Ramen Tatsunoya

For Ramen Tatsunoya, they experimented with tens of different types of flour before arriving at a special blend of flour. The idea was to create a thin and straight noodle that could mix well with the soup, and was shipped from the noodle factory to shops everyday. For their soup, they use only the tonkotsu (豚骨, Pork bones) from the pig's head and water, boiled at high heat, to get a 100% concentrated tonkotsu broth. By doing so, the umami (旨味, Savoriness) is concentrated, creating a broth that is both rich and strong, while also balancing it with the mild tastes of the tonkotsu.

For the chashu (チャシュウ, Chashū, Roasted Pork), pork belly is chosen that has a good balance of the lean and fatty portions, then it is glazed with a shoyu (醤油, Shōyu, Soy Sauce)-based tare (たれ, Sauce) and boiled. For the komiyu (香味油, Kōmiyu, Flavouring Oil), garlic is stir-fried with burnt tamanegi (玉ねぎ, Onion), to produce a fragrant komiyu. When mixed with the soup, it produces a deep flavour and umami (旨味, Savoriness). And just like when they were founded, the komiyu is still made by hand.

Ramen Tatsunoya has quite a few branches around Japan and even in the US, but the one dish that we love is their Motsu Tsukemen, which is exclusive to their Shinjuku (新宿) branch. We'll be honest, the first time we had the dish, it didn't have that "wow factor" on the first bite. Sure, it tasted good, the noodles were nice and chewy, and the dipping sauce was pretty tasty (though not the thick kind that you usually expect from tsukemen), but it was alright. Yet, a few days later, we started craving for this dish again, and maybe it's just the simple deliciousness of the dish that attracts us in, without being too overwhelmingly rich.

Typically, tsukemen depends on thick noodles, with an extra thick and rich dipping sauce, so it's sort of a double whammy of richness. For Ramen Tatsunoya, the noodles are of the thinner variation, and the soup is almost watery. Yet, when you dip the noodles in and eat it, they absorb a good amount of the sauce which has a light shoyu (醤油, Shōyu, Soy Sauce) taste to it with a smokey fragrance from the deep-fried motsu. And as you keep digging into it, you'll finish the plate of noodles before you even realise it. From being an unimpressive dish at first mouthful, it's now one of those "must go" shops whenever we are back in Tokyo.

Many tsukemen restaurants typically offer a wari soup (割りスープ, Wari Sūpu) at the end for you to dilute the tsukemen dipping sauce so that you can drink it as a soup. Ramen Tatsunoya will add in rice and some dashi (出汁) so that it turns into a porridge instead, calling it "wari okayu" (割りお粥). We prefer to not have this option as we feel like it dilutes the goodness of the soup. But this is definitely up to personal preference.

We would recommend against getting their ramen, mainly cause we feel like it is a rather unremarkable bowl of tonkotsu ramen (豚骨ラーメン, Tonkotsu Rāmen). Yes, it is decent, but it is not something worth queueing for or going back for in our opinion.

The biggest downside to Ramen Tatsunoya is honestly the queue. During the COVID-19 era, the shop used to see a queue of maybe 4-8 people during peak lunchtime. These days, the tourist queue has bumped that to around 20-30 people at the time of opening. Even if you go at 9 pm, near their closing time, you'll still find an insane queue outside the shop. We can't in good conscience guarantee you that the shop is worth the extremely long queue, but we can say that the tsukemen is indeed pretty good, and when there wasn't a queue, we used to visit multiple times a week.

Bonus Tip: Something a lot of Japanese know, but not the foreign tourists, is really how good the pudding is here. You might think: "Pudding? In a ramen restaurant?", and you would actually be surprised at how soft and how tasty this coconut pudding is. It has a nice bouncy texture to it, and the coconut milk is just sublime. We can't recommend this enough, and it always sells out by nighttime.

Ramen Tatsunoya was founded by Kajiwara Ryūta (梶原 龍太) in Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture (福岡県, Fukuoka-ken) in 1999. Initially, Kajiwara-san just had the idea that he wanted to start a restaurant, but he wasn't sure what type. He went around talking to various restaurant owners, but all they talked about was "how much were they making a month?" or "what's the annual sales goal?". So none of those things really called out to him, until he met Kawahara Narumi (河原 成美), the owner of the famous ramen chain Hakata Ippudo. Kawahara-san said that he wanted to create a world, where even if someone graduated from university, they could be proud and say that "I want to start my own ramen shop". And so, Kajiwara-san was himself inspired to see if he could change the ramen world, and ventured into making a ramen shop himself. He started off his research training in Hakata Ippudo as well.

To him, it was important for his staff to understand the pleasure and joy of customer service. To make sure that they are trained to know fun and joy, so that they themselves can give their customers a sense of fun and excitement. Instead of educating their staff to impress, the goal was to educate their staff to be a person who can feel emotions. To be able to look at the smile of a customer, and feel happy in return.

At the beginning, Kajiwara's goal might have been about "opening ramen shops all over the country" or earning "10 billion yen in revenue", but today it's about the "growth of his employees". He enjoys nurturing people, and seeing employees grow from someone who couldn't event properly use keigo (敬語) to someone who can serve customers properly with a smile. He notes that it's a dream of his to continue propagating it, and if one day his employee dies, his employee can look back on life and laugh saying that he "had no regrets, and it was really fun". So his goal is to build a company where their employees are proud of their life.

The goal of Ramen Tatsunoya is to be a welcoming shop for customers, because serving delicious food is just the most basic level, and they want to aim even further than that. To provide customers with a respectable and warm customer service that is from the heart. Kajiwara-san feels like he's never satisfied with the status quo, and the goal is to always try and go a step further in impressing customers. The goal is never ending, and its a continuous cycle of improvement.