Rare Noodles: The Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum

I woke up in Tokyo absolutely starving on the morning of my visit to the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum. With a 45 minute train ride in front of me, I didn’t think I’d make it to the venue without passing out from the sweltering heat and humidity. But I grabbed a water bottle and soldiered on, not wishing to risk filling up before sampling more than one ramen option from this truly unique destination.

Entering Noodle Heaven

The Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum is located within about a five minute walk of Shin-Yokohama rail station. The station itself is reachable within one or at most two transfers from most parts of Tokyo, and serves the JR Yokohama and Yokohama Blue lines.

Entry to the museum costs ¥310. This provides you with a simple if somewhat comprehensive history of ramen in Japan along the upper floor’s wall, as well as the ability to gawp at the museum’s quite staggering collection of ramen periodicals dating back decades. The upper floor also houses a shop.

In reality, however, you pay your entry fee in exchange for admission to the amusement park that lies below the surface. When entering the museum and browsing the rather, well, museum-like items described above, you don’t really have much of an idea of the incredible ramen wonderland that has been built on the lower two floors.

Venturing Downstairs

The Ramen Museum has built an incredible reconstruction of a town from decades gone by. The facades of barbershops, pachinko parlours, bars, beauty salons have all been faithfully composed – with their guts having been turned into pop up versions of famous ramen shops from around the world. It is a truly bizarre experience to walk down a fake alleyway, have a seat on a 1950s motorbike, and then walk into a beauty parlour in order to eat a rare variety of ramen from an island off the coast of Hokkaido. But then again, that’s why we do this.

I originally learned about this place on an NHK World special about Ramen. It had kind of lingered in the back of my mind for a while, being a somewhat out of the way destination. Having other plans in Yokohama, it made sense to finally check it out, and I’m glad that I did. Without wishing to be a bit too pretentious, my reservations for making the trip down maybe stemmed from the idea that those cultural TV programs – while super useful – tend to fill the space between the lines of: “Wow, ramen is amazing! Did you know about ramen?!” and: “Here’s something very cool and unique.” In all cases, these experiences feel most applicable to tourists and beginners, and I had spent most of my slurping days in search of small, off-the-beaten path ramen experiences all over the country.

For most things in Japan that are of exceptional quality, you do need to go beneath the surface.

So I have to say it was extremely pleasantly surprising to turn up such a unique experience of high quality, in a place designed specifically for tourism.

Evergreen Selection

One of my biggest frustrations especially as a smaller person is that I will visit a ramen shop, and one bowl is enough to fill me for 7 or 8 hours!  The museum has solved this by having all of the shops sell “Mini Bowls.” At ¥570, these modestly priced bowls provided a fantastic opportunity to sample more than one shop.

The museum rotates shops from all over the world, and has a display case the custom bowls of every shop that has served to patrons of the museum. Bowls marked “what is the next ramen shop” tease that they will continue to evolve the offerings. It’s a smart strategy. It not only entices repeat trips for visitors such as myself, but also provides an opportunity for locals to sample unique ramen dishes from far flung places around the globe, such as Frankfurt’s Muku or Ryu’s Noodle Bar from Toronto. 

Maybe it was not the day for rich, heavy bowls owing to the incredible humidity, but I opted to stay on the darker side with my selections.

The Bowls

First I checked in at Muku Zweite. The Frankfurt based ramen shop’s specialty Tonkotsu Shoyu (pork bone + soy) and Seafood soup has two layers. A card delivered with the bowl instructs the recipient to eat the from the top of the bowl first. The shop joined the rotating cast of characters in the Ramen Museum in 2014, and had a short waiting line. German beers were served as well, which felt like a curious pairing for the dish. As expected the soup was very rich with flavour, and the straight noodles took a bit of both the shoyu and tonkotsu influences.

I felt I had another “Mini Bowl” in me after this stop, and so ventured over to the yukata shop hosting Rishiri Ramen Miraku, which started serving at their pop up location in the museum in 2017. The scorched shoyu broth was something I was curious to try. Not being very familiar with Hokkaido style ramen generally (having never visited the region), the opportunity to try a much vaunted bowl originating in Rishiri Island was a wonderful experience. Again, this was a very rich bowl with deep soy flavour. The chashu served in the dish was quite soft, and the wavy noodles provided an interesting texture. I will caveat however that it is perhaps not the preferred style of noodle for a person who is inclined to get soup on their beard!

Both shops were operating at a very high level, while perhaps being somewhat short of the insane standards proffered by the Mensho family of shops, or the spectacle offered by a shop like Tokyo’s Menya Shichisai, where the noodles are prepared to your order and in front of your face. While those are perhaps unfair comparisons for any shop, the stores of the Ramen Museum still hold their own in a distinctive, creative and perhaps even quirky atmosphere. I will look forward to venturing back for more!

The Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum (website) is located at 2-14-21 Shinyokohama in Yokohama’s Kohoku Ward, and is open between 11am and 10pm, seven days a week.