I have never yet been to Japan, but whenever I visit a big city, I try a ramen shop. To be honest, so far it has been a let down. IDK, I guess maybe I'm expecting too much from a bowl of soup, with noodles and condiments. As a form factor, it's genius. But for the price that it is usually sold at in western cities, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I feel like it has been a bit too overhyped for what it is.
BTW, you can also replicate the form factor using western cooking ingredients/traditions and it still works pretty well.
That’s true in my experience, but Ramen in Japan is actually considerably better. The only good Ramen I ever had in Europe was in Düsseldorf but the owner imports pork from Japan.
I was actually surprised by the selection of cities in the OP until I learned that the author is the director of AI at der Spiegel. Related to the other comments on the 3D: maybe this can evolve to some gaussian splatting/diffusion world model thing...
agreed. i think the economics of ramen make less sense outside of japan, where it’s more expensive and turnaround is slower because folks linger longer (often to amortize the cost of waiting to get seated in the first place).
In Düsseldorf that’s not the case. The Japanese restaurant are very distinctly less chill than other restaurants. Like, where you’d usually spend 3 hours in a normal restaurant, it is kinda expected that you eat and leave a Ramen shop within an hour.
San Francisco is an example of a place with higher than average Japanese population where you have a chance of getting some really good authentic stuff. I recently ate at a place that caught my eye with chicken katsu curry, and that meal teleported me back to Japan.
I've been to Japan - the first cheap buy-and-nuke-at-home ramen from the konbini around the corner I ate there completely blew me away (†)! It was decisively better than what I would realistically expect to get in a restaurant in the west. I don't know how they do it, but I learned never to underestimate the Japanese people’s dedication to their craft.
(†) For the curious, it was chāshū ramen.
Edit: To avoid confusion, I do not mean instant ramen, but a plastic bowl of chilled, pre-prepared take away ramen soup.
For most foreign dishes you can't just compare the total price to local food. I'm saying that having ordered pizza in Japan, and an actually good one with Buffala for instance will be twice to three times the price you'd pay in Italy.
Ramen chains managed by Japanese people are decently good when I tried them in France (Ippudo for instance), it's not that far from what's served in Japan. It costs 1.5x to 2x more, and the default orders will be slightly adapted to the locals (harder noodles and lower grease by default) but that's par for the course.
> BTW, you can also replicate the form factor using western cooking ingredients/traditions and it still works pretty well.
The toughest part is the sheer amount of time to prepare the soup and dexterity to get good noodles. Spending 8h on the soup with all the ingredients, and repeat I don't know how many times to get to a decent balance is a dedication I don't think I'll ever have to be honest.
Not everyone can fly to Italy for a pizza to save money! But seriously, pizza in most countries is horrible. When I lived in Ecuador the pizza had some really funky cheese. I'm not sure if you can even call it cheese. That's probably why it is almost impossible to order a plain cheese pizza. They are trying to cover it up with an assortment of vegetables and meats.
I don't think this is unique to Ramen at all. Burgers should not cost $20-30 for some limp smooshed beef, a burrito should also not be $15-20, and tacos should sure as hell not be $3-5 per tiny taco. It's all bullshit; none of that food is worth that money. But... I suspect it costs that much because people pay that much, and because the cost of every other aspect of service puts pressure on the restaurants to try to push the ceiling of what it's worth.
As a ramen lover, I try to take advantage of value oriented cheaper pricing when it's available.
As a relatively tall active man, I need to pregame restaurants with something more cost effective, and even still need to order 1.5 to 2x what everyone else does in order to feel satiated. (~82kg, 192cm)
At least ramen takes some time to eat. When I go into a standard burger place nowadays, it takes me literally 20 seconds sometimes to finish a $20+ burger, and then I'm just sitting there waiting for people to delicately nibble their way through what is a deeply overrated culinary experience, in many cases. Like c'mon, give me some damn food, I'll go get it myself.
