Hakata Ramen

A cloudy pork-bone broth, boiled hard until it thickens, carries an animal richness that lingers pleasantly rather than overwhelming. The very thin, straight noodles cook fast enough that the first portion disappears almost before you notice. The custom is to cook the noodles firm, eat through that first portion, and then order kaedama — a fresh batch of noodles alone — into the broth that's left, so one bowl can deliver two or three rounds of that noodle bite.

After the war, the story goes, one man spent years trying to recreate a cloudy pork-bone soup, eventually landing on the method used today: boiling the bones hard enough to emulsify fat and protein into the broth's characteristic cloudiness. The noodles were cut extremely thin, it's said, to cook fast enough for the impatient customers at Nagahama's fish market — and that need for speed is what led to kaedama, ordering a fresh batch of noodles alone.

One story traces the cloudy pork-bone broth back to a man who, unable to forget a pork-bone soup he'd once eaten in Fengtian, Manchuria, spent the postwar years recreating it in Hakata. The extra-thin noodles and the kaedama refill are said to have grown out of shaving down cook time for impatient customers at the fish market — the pace of a busy market town, read this way, is what shaped how this bowl gets eaten.