RAMEN SHOPS & NOODLE BARS · JAPAN & BEYOND
Find the bowl worth the queue.
Tonkotsu in Fukuoka, miso in Sapporo, late-night shoyu in Tokyo, and the noodle-making tables of Kyoto. Reviews of the ramen shops, noodle bars and hands-on classes worth a detour, city by city.
Where the bowl comes from
Three broths, three home cities.
Ramen is regional, and the great styles each have a hometown: tonkotsu in Fukuoka, miso in Sapporo, the rich kotteri of Kyoto. Eat each one where it was invented and the whole map of Japanese noodles starts to make sense.
Hokkaido
Sapporo
Miso ramen started here, a fix for the Hokkaido winter: a thick, sweet-savoury broth with a knob of butter, a scoop of sweetcorn, sometimes a scatter of scallops. The shops crowd into Susukino and Ramen Alley, steam fogging the windows, and a guide takes you straight to the bowls worth the cold.
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Kansai
Kyoto
Forget delicate: Kyoto ramen runs rich and dark, a back-fat kotteri broth that surprises everyone who expects temple restraint. Ichijoji is a whole street of it. And Kyoto is the country's ramen-class capital, where you can spend a morning pulling noodles before you ever pick up the chopsticks.
- 1 Ramen Cooking Class at Ramen Factory in Kyoto
- 2 Kyoto: Ramen Cooking Class at a Ramen Factory with Souvenir
- 3 Kyoto: Ramen, Gyoza, and Onigiri Cooking Class
If you only book one
The ramen experience more travellers rave about than any other.
Out of every shop, bar and class on the site, this is the one people come home telling everyone they know to book.
The crowd-pleasers
The Most Popular Ramen Experiences Right Now
Tokyo shoyu counters, Kyoto noodle classes, Sapporo miso shops, Fukuoka tonkotsu yatai. The bookings travellers are happiest they made.
Start with a city
The best ramen, city by city.
Tokyo for the late-night shoyu, Sapporo for the miso, Fukuoka for the tonkotsu, Kyoto for a class of your own. Pick the city you are headed to and we will point you to the bowls worth queueing for.
Which bowl are you after
Pick a broth, and the region picks itself.
The first question every ramen trip answers: which style. Each of the big three has a home region and a city that does it better than anywhere, so start with what you want in the bowl.
Tokyo
The best counters seat eight.
Tokyo is the densest ramen city on earth, and its finest shops are tiny: a vending machine for the ticket, a row of stools, a cook who has made one bowl for thirty years. A guide handles the machine, walks you past the queues worth joining, and gets you into the Shinjuku and Ginza counters that stay open until the last train.
See the best Tokyo ramen tours →Osaka
The kitchen of Japan eats late.
Osaka built its name on eating until you drop, and Dotonbori is the proof: ramen counters wedged between takoyaki griddles and gyoza windows, neon on the canal, queues that move fast. A guide walks you to the bowls worth the wait, slots in the side dishes Osaka does best, and keeps the night moving from one stool to the next.
See the best Osaka ramen tours →Sapporo
The bowl that beats the snow.
Miso ramen was invented up here in Hokkaido for one reason: it had to be hot enough to face a Sapporo winter. Thick fermented broth, a melting knob of butter, sweetcorn, sometimes scallops straight off the northern coast. Down Ramen Alley in Susukino the steam never clears, and a guide takes you to the shops locals brave the cold for.
See the best Sapporo ramen tours →Kyoto, hands-on
Pull your own noodles before you slurp them.
Kyoto is the country’s ramen-class capital. Spend a morning at a noodle workshop, mixing and cutting the noodles, simmering the broth, choosing your toppings, then sitting down to the bowl you built. It is the most-booked ramen experience in Japan, and the rest of the city backs it up with Ichijoji’s famously rich kotteri street.
- 1 Ramen Cooking Class at Ramen Factory in Kyoto
- 2 Kyoto: Ramen Cooking Class at a Ramen Factory with Souvenir
- 3 Kyoto: Ramen, Gyoza, and Onigiri Cooking Class
How hands-on
Slurp it, hunt it down, or make it yourself.
A guided sit-down in Tokyo. A shop-to-shop crawl through Osaka. A morning pulling your own noodles in Kyoto. Pick how far into the bowl you want to go.
Just slurp
Tokyo, bowl in hand.A guide walks you into the shops you would never have found, works the ticket machine, and orders the bowl each counter is known for. You sit, you slurp, you move on to the next. No Japanese needed, no wrong order.
Eat the whole street
Osaka, shop to shop.Ramen is the anchor and the rest of Dotonbori fills in around it: gyoza, takoyaki, a beer between stops. A local leads you past the queues that are worth it and the ones that are only long, and tells you what to order at each.
Make it yourself
Kyoto, from broth to bowl.At a ramen workshop you make the noodles, build the broth, and choose the toppings, then sit down to eat the bowl you just pulled. The most-booked ramen experience in the country, and the one people talk about for years.
Yokohama
A whole museum, just for ramen.
Yokohama gave the world iekei ramen, the family-style bowl that splits the difference between tonkotsu richness and shoyu depth, with thick noodles and a sheet of nori. It is also home to the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum, a recreated retro street where regional shops from across Japan serve mini bowls so you can taste the whole country in one afternoon. A guide turns it into a tasting route.
See all 3 Yokohama ramen tours →By city
Pick a city and start slurping.
Tokyo for the late shoyu counters. Osaka for the Dotonbori crawl. Kyoto for a class of your own. Sapporo for the miso. Fukuoka for the tonkotsu. Yokohama for the ramen museum.
More cities
More cities worth a hungry detour.
Kobe and Nagoya for the Japan you have not eaten yet, then Seoul, Xian, Saigon and Taipei for the wider world of noodles. The rest of the map, ready when you are.
Three cities, three ramen days
Pick a city, build the day around the bowl.
A late-night counter in Tokyo, a noodle-making morning in Kyoto, a bowl against the cold in Sapporo. Three cities, three very different ways to spend a day eating ramen.
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