Before Ramen, There Was This Legendary Bowl

It's a dark and stormy night. You trundle into a tiny noodle shop somewhere between midnight and destiny, and call out for a bowl of ramen to warm your tired soul. In moments, a bowl of steaming noodles slides in front of you. You pick up the chopsticks, sip that sweet, sweet broth, and freeze. Something's not right. This broth is light, translucent, and warmly spiced. The noodles, long, pale, and widely elastic. The surface, slick with oils of an angry, vibrant red. And instead of pork staring back at you, it's thin slices of beef. This isn't ramen, or is it? Today, we're going to find out why what you ordered isn't what you think, yet. Confused, you scroll through your camera roll of all the Japanese ramen styles you've ever eaten to try to find a match. Hakata tonkotsu. Not even close. That's a pork bone cappuccino, not a light roast pork over. Osaka shoyu. No way. That's a pitch black soy sauce punch to the face. You don't even taste soy in this thing. Kanazawa miso. Nope. That's a thick cloud of fermented bean paste. This broth is clear as day. You go deeper. Kyoto. Too fatty. Saitama. Too fishy. Kasaoka. Close, but that's the chicken on chicken inception. Tokushima. Uh, that's just pork stew, dude. You're stumped. You've eaten your way across Japan's top shops, but none of them match until one finally catches your bleary eyes. The crisp, clear chuka soba. The heck is chuksa soba? Well, if you ask your average Japanese obachan, granny, what kind of ramen she ate growing up, she'll probably say that all they had back in the day was chuka soba, also called nanken soba, or in earlier time, shina soba. All essentially the clean, simple, classic Cantonese style wonton noodle soup. Chuka is literally zhonghua or Chinese in kanji. Nanken is well, nanjing. And shina is zhina for China in kanji, a name in a distant Sanskrit origin. It also ended up being a racial slur in Japan and got forced out of use, but we won't go into that now. Soba just means buckwheat, but it also is kind of a catch-all term for noodles, like the decidedly un-buckwheat yakisoba. So how did these names turn into the wholly unrelated Japanese term ramen? You see, a long, long time ago, southern Chinese immigrants flocked to a place like Yokohama's Chinatown, and their noodles were all called these names, including ramen, almost interchangeably. But all that changed in 1958 at the hands of an Osaka-based Taiwanese entrepreneur called Momofuku Ando, or Wubai Fu in Mandarin. After the Second World War, both he and Japan had fallen on hard times. America was sending over tons of wheat flour as aid, but the Japanese government was just telling people to bake bread with it. He was like, uh, that's not very Japanese, bro, and figured he could use that wheat to make noodles instead, even though the bureaucrats told him mass-producing noodles was impossible. And as all good entrepreneurs do, he set off to prove them wrong. He spent months in a tiny wooden shed behind his house to try to make the noodles quick, easy, and scalable, experimenting obsessively, until one day he watched his wife fry tempura. That's when it hit him. Flash-fry noodles in hot oil, and you can dehydrate them cleanly. Douse them in boiling water again, and they rehydrate in seconds, bouncing like they never stopped. Simple, elegant, revolutionary, the kind of idea we'd all take for granted. And so he founded Nissin Foods. Yes, that Nissin, the one that makes cup noodles, and made the world's very first instant noodle, and gave it a trendy, modern-sounding name, Chicken Ramen. It was a bare-bones, pre-seasoned, Chinese-tasting affair, but it would take the country, and eventually the diets of the world's college students by storm. Chicken for, well, chicken, and ramen for ramen. But that still doesn't answer the question, what in the world is ramen then? Ramen in Japanese is ramen, written solely in katakana, the Japanese writing system for borrowed foreign words, such as camera, kamara, and coffee, kohi. Hold on, borrowed? Foreign? You see, writing ramen in katakana is a subtle admission that the word isn't actually Japanese. It's a phonetic echo of a foreign sound. Have you ever felt like the chasu pork on your ramen never sounded that Japanese in the first place? Same thing. It's also written in katakana as chashu, because the name is from the Cantonese cha-sui. Unlike the food, the term ramen isn't from southern China. It's a linguistic survivor of a massive cultural migration before even Ando's time. As Japanese soldiers and travelers returned from northern China, specifically Manchuria, they brought back the name for the hand-pulled wheat noodles they'd eaten there, la-mien. La means to pull or stretch, mien means noodles. Even though they didn't bring back the hand-pulling part, the name stuck. And because the Japanese