I don’t know where you live, but in the Bay Area prices have exploded since COVID. I remember a decade ago when it was still possible to get a super burrito for under $10; in fact, the price was $7.75 for a carne asada super burrito at El Farolito in San Francisco. A burger was under $10, a deli sandwich was about $8-9, and tacos were around $1.50 at Taco Bell and no more than $3 at a proper taqueria. The prices weren’t cheap, but they never felt bank-breaking. Unfortunately prices have skyrocketed since COVID. Unfortunately my income hasn’t matched; I made the individually fulfilling but poor financial decision of pursuing a research career and not working for OpenAI/Anthropic/FAANG/NVIDIA. Thus, two years ago I quit eating out in the Bay Area, except when socializing. It’s sad making six figures and feeling priced out of dining out, just like I’m priced out of housing and RAM since I can’t compete with Big Tech. I now cook, which I guess is healthier but is also time-consuming.
Japan, on the other hand, is heaven for those with US dollars. A bowl of ramen is around ¥1,100 here (I’m here on a research visit), and they generally taste amazing! Even a Big Mac meal from McDonald’s is far cheaper than in the Bay Area.
> it takes me literally 20 seconds sometimes to finish a $20+ burger, and then I'm just sitting there waiting for people to delicately nibble their way through
Honestly, that sounds like a you problem. Maybe try eating instead of guzzling. You may even find time to enjoy the food.
It's almost like people have different taste in food!
It's also kind of a wild take "I have nearly zero experience in <thing from other culture> and I don't understand why people from that culture enjoy it"
Re price and prep
First, it's quite difficult to make. Try it, lol.. but by your admission you haven't had anything decent.
Second - in Japan, Ramen is mostly pretty cheap, a lot of places have a vending machine where you pay for a bowl and get a ticket with an order number. It's really not a fancy or pricey experience unless you're somewhere upmarket.
> But for the price that it is usually sold at in western cities
What are those prices specifically? In Barcelona (one of those western cities, imo) at a good ramen place, you get Gyozas for ~5 EUR, and a nice ramen for ~12-14 EUR, add a drink and you end up with ~20 EUR per person, which strikes me as relatively affordable for eating out, but maybe the metropolitan prices have biased me over time. Is this expensive/cheap compared to the other cities you've tried ramen in?
> BTW, you can also replicate the form factor using western cooking ingredients/traditions and it still works pretty well.
Isn't that just a stew at that point? How is it still ramen if you switch out all the ingredients and the broth that makes ramen ramen?
Besides fast food, isn't it always like that though? Of course Japanese food is cheaper in Japan, but I bet Spanish food is more expensive there than in Spain? Or Peruvian food being a lot more expensive in Europe compared to in Peru itself, it kind of makes sense.
Same as always, because people upvote it, probably it's interesting to a bunch of people.
> What to Submit - On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
New York City has great Ramen options. I find yelp rating a lot more indicative of the food quality than Google ratings.
Something that has seriously increased my trust in Yelp:
There's this one restaurant that has always been my favorite within 100s of miles and recently I noticed they had a top 100 in the USA poster for their cuisine on the outside from Yelp. It doesn't mention what rank specifically, just top 100. I look it up and they are in the top 10.
So I really have no idea how Yelp was able to figure out that this restaurant is so good and to rank it in a way I agree with. It could be just based on reviews because it does have close to 5 stars but regardless it's impressive.
So nice to see Bankara Ramen in Bangkok here - one of my favourite places, and you always see Japanese customers eating there, so you know it passes the local abroad trial :-)
Pre-Covid, this restaurant would regularly have queues down the street to get in. But it’s a small place. Basically the size of someone’s front room. Definitely worth a visit.
Kanada-Ya is a chain with at least 5 locations in London, and while they're fairly good, they're still somewhat focused on Deliveroo-type transactions.
It remains quite different from a genuine ramen shop in Japan.
this reminds me of a naive and happier time in tech, when i built a game called ramendan with twitter’s open API. you had to eat ramen every day for dinner, and tweet proof with the hashtag #ramendan, link to a photo (this was before twitter supported images), and geotag it so that we could make sure it was after sundown in your timezone.
Obviously, there can't be any movement, because it's just a single photograph - and if that were all, then perception would adjust accordingly.
