A ramen shop called Yumeno Ippo has opened on the spot where a mapo ramen place I used to love had closed down. Yumeno Ippo (“one step toward the dream”) is the sister shop of a ramen place called Yume wo Katare (“tell me your dream”). Yume wo Katare was famous to begin with, so Yumeno Ippo is famous too, but the line has been long non-stop ever since it opened. Wait, is Jiro-style really this hot? That was my reaction.

A notice banning place-holding in line

The notice says one person cannot stand in line while the rest of the group cuts in later. Why would they need to put that up.. because the line is unbelievably long. If you have queued for about 30 minutes at a place like this and someone slips in saying they are with a friend up front, that is a fight waiting to happen. Which just goes to show how popular this place is.

Inside

It is pretty spacious, and yet the whole place fills up..

How to order

You can adjust the amount of vegetables, garlic and oil.

Post-its

All kinds of dreams stuck up there.

The menu

Well.. it explains how to order. Looks like they spent very little money and made it with a lot of taste.

The other side

Inside the kitchen

A guy with a proper Jiro-style aura is making it.

Today’s shirunashi Jiro ramen

For toppings I went with fried onion and chashu, plus extra vegetables.

The other side

I piled on plenty of garlic too. Maybe I asked for too much extra vegetable, because I was genuinely stuffed.. still, eating vegetables helps with blood sugar control, so putting away a lot of them is good for your health. But it really was too much, so next time I will go up only one level on the extras.

The noodles

Jiro-style is really defined by thick noodles and a heavy broth, but because the noodles are so thick they cannot soak up the broth all the way through, so the two end up going their separate ways. That is why shirunashi deliberately serves the noodles steeped in the broth, and that actually turns out to be a deeper flavor, closer to the essence of Jiro-style. In a way it is close to the ramen I used to eat at Fujimaru back in the day, only that flavor has been made a bit more mainstream and turned into a shop people queue for.. Put another way, that flavor is of course delicious, but there is the Fujimaru you can only eat in Akabane, and if you popularize it the way Yumeno Ippo has, you can make a lot more money.

The ticket machine

They have all sorts of toppings. It tasted good, so even if not often, it is a place I would like to drop by now and then.

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