“Ramen is one of the hardest things to make,” Ivan Orkin says with quiet authority. “Even now, I get it wrong.” I had come to this interview hoping Orkin, a god in the cult-like world of ramen, and star of a 2017 episode of the Netflix series Chef’s Table, was going to help me up my own ramen game, so this was not exactly what I wanted to hear. But there’s no doubting the guy’s credentials. Though born in Long Island, he has spent much of his life in Tokyo, raising a family while attempting, in the words of the Wall Street Journal’s Yuka Hayashi, to “out-noodle the Japanese” – though I suspect Orkin would argue that he was simply trying to create something that wouldn’t get him laughed out of his adopted home town.
After all, this much-loved noodle soup is a very serious business in Japan, with no fewer than three museums devoted to it, as well as countless manga (one series even features a character called Ramenman), anime, films and books, and a meticulously catalogued Ramen Database run by critic (and some might say obsessive) Ohsaki-san, who eats about 800 portions a year in his quest to keep up with new openings.