But because of the rotation, suddenly movement is added back - only, the contents of the photo don't follow it, so the whole thing now looks like a plastic replica of a ramen dish instead of the real thing.
I agree. It's just the .jpeg rotating through css. It's inspired by (as mentioned on the website) rotatingsandwiches; those are actually 3D photographed (or filmed) with a fixed light source
This is probably the right place to remind beginners in the study of ramens, that basic knowledge can be acquired from the classic "Tampopo" movie.
Just the opening scene is must-know : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeVhZkbAc5k
:)
I have never yet been to Japan, but whenever I visit a big city, I try a ramen shop. To be honest, so far it has been a let down. IDK, I guess maybe I'm expecting too much from a bowl of soup, with noodles and condiments. As a form factor, it's genius. But for the price that it is usually sold at in western cities, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I feel like it has been a bit too overhyped for what it is.
BTW, you can also replicate the form factor using western cooking ingredients/traditions and it still works pretty well.
That’s true in my experience, but Ramen in Japan is actually considerably better. The only good Ramen I ever had in Europe was in Düsseldorf but the owner imports pork from Japan.
Düsselsorf is actually Japanese expats/migrants hotspot in Germany. Had great Japanese foos there on multiple occasions
Highest japanese population outside of Japan IIRC.
I was actually surprised by the selection of cities in the OP until I learned that the author is the director of AI at der Spiegel. Related to the other comments on the 3D: maybe this can evolve to some gaussian splatting/diffusion world model thing...
agreed. i think the economics of ramen make less sense outside of japan, where it’s more expensive and turnaround is slower because folks linger longer (often to amortize the cost of waiting to get seated in the first place).
In Düsseldorf that’s not the case. The Japanese restaurant are very distinctly less chill than other restaurants. Like, where you’d usually spend 3 hours in a normal restaurant, it is kinda expected that you eat and leave a Ramen shop within an hour.
There’s a surprisingly robust Asian restaurant scene within a few blocks of the train station there. I try to eat there every time I visit Drupa.
Happy you enjoyed the ramen in my home city!
San Francisco is an example of a place with higher than average Japanese population where you have a chance of getting some really good authentic stuff. I recently ate at a place that caught my eye with chicken katsu curry, and that meal teleported me back to Japan.
I've been to Japan - the first cheap buy-and-nuke-at-home ramen from the konbini around the corner I ate there completely blew me away (†)! It was decisively better than what I would realistically expect to get in a restaurant in the west. I don't know how they do it, but I learned never to underestimate the Japanese people’s dedication to their craft.
(†) For the curious, it was chāshū ramen.
Edit: To avoid confusion, I do not mean instant ramen, but a plastic bowl of chilled, pre-prepared take away ramen soup.
For most foreign dishes you can't just compare the total price to local food. I'm saying that having ordered pizza in Japan, and an actually good one with Buffala for instance will be twice to three times the price you'd pay in Italy.
Ramen chains managed by Japanese people are decently good when I tried them in France (Ippudo for instance), it's not that far from what's served in Japan. It costs 1.5x to 2x more, and the default orders will be slightly adapted to the locals (harder noodles and lower grease by default) but that's par for the course.
> BTW, you can also replicate the form factor using western cooking ingredients/traditions and it still works pretty well.
The toughest part is the sheer amount of time to prepare the soup and dexterity to get good noodles. Spending 8h on the soup with all the ingredients, and repeat I don't know how many times to get to a decent balance is a dedication I don't think I'll ever have to be honest.
Not everyone can fly to Italy for a pizza to save money! But seriously, pizza in most countries is horrible. When I lived in Ecuador the pizza had some really funky cheese. I'm not sure if you can even call it cheese. That's probably why it is almost impossible to order a plain cheese pizza. They are trying to cover it up with an assortment of vegetables and meats.
That's why you should try it in Japan.
I don't think this is unique to Ramen at all. Burgers should not cost $20-30 for some limp smooshed beef, a burrito should also not be $15-20, and tacos should sure as hell not be $3-5 per tiny taco. It's all bullshit; none of that food is worth that money. But... I suspect it costs that much because people pay that much, and because the cost of every other aspect of service puts pressure on the restaurants to try to push the ceiling of what it's worth.
