Instant ramen noodles constituted a formative brick of my collegiate food pyramid. I will admit eating many a pack of chicken-, sometimes beef- flavored Maruchan Ramen back in the day, bought for pennies apiece and flavored with a salty powder included in a foil square reminiscent of a wrapped condom.
In my adult life, ramen ranks among my favored home remedies of tempering a sinus headache. I hold my face close over the hot steam as the noodles boil, then fork down the gunk to rebalance my electrolytes and ease my fatigue, or something like that.
My sense before tonight of eating ramen in an actual ramen establishment seems informed by dystopic sci-fi movies1. In The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s been fired. In Blade Runner, Harrison Ford learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s being arrested by Edward James Olmos. “He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard,” quoth the wizened Asian ramen-vendor. “He say you Blade Runner.”
Taking place in a futuristic Los Angeles (“November, 2019”), Blade Runner visually adds, as I think William Gibson has, that you must eat your ramen while wearing an overcoat and seated at a counter of a stall-like street vendor, beneath a florescent-lit awning, as around you, the cold rain pours and crowds mill by under umbrellas with rods that appear to be light sabers.
Well, it was dark and cold and rainy tonight, and New York, at least the East Village, is probably as grittily deteriorated a match to Los Angeles 2019, so I took the L east then walked over, under my unlit umbrella, to Ramen Setagaya, an outpost of a Japanese noodle chain. There are a scant few tables for two and I sat at the narrow counter on a black-lacquered wooden stool. I was only about two feet away from the two cooks, who scurried about the tiny kitchen preparing dishes in clouds of fragrant steam. Each gentleman wore a yellow T-shirt printed with the chain’s logo and, oddly, had a white terry-cloth hand-towel wrapped around his head and tied in the back, as if he’d just exited a shower.
A flat-screen TV near the entrance looped a bewildering array of cooking shows, gameshows, commercials and promotional videos, all of which seemed to feature Setagaya ramen, and none of which had subtitles or a lick of English otherwise. After calling for a Sapporo, I started out with the Oshinko pickled vegetables, none of which I recognized but all three of which were tasty. For my noodles, I opted for the pork BBQ salt ramen (or “cha-syu-men,” according to the mostly Japanese menu, unless that’s actually a pronunciation guide). The tender, thin-sliced pork floated in a rich noodle broth of various chopped vegetables, seaweed and half of a soft-boiled egg with a vibrant yellow, goopy yolk, floating there like a lifeboat.
Unless this is a prank on Westerners, I’m told that in Japan it is good manners to slurp one’s noodles, as if to audibly yet nonverbally complement the chef. Suspicious of this, I ate mine silently and with a minimum of wet whiplash, although two Asian gentlemen down the counter to my right were consistently and noisily Hoovering in large tangles from their bowls. A sideways glance revealed that, with noodles dangling from their faces, they resembled Cthulhu and his “awful squid-head with writhing feelers.”
All told, and as expected, much heartier and tastier ramen than those dehydrated bricks from my youth, and better yet, nothing bad happened to me during my meal, unless you count that giant puddle I accidentally stepped in on First Avenue afterwards.
Ramen Setagaya
- 141 First Ave. (between St. Marks Place and East 9th Street)
- (212) 529-2740
- Meal 34 of 52: pickled vegetables ($2), pork BBQ ramen ($11) and a bottle of Sapporo ($4).
1 I’ve seen Tampopo, but I’m going to conveniently ignore that here. [back]