THE JAPAN TIMES takes a look at how a lot of ramen shops are going upmarket. “Ramen has long been known as a staple of construction workers and penny-pinching students. But in a push to win over new clientele, ramen chains are going upscale, serving special pork and organic vegetables at eateries featuring dark-wood interiors and soft lighting. One company even came up with a form of diet ramen made from seaweed extracts. This dish weighs in at a meager 8 calories.” Shiodome Ramen is calling me…
Category: General
Jean Snow lives and breathes design and pop culture in Tokyo -- sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for the following online/offline publications: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Game|Life, and The Japan Times. He also manages the gallery space at Cafe Pause.
Jean Snow is a daily contributor to Wired magazine's game blog, Game|Life, covering game news from Japan and beyond.
Tokyolife: Art and Design covers Tokyo's cultural output of the past few years, covering the works of over 80 influential creatives. Jean Snow provided coordination assistance.
The Superfuture Superguides are a series of PDF travel guides to some of your favorites cities, updated monthly, and obsessively compiling the best places to shop, eat, and drink. The Tokyo guide is edited by Jean Snow.
He is also the design/culture editor at Neojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx, here.
PauseTalk is a regular series of events that take place at Cafe Pause on the first Monday of every month, with a start time of 20:00. The idea is to create a forum where Tokyo-based creatives can get together and discuss their own projects, as well as cultural currents of the city. The next edition happens August 4 (there is no July edition).
Categories
Art & Design
Media
City Life
Tokyo Boy
Find out more about how to advertise directly on this site here, or by contacting me.
Damn you! Do you know how many times your posts have given me unsquelchable cravings for ramen?! How I wish there was a decent ramen place in Santa Cruz, CA… though I guess that wouldn’t help me at 6:30am anyways.
P.S. - I enjoy your blog on a daily basis.
Glad to hear that you enjoy the site, and sorry for causing those cravings!
Oooh, ramen. It’s a real pity that we don’t have any ramen restaurants at all in Stockholm.
Last summer we found a great, back-alley, ramen restaurant, DenDen, somewhere between Roppongi and Azabu in Tokyo. Really small place, but with that cozy dark furniture and ambient lighting. Always the same chef, his side-kick and the waitress. Quite a lot of people for such a small restaurant. In the beginning of August he put up a sign saying he’d taken a long vacation. Then we went back to Sweden and I’ve wondered ever since if he re-opened or closed alltogether.
Damn fine ramen.
Curses, no ramen here either … ;)
ramen out the ass here in nakame…
Yeah, but you come to Ikebukuro for a bowl of the “good” stuff.
girl you know it’s true!