As a ramen lover, I try to take advantage of value oriented cheaper pricing when it's available.
As a relatively tall active man, I need to pregame restaurants with something more cost effective, and even still need to order 1.5 to 2x what everyone else does in order to feel satiated. (~82kg, 192cm)
At least ramen takes some time to eat. When I go into a standard burger place nowadays, it takes me literally 20 seconds sometimes to finish a $20+ burger, and then I'm just sitting there waiting for people to delicately nibble their way through what is a deeply overrated culinary experience, in many cases. Like c'mon, give me some damn food, I'll go get it myself.
I don’t know where you live, but in the Bay Area prices have exploded since COVID. I remember a decade ago when it was still possible to get a super burrito for under $10; in fact, the price was $7.75 for a carne asada super burrito at El Farolito in San Francisco. A burger was under $10, a deli sandwich was about $8-9, and tacos were around $1.50 at Taco Bell and no more than $3 at a proper taqueria. The prices weren’t cheap, but they never felt bank-breaking. Unfortunately prices have skyrocketed since COVID. Unfortunately my income hasn’t matched; I made the individually fulfilling but poor financial decision of pursuing a research career and not working for OpenAI/Anthropic/FAANG/NVIDIA. Thus, two years ago I quit eating out in the Bay Area, except when socializing. It’s sad making six figures and feeling priced out of dining out, just like I’m priced out of housing and RAM since I can’t compete with Big Tech. I now cook, which I guess is healthier but is also time-consuming.
Japan, on the other hand, is heaven for those with US dollars. A bowl of ramen is around ¥1,100 here (I’m here on a research visit), and they generally taste amazing! Even a Big Mac meal from McDonald’s is far cheaper than in the Bay Area.
> it takes me literally 20 seconds sometimes to finish a $20+ burger, and then I'm just sitting there waiting for people to delicately nibble their way through
Honestly, that sounds like a you problem. Maybe try eating instead of guzzling. You may even find time to enjoy the food.
Spoiler alert: it's rent.
It's almost like people have different taste in food!
It's also kind of a wild take "I have nearly zero experience in <thing from other culture> and I don't understand why people from that culture enjoy it"
Re price and prep
First, it's quite difficult to make. Try it, lol.. but by your admission you haven't had anything decent.
Second - in Japan, Ramen is mostly pretty cheap, a lot of places have a vending machine where you pay for a bowl and get a ticket with an order number. It's really not a fancy or pricey experience unless you're somewhere upmarket.
I had a lousy burger in Japan.
> But for the price that it is usually sold at in western cities
What are those prices specifically? In Barcelona (one of those western cities, imo) at a good ramen place, you get Gyozas for ~5 EUR, and a nice ramen for ~12-14 EUR, add a drink and you end up with ~20 EUR per person, which strikes me as relatively affordable for eating out, but maybe the metropolitan prices have biased me over time. Is this expensive/cheap compared to the other cities you've tried ramen in?
> BTW, you can also replicate the form factor using western cooking ingredients/traditions and it still works pretty well.
Isn't that just a stew at that point? How is it still ramen if you switch out all the ingredients and the broth that makes ramen ramen?
Nice Ramen sold at 14 EUR are those prices. In Japan, you can have a nice hinge quality bowl of Ramen for around 7-8 EUR.
Besides fast food, isn't it always like that though? Of course Japanese food is cheaper in Japan, but I bet Spanish food is more expensive there than in Spain? Or Peruvian food being a lot more expensive in Europe compared to in Peru itself, it kind of makes sense.
Tried many ramen places in Europe and only two were close to good ramen in Japan. Kodawari in Paris and totemo ramen in Stockholm.
Happy to see they have a selection from the location (Ramen Tatsu-ya, in Austin) that started my love of ramen
https://ramen.haus/united-states/austin/tatsu-ya-the-og/
A rotating ramen in the first position of HN? why?
Same as always, because people upvote it, probably it's interesting to a bunch of people.
> What to Submit - On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Whoever "people" is.
