Food that adapts the quickest, sticks around the longest.
Bowl by bowl, noodle soup has taken over the world. Call it ramen (as the Japanese do) or ramyeon (like the Koreans), few dishes are as popular as noodles — fresh or instant, curly or flat — in hot broth. Gussied up with toppings that range from thinly-sliced pork belly and soy-cured eggs to mushrooms and chilli oil, ramen is well on its way to shedding the “unhealthy” tag that has long dogged it in regions beyond East Asia, even levelling up to the “gourmet” category. This includes India, where ramen-focused eateries, like Bengaluru’s Naru Noodle Bar, are booked out months in advance, and where, according to a recent report by the World Instant Noodle Association, more ramen is consumed than anywhere else in the world, excluding China and Indonesia.
This unprecedented popularity is driven, in part, by the sheer convenience of ramen: All that the most basic bowl requires is hot water and a packet of instant noodles (with, perhaps, ingredients like butter or bacon bits for additional texture and taste). The biggest factor driving its popularity is that it can be customised to suit every palate in the world. For each sweat-inducing bowl, like the infamous Buldak spicy ramen that was pulled off the shelves in some countries, there is another that banks on the subtle but complex flavours of kelp and bonito. When it comes to ramen, there are no rules: Foie gras and chocolate are as much in the game as classic ingredients like boiled eggs, shiitake mushrooms and scallions.
In the journey of ramen, from post-World War II famine food to the packaged noodles made for a globalised world in the 1980s and 1990s to the quintessential 21st century gastronomic fare, is the universal secret sauce: Food that adapts the quickest, sticks around the longest.
