Ramen Museum

Mike and I went on a little date after Christmas up to Yokohama to visit the Ramuem Museum. We heard such great things about this place from our friends and knew we had to try it before leaving Japan. Inside the museum down on the lower levels is the main part of the museum. It is set up to look like a small town with a variety of different styles of Ramen restaurants. The Ramen Museum has selected renowned ramen shops from all over Japan such as Sapporo, Asahikawa, Fukushima, Tokyo, Yokohama, Wakayama, Hakata, and Kumamoto. In this museum ramen restaurants highly regarded in areas famous for local ramen have come together to create a wide variety of ramen to try. The first place we tried was the Taniguchi Syokudou Ramen Restaurant. In typical Japanese fashion you buy a ticket for what you want to eat from the vending machine and then hand it to the waiter inside. Mike and I are more fond of the milky miso or soy milk soup base with the thicker ramen noodles. This first restaurant had a soy flavored soup with was actually quite good but the noodles were way too thin for our liking. Still, it was a good ramen and we enjoyed it. We got to sit right up against the kitchen window and saw a little of the process of preparing the ramen. We really enjoyed that. We weren't quite full since we got the half portion so we headed upstairs to try one more style of ramen.   We got miso ramen at the Sumire Ramen Restaurant. This specific ramen is famous in Hokkaido and we really thought we were going to love it but we were a little disappointed with the soup base. The noodles were thicker which was nice but the soup was not what we expected. Overall it was just fun to try differet kinds of ramen and enjoy the ambiance of the place. It was especially entertaining to watch the juggler in the "town square" while eating melon ice-cream.