Twelve Hours of Broth

The version of ramen most people outside Japan grew up with is a foil packet, dehydrated noodles, and a powder that tastes like sodium if sodium had ambition. Thirty cents, three minutes, a meal you eat standing over the sink because you’re twenty-two and it’s 1am and nothing else is open. That understanding of ramen is so far from the actual dish that they barely share a name.

My benchmark is Afuri in Sendagaya—yuzu shio broth light enough to drink like tea, noodles with texture and intent, a menu that changes just enough to justify paying close attention. I’ve been enough times that I stopped looking at the menu a while back. Ramen earns loyalty the way almost nothing else does.

Ramen Heads, a documentary by Koki Shigeno, Arata Oshima, and Yusuke Kamata, builds its case around ramen chef Osamu Tomita, whose relationship with the dish reads less like a career and more like a calling. He’s the kind of cook who has clearly sacrificed things you wouldn’t sacrifice for a bowl of soup and considers the trade completely fair. The film argues that ramen belongs in the same conversation as any serious food—that the broth simmered twelve-plus hours, the hand-cut noodles, the precise balance of tare and fat and toppings, represent craft on the level of anything that gets taken more seriously by people who should know better.

It screened at food festivals and deserves a wider streaming release. In the meantime, Tomita’s quiet fanaticism is the kind of thing you can’t watch without reconsidering the last bowl you ate and whether you paid it the right amount of attention.