The Ramen Museum
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Last Sunday was a rainy day, so we made a trip we’d been saving for a bad weather day: the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum. The museum section on the first floor is actually much less than what you’d expect based on the description at the page I just linked to. It consisted of a few modest displays, and then a shop selling every kind of ramen related merchandise you can think of.
The lower level is more interesting: it’s a one block, two story re-creation of what Tokyo was like in the 1950s (or, perhaps, a rose-tinted version of what it was like). It has 8 ramen shops, a candy shop, and a game shop. Kai loaded up on 50s-era candies and particularly enjoyed the pop gun game. Unfortunately, it seems that everyone else in Tokyo and Yokohama had the same idea we did on this rainy day, as the place was absolutely mobbed. All the ramen shops had a wait of at least an hour – a wait that we couldn’t ask the boys to endure.
So we left feeling a bit defeated, having visited the Ramen Museum and not eaten any ramen! But on the way back to the train station we stopped at a ramen shop that had no wait, and was really fantastic. I’ve never been a big fan of ramen, but this bowl was delicious. It was shoyo ramen (which means the broth was soy sauce based) with a lot of chili sauce. It made me sweat profusely, causing me to turn into an ice cube when we ventured back out into the cold, wet weather. For me it was a lesson in why spicy food recipes all come from countries with warm climates.
