every possible kind of pineapple-related food and beverage product a human could think of. Thank you, quiet udon seller. I’m sorry I didn’t buy any of your wares to take home.

Day 10: rest stop so-ki soba

This was just a really honest, simple bowl of Okinawa soba.

We’d rented a car in Naha and had been driving north all day and it was about four in the afternoon and we had no idea where to get lunch, and the further north we got the less places to eat there were, and places were closed, and sometimes it seemed too hard to turn the car around just to check out a place that might not be open, so in late-afternoon hunger and frustration we finally pulled into the michi no eki in Kunigami, a rest stop on the side of Route 58.

I didn’t expect much, but at least there was a place selling noodles, and it was open. I got the so-ki soba, with a big hunk of pork floating on top.

The noodles were definitely not handmade, the soup was probably msg-laden, but damn. It was good. The pork substantial and well-seasoned throughout, both tender and lean all at once, the soup refreshingly clear and salty, I inhaled the bowl in a few minutes. I would not expect this quality of food at a highway rest stop, ever. But Japan constantly defies these expectations. Damn. Yum.

Day 9, Part 2: a party for Murata-san (Noodles with strangers, #2)

At lunchtime, mum got to talking to Wayama-san, the owner of the mozuku soba place. Usually we’re closed at dinnertime, he said, but tonight it’s the birthday of one of our regulars, and he’s shipped in all this steak: (he showed us a room full of boxes and boxes of meat), so we’ve invited some friends for a party of sorts, it’s 1500 yen per person (about NZ$25), you two should come along, it’ll be fun, I’ve prepared plenty of beer, wine and awamori.

So after an afternoon of swimming at Furuzamami beach we showered and went over to the mozuku place where, sure enough, a crowd had gathered, a barbecue of sorts had been set up in a big metal drum, the aroma of grilled meat wafted through the air, drawing us in.

It quickly became clear that although they were collecting money this wasn’t a party for just anyone; these people all seemed to know each other, either through living and working on the island (plenty of dive instructors and lifeguards) or because of friendships they’ve made by coming to Zamami again and again.

It was Murata-san’s birthday and he was the one who’d sent down about NZ$1500 worth of steak to Wayama-san, asking nothing in return except a party everyone could enjoy. Murata-san comes to Zamami to dive five or six times a year, and seems to know everyone there. The gathered crowd burst into a cheer when he arrived: Murata! Murata!

There was barbecued steak, served Korean-style with spicy sauces and gochujang and lettuce leaves to wrap it all, there was kimchi-cured dried squid that Murata-san had made himself, there was chicken and sausages and stir-fried vegetables, fried egg with agu (what’s agu? I asked the girl sitting next to me. Agu is pig, she said, Okinawan pig, and it’s really really good. She was right), and, for the tenuous link to this blog, there was yakisoba. Not the light, almost-delicate yakisoba of the night before, but the kind I’m more used to: thick, strongly flavoured, almost gluggy with a sweet soy sauce, noodles almost overcooked, served with plenty of shredded nori and red pickled ginger, it matched perfectly with my beer.

There was a birthday song, and a birthday cake, with candles the wind kept blowing out before Murata-san could. There’s no cake shop on the island, someone said, so one of the young mothers (lots of kids at this party) made it from scratch. It looked and tasted exquisite: light and fluffy and full of whipped cream and fruit.

The mayor of Zamami was there. He said the challenge for him is to keep people on the island, because there’s no high school so a lot of the time when the oldest kid in a family reaches high school age they’ll either go to the honto themselves and rent an apartment in Naha, or the mother will go with them, taking the younger children along, leaving the father behind. And most of the time when they go, they don’t come back, it’s more convenient, more exciting in the city after all. Do you have kids, we asked. Yes, he said, and his oldest’s gone across to Naha for high school, she’s in an apartment by herself, as a parent it’s hard. He wants to set up a system, maybe a dormitory or something in Naha for the kids of Zamami so that whole families don’t move across, so that the island population doesn’t dip even lower. But there’s a lot of red tape, he said.

After that there was too much Orion beer and awamori and chilled red wine and resulting nonsensical conversation for me to write down all the details here, but here are some photos I took:

Day 9: Mozuku soba

This one was really good.

In Okinawa, and on Zamami Island in particular, there’s a type of long, thin, edible seaweed called mozuku. (Actually I think it’s pretty widespread all over Japan – you can buy it in little packs at the supermarket – but it’s harvested around here). They come in strands, like slippery little noodles, and are often eaten cold in a rice vinegar dressing, sometimes with a bit of lemon, really refreshing. And good for you too: they’re a good source of fibre, and vitamins and minerals, especially iron.

