Ramen is one of those foods that inspires a cult following, and Tokyo is its spiritual home, with around 10,000 ramen shops to choose from

Because the ramen space is so competitive, only the good ones tend to survive which means it’s pretty hard to get a bad ramen in the Japanese capital.

If you don’t know what you’re doing in a Tokyo ramen shop you can order the wrong thing, make an embarrassing faux pas or otherwise come off looking like a bit of a noodle.

Recently I was lucky enough to take a ramen tour around Toyko’s Jinbocho area – known for its ramen, curry and its secondhand bookstores – with the charming Shotaro Mizuno, a ramenhead who runs the hugely popular Ramen Guide Japan and also hosts bespoke ramen shop tours.

This guy has tried every ramen you could think of – from the big three of shio ramen (made with chicken broth), shoyu ramen (soy sauce based) and miso ramen (self-explanatory!) to newer styles made with fresh fish or oysters.

He even claims that fruit ramen and Italian-style cheese ramen aren’t nearly as bad as they sounds, though I reserve judgement.

If you don’t have Shotaro holding your hands ramen shops can be a little daunting. They’re doable though. Here’s how to go it alone:

When you enter a ramen shop, you head to a ticket machine covered in buttons to make your order before you sit down.

If you don’t read Japanese you can use Google translate on your phone to work out which one to pick but if that’s too hard (or you worry you’ll annoy everyone by holding up the line) just pick the button on the top left of the machine, which is a doubly sure bet if it’s the biggest button.

Odds are that’s the shop’s most popular bowl and so you’re almost certainly getting the house specialty. 

“Slurping will help get more soup in to your mouth when you’re eating it with the noodles and will also help cool it down a tiny bit as you get some air on it,” says Shotaro.

But it has nothing to do with ‘showing appreciation to the chef’, despite what you may have heard. “Not sure where this reasoning came from, but definitely not the case!” he says.

Tsukemen ramen is a hugely popular style: it simply means the noodles are served separately to the broth, and you drag them into the soup before you eat which helps keeps the noodles fresh and springy.

Tsukemen ramen soup is often saltier and more condensed than other soups to infuse the noodles with extra flavour. So if you want to drink it as a standalone soup at the end, ask the chef for “Soup Wari” and he’ll dilute it with a ladle of dashi broth, making it much more palatable on its own.

Ramen shops are all about ‘in and out’ – there will be others waiting for your spot so be courteous and vacate as fast as you can.

Plus, ramen tastes best when it’s piping hot. “In addition, ramen shops make money by trying to get as many customers in and out of their shop as possible,” says Shotaro, so it’s disrespectful to take up their time by chatting and dawdling. I

t’s also unacceptable to take up a seat if you’re not ordering anything – one seat, one bowl. “The average time ramen eaters spend in a shop is about 20-25 minutes so definitely shoot for that mark,” Shotaro says.

No they’re not just for clumsy foreigners.

Ramen is a messy business and plenty of locals will don a paper bib if the restaurant hands them out, to protect their clothes from errant soup splatters. Take one, unless you want to spend the rest of your day looking like you’ve just escaped a game of paintball. 

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