lacks a native L sound, la-mien was smoothed out into ramen. And there it is, the origin of ramen, the word. It still doesn't resolve the mystery of the bowl sitting in front of you. Or does it? You see, when you bring up la-mien to a Chinese person, a very particular image comes to mind. A bowl defined by a strict legendary code known as the five colors. One, clear, ting, a pristine beef bone broth simmered with a medley of Chinese spices. Two, white, bai, clean pale slices of tender radish. Three, red, hong, a brilliant fiery splash of chili oil floating on the surface. Four, green, lu, a fresh handful of cilantro and leeks. Five, yellow, huang, the alkaline laced noodles themselves. Sound familiar? Yeah, that's exactly what you're looking at. Ramen's namesake and granddaddy, Lanzhou la-mien, a genre-defying bowl codified by Ma Baozi in 1915 in a style pioneered by the Hui Chinese Muslims up in Gansu province, China's northwest frontier at the crossroads of the Silk Road. It's defined by a broth of beef and spice paired with refreshing greens spiked with a splash of hot oil and A master noodle maker takes a single lump of dough, just flour, water, and a touch of lye, and begins stretching. Then a fold, a pull, a fold, a pull, slap it on the board, pull again. What starts as one thick rope becomes two, then four, then sixteen, then sixty-four strands, each one impossibly uniform, impossibly thin, no machine, no mold, just muscle memory handed down through generations, crafting a foundation for a bowl so legendary that just saying pulled noodles conjures up not a technique, but this singular, highly specific dish. So legendary, China has more Lanzhou la-mien shops than McDonald's has locations on the entire planet. So legendary that it didn't only go east, it also went west. In the 1800s, the Qing dynasty violently crushed the Muslim Chinese-led Dungan Revolt, Donggan Qiyi, in the northwest, forcing many of the Hui people to flee westward into Central Asia, and eventually throughout Russia and the Soviet Union. And instead of just bringing the la-mien name with them, they brought the recipes too, the beef, the spice, the pulled noodles. But the obstacle here wasn't linguistics, it was the availability of produce. In the harsh conditions of the steppe, they were forced to replace the bone broth with a tomato and bell pepper stew, the Chinese spices with cumin and coriander, and the radishes and green onions with potatoes and cabbage. And so, if you wander into a Central Asian restaurant nowadays, be it Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, or Tajik, you'll see something that is a little familiar. Lagmen. The word itself, much like ramen in Japanese, doesn't actually mean anything, because it too came directly from the Chinese la-mien. But unlike your typical ramen joint, the noodles you'll get is a much more authentic hand-me-down from history. So, where does that leave you and your bowl of ramen but not really ramen? Well, you're not about to eat a broken Japanese ramen recipe, you're about to eat its etymological blueprint. You're about to taste the geographic crossroads of where a single culinary idea exploded across the whole world. Go east, and la-mien becomes mechanized, commercialized, and globalized into the Japanese ramen that took over every date night and college dorm. Go west, and it adapts to the rugged steppes of Central Asia and through the Soviet machine to be a staple food that kept workers fueled and families warm. But right here, in this bowl of Lanzhou la-mien, you're about to experience the living ancestor, the original spark, the beginning of the legend. So, the next time you're about to order a bowl of noodles, whether it's a thick hakata tonkotsu, a hearty Uzbek lagman, another Lanzhou la-mien, or just a meruchen from the gas station, take a second to appreciate the journeys of travelers and refugees, the rise and fall of empires, and the generations of merchants from Gansu to Guangzhou that brought those noodles to and also Momofuku Ando for naming his invention chicken ramen, because asking your date if they want to hit a chicken chuka soba joint just doesn't hit the same. Thank you, Ando-san. And thanks to the noodle pullers of Lanzhou for unwittingly starting an international culinary revolution. That lagman detour I sent you on, the noodle that ran west out of China across Central Asia, I gave that maybe 30 seconds, and that was a crime, because the reason that noodle ended up 3,000 miles from home in a little cafe in Uzbekistan is one of the saddest, most unbelievable survival stories a bowl of food has ever hidden. That's the video sitting on your screen right now. It's the whole story behind the lagman I breezed past, and it just might change the way you look at every bowl of noodles you ever eat again. Click it right now to watch, and until next time, goodbye!