At the far end of Zamami village, near a stream flowing into the port, is this little open-air mozuku shop called Wayama Mozuku. They’re only open for lunch, and they only serve a few things: Okinawa soba, with mozuku kneaded into the noodle dough, rice and pork (the rice cooked together with mozuku), and fresh mozuku in rice vinegar. Mum and I went there at lunchtime, in between a swim at Ama beach and another swim at Furuzamami beach, and ordered one of everything, except they’d just run out of fresh mozuku for the day, zannen. It must’ve been popular.

Even without the fresh mozuku the rest of the food was really good. My Okinawa soba, topped with sliced pork and kamaboko and red pickled ginger was deeply fragrant, the light, clear broth carrying the distinct umami flavour of katsuo (bonito), savoury and just faintly sweet.

The noodles were a light grey-ish colour and just a tad earthy-tasting from the mozuku kneaded into the dough, and their twisty-ridgy shape suggests they’d been hand-cut, none of this machine-made uniformity here. They were at once slippery and firm, with a good bite; the slightly irregular shape seemed to carry more flavour with each slurp. This dish, guys: a textural odyssey in your mouth.

The toppings were pretty standard as far as Okinawa soba goes, but the sliced pork was well-seasoned and a good balance between fat and meat.

On the table there were some bottles (one homemade, one commercially bottled) of Okinawan chilli vinegar, a recommended condiment for soba. I added some: it wasn’t too hot, just a little tingly and sour from the vinegar. Yum.

After this, mum got to talking to Wayama-san, the owner, who invited us to a party of sorts. But that’s a story for the next post. Stay tuned!

Day 8, Part 2: squid ink yakisoba

This plate of yakisoba was at a little local izakaya / restaurant in the little town on Zamami island*. The name of the place is Umi-batake which translates to “sea field” or “sea farm”. During the day they’re a noodle shop and at night they turn into an izakaya with lots of little dishes to choose from,** including a full page of different variations on yakisoba.

On the owner’s recommendation I got the ikasumi yakisoba, a plate full of stir-fried squid ink noodles, vegetables, the ubiquitous spam (Okinawa is practically Hawaii or a Pacific island in this regard).

Visually, the dish was striking – a stark contrast of the inky black noodles against the white bean sprouts especially, but also the rest of the only lightly cooked, still just-crunchy vegetables – onions, green capsicum, thin strips of shaved carrots.

The noodles themselves were thick and flat, linguine-like; I suspect they’re the same noodles used in Okinawa soba. They were perfectly cooked – just a little chewy – and I thought I could detect a little brininess in the flavour, though it was hard to tell.

Some yakisoba you get in Japan can be really strongly flavoured, with soy sauce or a thick, sweetish yakisoba sauce. This one, though, was what you’d call assari – lightly flavoured with just a little salt (and perhaps just a bit of soy sauce), almost refreshing. It was really easy to eat. Oishikatta!

*it was really surprising that a place as small as Zamami (island population 645, no idea about the actual village but somewhat less) had so much really good food – we weren’t disappointed the whole time – but I guess there is enough diving tourism in the area to support all the restaurants and izakaya.

**other things we had, and really enjoyed: daikon salad, cucumber and local (raw) octopus marinated in kimchi, mozuku (a type of local sea vegetable) in a light rice vinegar, rice cooked in squid ink. All very, very good.

Day 6: Okinawa soba, an initiation

Okinawa soba. Uchinaa-suba. Or, in Okinawa, often called simply soba. It’s not soba as you or I know it; the noodles are made of wheat instead of buckwheat, the broth is a light, porky, salty soup and it’s topped with a big, fatty hunk of slow-cooked pork. I’m in Okinawa for the first time, and though I’ve eaten a lot of Japanese food in my life Okinawan food is mostly new to me.

My first bowl of Okinawa soba was from Kanouya (I think), a lively little Okinawan restaurant around the corner from our hotel in Naha. I’d just flown in, ravenous after a flight delay and a dull three-hour flight, and my mum (who had flown in on an earlier flight and eaten here for lunch) recommended this little place close by.

The restaurant is actually most famous for their prawns – we had some cold in a salad, and hot off the grill – but they also have a range of typical Okinawan dishes, and from this I chose the Okinawa so-ki soba, Okinawa soba with a big, fatty, boneless chunk of pork rib meat floating on top.

This is the perfect stamina-giving meal for someone doing physical labour or coming off a long flight: filling, fatty, but not too rich, the noodles satisfying to slurp, the broth packed full of flavour. It was a bit different from anything I’d tasted, but somehow familiar at the same time: a full-bodied smoky sweetness, rich with umami, with globules of pork fat floating on top.

(Now I understand ‘globules of pork fat’ might put some people off, but they really did add to the overall satisfaction levels I experienced eating this soup, and if you really wanted to, you could avoid them…)

The pork was falling-apart tender, very fatty, but again you could just pick off the meat if you wanted to. The noodles were thick and flat, almost linguine-like; they seemed to have been made from dried rather than fresh noodles but I’ll forgive Kanouya that, they are a prawn shop after all.