Tokyo Ramen Deep Dive — Three Bowls, Three Styles, One Evening

Tokyo has 10,000 ramen shops and most of them are excellent. The problem is that visitors eat at the ones with English menus and tourist queues. I take groups to three neighbourhood shops in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, Monzen-Nakacho and Fukagawa — areas that are deeply local and where almost no foreign visitors eat. We do a small bowl at each stop: a classic shoyu at the first place (the broth has been running for 35 years), a modern seafood-based shio at the second, and a tonkotsu variant that the owner makes with Hakata technique adapted for Tokyo water. Between stops I explain how ramen evolved — from Chinese immigrant food to a post-war staple to the obsessive craft culture it is now. We walk along the old Onagi River canal between stops. It is a genuinely beautiful evening neighbourhood walk that happens to involve three bowls of extraordinary soup.