How many upvotes (in orders of magnitude) are needed to get to the front page is still a mystery to me.
I wonder if there are "slow days" on which it might be easier because there is less voting in general.
I've seen posts with 3 on the front-page but they have to be picked up to stay.
Because not everybody is ramen-profitable yet.
What’s wrong with appreciating beautiful food?
The site looks good on mobile.
> No cookies. No tips. No JavaScript. Just ramen.
I cannot help but wonder if Claude wrote this copy. Not that there would be anything wrong with that, I am just curious.
It did not!
It's because it's food lol
I prefer that over yet another AI blog post
New York City has great Ramen options. I find yelp rating a lot more indicative of the food quality than Google ratings.
Something that has seriously increased my trust in Yelp:
There's this one restaurant that has always been my favorite within 100s of miles and recently I noticed they had a top 100 in the USA poster for their cuisine on the outside from Yelp. It doesn't mention what rank specifically, just top 100. I look it up and they are in the top 10.
So I really have no idea how Yelp was able to figure out that this restaurant is so good and to rank it in a way I agree with. It could be just based on reviews because it does have close to 5 stars but regardless it's impressive.
I’ve found it’s very city dependent. My experience in the US was yelp was miles ahead, but where I live (Edinburgh) it’s pretty much useless.
In the southeastern US, Yelp is almost negative signal because southerners have legitimately horrible taste.
It doesn't rotate on firefox on my linux machine, but does on firefox on my windows.
edit: it looks like my firefox linux have a "prefers-reduced-motion: reduce" set...
So I discovered that setting animation to instant on kde, tell the browser to reduce motions...
Some downright drool inducing photography there. So many truly delicious looking ramen bowls.
So nice to see Bankara Ramen in Bangkok here - one of my favourite places, and you always see Japanese customers eating there, so you know it passes the local abroad trial :-)
As a Japanese in Tokyo, I didn't know that Ramens in other countries look so good.
One of the best ramen I’ve ever had is this:
https://ramen.haus/united-kingdom/london/cha-mori-ramen-kana...
Pre-Covid, this restaurant would regularly have queues down the street to get in. But it’s a small place. Basically the size of someone’s front room. Definitely worth a visit.
Kanada-Ya is a chain with at least 5 locations in London, and while they're fairly good, they're still somewhat focused on Deliveroo-type transactions.
It remains quite different from a genuine ramen shop in Japan.
That wasn’t the case pre-Covid when I was talking about. But it’s still good even now.
And it’s obviously going to be quite different from Japanese restaurants because London isn’t in Japan (surprise surprise).
Ittenbari in Akasaka was an absolute revelation as to what ramen can be.
Tabutchan in Osaka was the confirmation that it is the most delightful form of food invented by mankind.
this reminds me of a naive and happier time in tech, when i built a game called ramendan with twitter’s open API. you had to eat ramen every day for dinner, and tweet proof with the hashtag #ramendan, link to a photo (this was before twitter supported images), and geotag it so that we could make sure it was after sundown in your timezone.
https://www.pechakucha.com/presentations/the-savory-month-of...
I love ramen. And the best thing about it is that it’s always a bit different, unique experience
Is it just me or does the rotation make it less appealing?
I think the problem is, with that kind of lighting, you'd subconsciously expect a lot of movement. ( like in this animation: https://kotaku.com/unity-3d-ramen-noodles-art-artist-tech-vf... )
Obviously, there can't be any movement, because it's just a single photograph - and if that were all, then perception would adjust accordingly.
But because of the rotation, suddenly movement is added back - only, the contents of the photo don't follow it, so the whole thing now looks like a plastic replica of a ramen dish instead of the real thing.
I agree. It's just the .jpeg rotating through css. It's inspired by (as mentioned on the website) rotatingsandwiches; those are actually 3D photographed (or filmed) with a fixed light source
This is spectacular. I think food can never be overrated.
This is amazing. I love Ramen noodles!!
This is the nuance people skip
Like a trip back to late 2000's website design. I hope those style (or maybe something new) comes back.
This is the takeaway I'll remember
so now ramen tops in HN