Noodles ── Ramen
Funabashi Sauce Ramen
Funabashi Sauce Ramen — a ramen built on Worcestershire sauce instead of soy
Said to have been born at a Chinese restaurant in a Funabashi shopping street, this ramen builds its broth on Worcestershire sauce. The dark broth is balanced for sourness, sweetness, and salt, finished with green laver and red pickled ginger that recall yakisoba.
- Origin: Chiba Funabashi
- Besides shoyu, miso, shio and tonkotsu
What it's made of
The broth is built around Worcestershire sauce, dark in color, delivering sourness, sweetness, and salt in that order on the tongue. It's usually finished with green laver and red pickled ginger, so it looks and smells like yakisoba. Made with Chinese noodles yet carrying almost no trace of soy, it's a bowl that calls yakisoba to mind with every slurp.
How it's made
Worcestershire sauce alone comes on too sharp, so each shop blends in other seasonings to balance the sourness, sweetness, and salt. It's said to have begun as a soupy version of yakisoba, made to answer regular customers asking for a large yakisoba with broth, and many shops still use the same noodle they use for yakisoba. Some serve it tsukemen-style, keeping the dish standing at the border between yakisoba and ramen.
Why it took this shape
One account holds that around 1945, at a Chinese restaurant in a shopping street near Keisei-Funabashi Station, regulars asked for a soupy version of their favorite yakisoba, and that request became this ramen. The number of shops serving it fell off through the postwar boom years, but later local volunteers are said to have reached out and traced the dish back through shops that still remembered the original taste. An improvised bowl born in a postwar shopping street, rediscovered decades later — the recovery itself became a way of reconnecting with that lost flavor.
Before You Go
- How to read a ticket machineShops that use a ticket machine (shokken-ki) often place their most popular items in a similar spot.
- Cash-only shops are commonEspecially at ramen shops, it's common to find places that only accept cash — often through a ticket machine.
- Foods to look for in summerA guide to foods often seen in Japan around summer — eel on the Day of the Ox, hiyashi chuka, somen, shaved ice, edamame with beer, and hamo — with rough pointers for finding them.
Dishes in the same style
- Abura SobaNo broth is poured at all — noodles are tossed in a soy-and-sesame-oil tare pooled at the bottom of the bowl, said to have started at shops in the Musashino area in the late 1950s, with vinegar and chili oil stirred in partway through.
- Betokon RamenA garlic-and-chili stamina ramen said to have originated in Ichinomiya, Aichi, devised from a repatriate's memories of Manchurian cooking. Its name is said to come directly from what customers started calling it.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Chiba
- Arirang RamenA soy ramen said to have started at a single restaurant on a mountain pass in Chiba's Nagara. Named, it's said, for the legendary Arirang Pass of Korean folklore, its soy broth carries the sweetness of onion and pork, layered with house-made chili oil and grated garlic for depth and heat.
- Barappa ManjuFreshly milled wheat dough is wrapped around red bean paste and steamed on a leaf of catbrier, called barappa locally — a bun said to be made in Chiba's Hokuso area when people gathered for summer festivals or Obon, each bringing ingredients to share.
- Iwashi no Unohana-zukeSalt-and-vinegar-cured sardines are packed into sweet-vinegared tofu lees with carrot and ginger — the pale lees are likened to unohana blossoms in the name, and are also said to keep the fish from breaking apart or oxidizing; eaten at New Year's and as an everyday pantry food.
- Rakkasei MisoPeanuts too small or misshapen to sell are stirred into miso and sugar and toasted into a pantry relish — said to have started as a way for farm households to use up peanuts the market wouldn't take, in leaner years.
- SumitsukareDaikon and carrot, coarsely grated with a rough-toothed oni-oroshi grater, are simmered with leftover setsubun soybeans and sake lees — said to have traveled from Tochigi into Chiba's Higashikatsushika area, offered to the local inari shrine on the year's first Day of the Horse before being eaten. Ibaraki and Saitama carry dishes of the same name.
- Yude RakkaseiFreshly dug peanuts, still in their shells, are boiled whole in salted water — a taste unique to the growing region, since raw peanuts start hardening the moment they're pulled from the ground and need to be boiled almost immediately.