Ramen Guide: How to find the best ramen in Japan?
Your quest of finding the best ramen in Japan might lead you here to Kinryu, a tsukemen ramen shop near Tokyo station.
It’s one of the most common questions for anyone sharing any kind of information and content about ramen in Japan: What is the best ramen?
This question comes in various forms and variants:
What is the best ramen restaurant in Japan/Tokyo?
What is the best ramen style?
What are your top 5 ramen restaurants?
What ramen restaurant is a must go-to?
How do I find the best ramen?
The question “what is the best ramen?” can be compared to the question “what is the best sandwich?”. How would one answer that? Is a BLT better than a grilled cheese? Or is the hot dog the superior sandwich? Is it even a sandwich? The answer is always: it depends.
It depends on your preferences, it depends on where you are, it depends on your knowledge of the subject.
Considerations for ramen recommendations
The same goes for ramen. How should I give recommendations for ramen restaurants? I would not recommend the same place to someone going for their first bowl of ramen and to someone who has been eating ramen regularly for years. There’s many factors to consider when recommending a ramen restaurant:
Accessibility: is this place easily accessible or is it in the middle of nowhere? (looking at you, Yotsuba and Zundbar)
Wait times: They range from sit down as you arrive to things like standing 2 hours in front of the shop or getting up in the morning to wait in line at 7am to eat at lunch time. Nowadays some shops even require reservations a week in advance, which are sold out within minutes. (Examples: Ida Shouten and Tomita Matsudo)
Simplicity and complexity: Some shops go over the top with either how simple their ramen bowls are and others how they pack them with complexity. Having an extremely simple bowl that maybe showcases one specific ingredient might be terribly boring as a first ramen bowl. On the other hand, very complex bowls might be hard to appreciate, especially as they are often combined with a lot of effort to get them, including long wait times, far out location or a combination of both. They also sometimes seem too extreme and outrageous for the uninitiated, Jiro style bowls come to mind as an example.
So if the answer is “it depends”, how can one go about getting recommendations for ramen restaurants to visit when coming to Japan or a specific city in Japan?
It is difficult to end up at the top ramen shops without recommendations. Too many people end up in tourist traps and chain ramen spots.
How to get ramen shop recommendations
Let’s take a look at some ways to get recommendations:
Ramen nerds on Social Media
Follow “ramen people” on Social Media, mainly Instagram. There’s tons of people eating and sharing bowls online. See where they eat and add the locations in a list on Google Maps. Here’s an short list of suggestions:
And last but not least: Namajapantv
Three’s many many many more. Maybe I’ll one day make a “complete” list of all recommendable ramen heads out there.
Don’t be shy, reach out to ramen nerds!
Message the aforementioned people and ask directly for a ramen recommendation. You will get an answer from most of them with a day or two. Tell them the style you like and give a rough location where you would like to eat ramen. Or mention clearly if you don’t have a lot of experience with ramen and give a location, all of them will be able to help you out.
Ramen Magazines
If you speak Japanese or have Google Translate app skills (lol), get your hands on the Ramen Walker and TRY (Tokyo Ramen of the Year) magazines. There’s usually an annual Tokyo version and local versions for other areas, however less frequently. Having both magazines gives you a good “lay of the land”, as both have their biases in some ways, be it certain shops, styles or locations.
The Ramen Beast App
Check the ramen beast app for your phone. There should be at least some good ramen recommendations for all areas in and around Tokyo, plus some spots beyond Tokyo. It is currently only available for iPhone.
Ramen YouTubers
Check out ramen youtubers. My advice would be to avoid general foodtubers who visit Japan for a week or so, as they often go to the tourist trap places or the ones with the best overseas marketing such as Ichiran, Ippudo and so on.
Here are some English speaking suggestions:
Here are some Japanese speaking recommendations:
Ramen Blogs
Ramen blogs are also a great alternative to the social media stuff to find the best ramen. In that space, Ramenguidejapan and Ramenadventures are probably top rank, followed by 5amramen and then maybe the ramen blog you are on right now. If you search for the best ramen in a specific place or a specific style, you will often find one of these blogs within the top 10 results. Go with the shop/shops mentioned in there to eat at the best ramen shops possible.
Tabelog “Hyakumeiten” Top 100 Ramen Shops
The Tabelog top 100 ramen shop list is also a great guide if you start from zero. While a couple of the stores might leave some question marks above the heads of ramen nerds, the list is mostly solid and there aren’t any terrible ramen stores or “clear mistakes” on there. A lot of ramen heads have set themselves the goal to eat at all 100 best ranked ramen shops, which are of course changing every year, so you’re never really done eating. This is probably the easiest list to follow if you want to eat at the best ramen shops in Japan.
The Michelin Guide for Ramen
The Michelin guide list of ramen restaurants with stars and Bib Gourmand awards are an ok list too, even though it hey heavily skew towards refined shio and shoyu bowls. Again, there aren’t any terrible shops in there, but some might not have been among the first picks of some ramen heads.
Ramen Database
Ramen Database is the (Japanese language only) tool for all advanced ramen heads and the best kept secret to finding the truly best ramen in Japan. You will often see a great difference in rating between Ramen Database, Tabelog and Google Maps. While unfriendly service and scolding customers might get you 1 star on Google Maps, it might increase your rating on Ramen Database. The scores are quite reliable in the bigger cities, but get quite unreliable and random when out in the countryside where shops might only have a handful of reviews.
Last but not least, the Japanese speaking trove of information is basically endless. Japanese blogs, Twitter, Facebook Groups, etc., I’ll probably have to dig a bit deeper into all this myself to talk about it with some authority.
A great recommendation for most ramen hungry visitors of Tokyo, Ramen Hayashida has multiple shops in Tokyo now.
Tokyo Top Shop Recommendations
With all that being said, I still want to leave some ramen recommendations here for the very busy people coming to Tokyo. I’ve picked three locations that almost every visitor will make a stop at and shops that can make you go “that is the best ramen I ever had!”.
Tokyo station
Ramen beginner: Matsudo Tomita Menban in KITTE shopping center next to Tokyo station. Legendary tsukemen, just not prepared by Tomita-san himself (those you only get at the Tomita Matsudo main store)
Ramen head: Menya Shichisai. Get yourself some awesome Kitakata style ramen.
Akihabara
Ramen beginner: Do the words spicy and miso together sound great to you? Then don’t pass on the super famous Kikanbo and get yourself some spicy miso ramen.
Ramen head: Hard to pick one, so I’ll just mention two. If you’re into refined bowls of shio and shoyu, Mendokoro Honda is the place to be in Akihabara. For some old school shoyu ramen with a great ginger zing, make a stop at Aoshima Shokudo.
Shinjuku
Ramen beginner: It’s hard to overstate how eye opening the shoyu chicken ramen at Ramen Hayashida is. Must try in Shinjuku before you consider anything else.
Ramen head: Tons of options. But Housenka stands out with their seabream based ramen as something that you will have difficulty finding outside of Japan.
That’s all the recommendations I would like to share here for now. If you want to get more, check out this ramen blog in depth, my YouTube ramen channel or just message me directly on my Instagram @namajapantv
