For some reason I can’t quite explain, the Shimizu area of Shizuoka is famous for its local ramen. Of all of them I went to Ichigen Honten, known for its toki-miso ramen, where you dissolve the miso yourself.

A place like this

It’s written 一元本店 in kanji, read “Ichigen Honten” in Japanese. There’s a house right next to it, so I’m guessing it’s your classic family-run diner.

The menu

Apparently the moyashi miso ramen is the popular one.

The Shimizu sky

I got there 15 minutes before opening and wandered around the area. This place doesn’t seem to draw a long queue.

Inside

I was a little worried since it’s such an old shop, but the inside is spotless.

Water

The table

Since I came on my own, they showed me to a small table.

Moyashi miso ramen

The size of the bowl is no joke. And there’s a huge mound of miso sitting on top of the bean sprouts. It came out so big that I asked whether they’d got my order wrong, and they told me the large is 1.5 times this size. So it was always that kind of place.

The noodles

The chicken-bone broth and the crunchy bean sprouts feel like they came straight out of proper Chinese cooking, but the noodles are thin like tonkotsu ramen noodles, and the miso isn’t sweet — it has a slight kick to it, so it tasted a lot like Korean doenjang soup. You could call it a Korea-China-Japan collaboration. Amazing that a flavour like this exists out in a region like this.

The portions are big, it has real character — hunting down local ramen like this is genuinely fun. I’ll have to keep visiting all sorts of places.

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