RAMEN, No. 21

Excerpts from the RAMEN edition:

Chefs who brought ramen to the realm of gastronomy

We looked at the scalability of ramen and its meaning by looking for shops that show a different look of ramen.

👨‍🍳 Yasushi Matsumura
📍  Ginza  Hachigo

Ginza Hachigo in Tokyo, Japan, which opened in 2018, proves that gourmet food is not the exclusive property of a certain class with ramen. The owner, Yasushi Matsumura, is a former French chef with 40 years of experience. He combines recipes with Western ingredients such as prosciutto and Guérande salt to present ramen with a clear and clean taste. With creative variations while maintaining an affordable price range, in 2022, it even earned a rare Michelin Guide one star as a ramen restaurant.

“The reason I switched from French cuisine to ramen is because I wanted to give more people, not just customers with high economic power, the opportunity to taste dishes made with quality ingredients. It is a great pleasure to see the person who eats the last soup until the end, and the customer who leaves after saying that it was delicious. A chef is a job that does not have standards for moderately good. Because it should be more delicious tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”

Ramen industry as told by ramen developers

The changes and trends of the instant ramen industry, which has grown rapidly over the past 70 years, were observed through the voices of ramen developers in Korea and Indonesia.

🇰🇷
Jaewon Yoon Head of Soup Development Team, R&D Division ,
Nongshim

Jaewon Yoon , who joined Nongshim in 1994, is working in a department in charge of developing various ramen soups, including Nongshim’s representative ramen, Shin Ramyun. He says that developing products that consumers can value more is the key to the ramen industry in the future.

“Due to the nature of ramen, it is necessary to ensure popularity, but as individual tastes are getting stronger, it is increasingly difficult to develop a soup that satisfies many people. Like ‘Cjapaguri’, a combination of Chapaghetti and Neoguri, the way the manufacturer presented the product Unlike, I think we need a strategy that takes into account active consumers who reinvent themselves in their own way, invest directly in products or participate in the manufacturing process to grow products and brands.”