Tokyo Ramen

A clear soy broth built on chicken bones and dried sardines. Thin wavy noodles, char siu, a slice of narutomaki, chopped scallion, a combination that, in hindsight, is simply what everyone pictures when they hear the word ramen. It doesn't push a strong personality; it reads instead as the shape people default to when asked to describe the basic bowl. Long called chuka soba, it stays unadorned — and it's precisely that lack of any twist that makes it the standard everyone else is measured against.

The base is said to be chicken bones layered with distinctly Japanese stocks, dried sardines, katsuobushi, kombu. Rather than importing Chinese noodle soup wholesale, this bowl is thought to have been reworked toward the clear, dashi-forward logic of soba broth. The soy tare is kept light enough not to bury the stock's aroma. The toppings, too, avoid excess, letting the plain outlines of noodle and broth stand on their own.

One account traces it to the late Meiji era, when a Chinese restaurant that opened in Asakusa served a dish called shina soba. Local palates, long accustomed to the clear dashi of soba broth, are thought to have gradually pulled the Chinese noodle dish toward a more Japanese-style stock. What settled out was a bowl easy to accept as an extension of an existing soba culture, this clear soy broth. It reads as a case of an imported dish reshaping itself to fit the water and palate already established here.