The Ramen Shop That Followed Me Home

Afuri is in Sendagaya, and it is where I want to end up when Tokyo finally gets around to killing me with food. The yuzu shio broth is clear and fragrant and tastes like someone spent years thinking about how a bowl of soup should taste before allowing themselves to make it. Every heavy tonkotsu I’ve eaten since has to answer for itself by comparison.

So when Uniqlo released a t-shirt collection built around Tokyo’s best ramen shops, and Afuri was on the list alongside Ebisoba Ichigen, Menya Musashi, and Ippudo, I took it as the universe briefly paying attention. The shirts are exactly what they sound like—clean graphic tees, around fifteen euros each, wearing a restaurant’s name the way people wear band shirts: as a declaration of loyalty.

I’ve been saying for years that ramen is the new sushi, and I mean it as both observation and warning. Sushi spent decades being culturally mangled—duck instead of salmon, ground beef instead of tuna, whatever structural crimes are committed at all-you-can-eat conveyor belt places the world over. The Japanese masters who spent lifetimes perfecting nigiri presumably don’t enjoy watching what the rest of the world has done to their work. Ramen is still, mostly, intact. The craft is still serious. The obsessives are still obsessive.

The Uniqlo collaboration sits somewhere between genuine appreciation and the first stage of inevitable commodification. Wearing a restaurant’s logo is a different relationship to it than waiting forty minutes in the Sendagaya cold for a seat at the counter. But I don’t begrudge it. The shirts are good, and the Afuri design in particular is the kind of thing I’d wear without irony. Just leave that one for me.