‘Ramen Heads’: A deep dive into broth with Japan’s ramen king
THE BEST ramen shops in Japan don’t give up their secrets easily. But it’s not necessarily because they’re worried about competitors.
“The truth is, they just don’t want people to see that they’re not doing anything special,” says chef Osamu Tomita, who presides over his humble restaurant in Matsudo, outside Tokyo, as Japan’s reigning ramen champion. Tomita has won “Best Ramen of the Year” from Japan’s most prestigious ramen guidebook four years in a row.
Tomita - who decidedly is doing something special - is the subject of Ramen Heads, a culinary documentary about a master at the top of his craft. We get to dwell in his closet- size shop with him, as he stirs whole pigs’ heads, seaweed and dried fish into his broth and prepares his handmade noodles, which are cooked to a precision of, seemingly, milliseconds.
Cue the luscious slow-motion shots of pearlescent broth being poured into bowls and its condiments delicately arranged.
“There is nothing clean and pretty about this broth,” said Tomita, and he’s right: It looks like sludge.
To a certain kind of fanatic, however - the film’s “ramen heads” – it’s liquid gold.
Of course, there are parallels to be drawn between this film’s subject and Jiro Ono, the master sushi chef profiled in the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Both are obsessed with their craft and accept nothing less than perfection.
When the film segues into short portraits of other ramen chefs who specialise in different styles of the soup, it’s interesting, but incomplete. You’d have to be a bit of a ramen head yourself, with a working knowledge of how tonkotsu differs from tsukemen, and shoyu from shio, to appreciate the film: Many of the terms are not explained.
Life in Tomita’s shop is difficult. The chef is strict with his apprentices, correcting their grammar, chewing them out and never actually teaching them the necessary skills: “If they want the knowledge, they’ll have to steal it by tasting and watching,” says a narrator. “He’s not giving anything away.”
And Tomita himself has some amusing eccentricities, dressing flamboyantly in Louis Vuitton but foregoing food from the time he wakes up until the shop’s 5.30 closing each day. When the staff does finally have a meal, they all eat from the same bowl. — Washington Post.