Ramen restaurants are another place that have an interesting system. When you go in, you are faced with a large, old-fashioned ticket machine, think London Underground circa 1983. You pop in a note, press a button and out pops a ticket. (Remember to flush out your change using the lever, it is not automatic.) Now, to the uninitiated, you might think you’ve placed your order, but you haven’t. You have paid for it, but unless you give your ticket to the waiting staff or more usually the chef behind the counter you will be sitting waiting for your soup like a very hungry London commuter.
But how do you know what you’ve ordered, I hear you ask. Well, in the helpful restaurants, there is a picture of what you are ordering on the buttons but in most places it is written in one of the three alphabet which regular readers will know are a mystery to me and I am still searching for a clue. But I have a ramen shop hack. I was told that the top left button, the 750 or 800 button is your bog-standard noodles in a bowl of soupramen that I know and love so much. Therefore, I often go in, press button one, and live in hope. Sometimes, I see other diners with egg in their bowls and wonder how it got there. I sometimes have plate envy when the cook places a bowl of something different on the counter in front of the person next to me, but usually I am happy with my top-left corner ramen. Usually.
Let me tell you about last night. Last night I pressed the top left button, handed my ticket over, waited with eager anticipation and a grumbling, rumbling tummy, so far, so good. I can Gloria Gaynor in this weird and wonderful country. I watched the chef prepare two bowls, not one. Watched him handle something long and stringy that looked alarmingly like an intestine. Watched him flip the noodles in a bowl like a flamboyant pancake maker. Must be for someone else, I thought, but then, he placed the bowls on the counter in front of me. This wasn’t bog standard ramen, there must be some mistake. I looked at the bowls and tried to work out what to do. In one bowl were cold noodles, in the other a hot and spicy soup, that had the intestine lurking beneath the surface like the Loch Ness Monster. I ate it, what choice did I have? I was like the very hungry caterpillar and what that book doesn’t tell you is the hungry caterpillar doesn’t like paying for two meals of an evening. I am not sure I liked it, the soup was gloopy, fishy, porky; I couldn’t work out the flavours. The intestine turned out to be an unknown vegetable, the noodles were coated in egg or something. It was and is like the puddle in my apartment, a complete mystery and highlights the dangers of ordering in the dark.
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy my novel - Humans, Being.
A shot in the dark even
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