Believe it or not…

The Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum has as its center piece a 2 story basement recreation of a late 1950’s (Showa Era) typical Japanese town. Most of the store faces are fake except for a candy shop, a few bars, a bakery and then about 8 different ramen restaurants that represent different types of ramen found throughout Japan.

Kozy and I are sort of in love with mid- century Japan and wish we could have lived there and then, so this place was right up our alley, as cheesy as it was, and as overpriced as the ramen was. Also there is no good ramen to be had in LA (for those of you that live in LA - you just don’t know what good ramen is if you think that your local ramen joint is “good”), so its always good to grab some ramen while we are in Japan.

If you squint yours eyes (almost compltely shut) you’d swear you were in a real 1950’s small Japanese town (rather than a basement of an office building in Yokohama).

Kozy and her younger brother walking down the “street” inside the Yokohama Ramen Museum

The interesting thing about Ramen is that its rather a new part of Japanese cuisine. Ramen was not a particularly common dish in japan in 1900. It wasn’t until after that that an influx of Chinese immigrants brought ramen to Japan and it began to spread quickly until by mid-1900s it was one of the most popular meals in japan.

One of the ramen’s we tried that was rahter out of the ordinary was akayu karamiso ramen. It has a spicy miso broth flavored with fish and shellfish. Kozy loved this one, it reminded her of the dish popular among sumo wrestlers, chanko-nabe.