The Ramen Shop That Keeps 900 Kilos of Rice in the Owner’s House

Most restaurants keep their rice in the restaurant. Keirin keeps 900 kilos of it — close to a tonne — stacked inside the owner’s house, because there is no room left in the shop.

Aotake Teuchi Ramen Keirin (青竹手打ちラーメン 桂林) is a family-run Chinese restaurant in Ashikaga, a city in Tochigi Prefecture north of Tokyo. It opened in 1989. The owner, Kakinuma-san, walked into the kitchen at 16 and is now, by his own count, in his 38th year.

The menu is ordinary neighbourhood Chinese — soy ramen, fried rice, gyoza, most of it under ¥1,000. The volume is not. A “large” fried rice is about a kilo of rice (2.2 lb). The size above that runs to 2.5 kg (5.5 lb). The giga menu clears three.

And through a sharp run-up in the price of rice, he has raised his prices exactly once. “It’s hard, honestly,” he says. Then he apologises for the increase.

What “aotake teuchi” means

Aotake teuchi (青竹手打ち) translates as “hand-cut with green bamboo”. A thick pole of fresh bamboo is laid across the dough and the noodle maker treads along it, walking his weight down the length of the mass until the cracks close up and the gluten is worked evenly through.

It is the signature technique of Sano, a neighbouring city in the same prefecture, and it produces a soy-based bowl with irregular, slightly wavy noodles that no machine reproduces. A customer at the counter, in from another prefecture, calls it “textbook Sano ramen”.

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His father told him not to take it

Kakinuma-san is the second generation. He started at 16, while still in high school — school finished, then straight into the kitchen.

I’ve been in here since I was 16. I went to high school, but school would end and I’d come here. I’ve been doing this ever since.

He says he had no particular ambition to cook. His father actively tried to talk him out of it.

My old man kept telling me not to take it over. That it’s hard work, that I shouldn’t. He kept saying it. And I said I wanted to do it anyway.

Every bowl comes with rice porridge

Order any ramen at Keirin and a small bowl of okayu — Japanese rice porridge — comes with it, free. Almost no ramen shop does this.

At Keirin, every ramen comes with okayu. So we make enough for all of them. It’s become really popular — people are behind it.

The reason is inherited. His father trained in a Chinatown kitchen, and the porridge there was good.

Morning prep starts with water going into the stockpot: chicken frames and pork femurs, roughly fifty-fifty. Beside it, a wok on full heat starts the porridge.

Under ten yen a portion

Flour and mixed water go into the noodle machine; the mass comes out as a rough slab. Then the bamboo goes on top of it.

You see how the cracks from when it was first gathered up have gone? If a crack is still in there, it opens up when you cut the noodles and they break.

The trodden dough rests on top of the noodle boiler, where the ambient heat cuts the resting time from about four hours to two, and makes it easier to stretch out afterwards.

The economics are blunt.

It costs under ten yen a portion. Buying from a noodle maker is fifty yen a portion. The cost is completely different.

The saving comes straight back as labour.

The work goes up, it really does. And there’s a ceiling. There’s only so much one body can do. Flat out, about 250 portions a day is the limit.

On a weekday he cuts about 160 portions. That number, not the dining room, is what caps the shop.

Nearly a tonne of rice, in the house

Lunch alone burns through 80 gō of rice — a gō is the traditional Japanese cup, about 150 g uncooked, so that is roughly 12 kilos before it goes near water. Some days it isn’t enough. Over a long holiday he cooks around 300 gō a day.

So the rice market lands directly on him.

It hits us straight on. I know I have to raise prices. I do it a bit at a time, but you can’t overdo it. So I put them up once last year and that was that.

What won’t fit in the shop goes home with him. One stack is 180 kilos. Behind it, thirty more sacks.

Nine hundred kilos. We’ve got rice, for now. Any more and I think the floor gives out, so there are six sacks outside at the moment, where the rain can’t get them.

Call it a tonne. On the heaviest days the shop goes through two sacks — 60 kilos — in a single day.

I’m scrambling to keep three part-timers employed. The finances are on fire.

Where the portions stop making sense

The best seller is toromi ramen — the shop’s hot-and-sour, thickened bowl — followed by soy ramen, fried rice and prawn fried rice. So far, so normal.

Regular and large are pretty much what you’d expect. It’s from tokumori — extra-large — that things start going strange. That one is about 2.5 kilos.

Laid out, using his own numbers, the rice in a bowl of fried rice goes like this.

The à la carte “half” is bigger than the lunch-set “half” because enough people wanted just a half fried rice in the evening that he made the evening one larger. A customer who ordered it that day: “I asked for a half portion. It was bigger than a regular.”

At these sizes, sharing is not a workaround. It is the intended use.

Coming as a family and sharing is completely fine. Three of you eating one, four of you eating one — however many you like.

The kitchen runs in ten-cup batches

Fried rice is cooked ten gō at a time, fifteen eggs beaten into it. At the lunch peak he does it again, and again. “Fried rice again. That’s ten gō done.” Behind him the order slips stack up: ramen, tanmen, yakisoba, rice bowls, all moving at once.

Giga ramen, and the Ashikaga Dam

Giga fried rice, ¥2,200, is packed into a cone, skewered so it holds its shape, and carried out on a turntable. The room reacts when it lands.

The challenger that day ordered the two-litre apple juice alongside it. That is two full plastic bottles in one glass.

Giga ramen is three portions of noodles: ¥2,300, or ¥2,000 as a challenge. Asked what it weighs, the owner works it out on the spot.

Six kilos? About three and three. Three kilos with the soup, so the two together are around six.

The house speciality is the Keirin Ashikaga Dam, ¥1,300. Assembled in order: a kilo of rice moulded into a ring, beaten egg with wood-ear mushroom poured into the middle, fried chicken stacked on top, a hamburg steak, the thickened sauce from the toromi ramen ladled over, ketchup, and finally a small cocktail parasol.

A family who had found the shop on Instagram drove over from Ibaraki to try it. He opened with the fried chicken, as planned, and moved well for twenty minutes. Then he stopped.

That was rough. … No, I’m not gutted. It’s been a while since I really went for it. It tastes good — it’s the sauce. It starts catching up with you in the second half.

He bought a takeaway container. The shop expects this: the containers are there, and nobody rushes a table that is still working.

Prices, as filmed

Year 38

This is year 38 now. Honestly, there’s nothing in particular I’m trying to achieve. Nothing — except the taste never changing. Doing it exactly the same way, every day, as hard as I can.

Cheap ingredients are not what makes that possible. Held prices and held portions are, and something has to absorb the difference.

Honestly, it’s hard. But the customer comes first — if they’re happy, that’s enough for me. Just forgive me the occasional small increase.

On his staff:

The part-timers I’ve got now, the staff — they’re the ones who keep this place bright. I feel like I should be thanking them all the time.

One of them had been on the shop’s books for barely eight months. Before that he was a regular who ate there several times a week, until he quit his job to give it a go.

And to the people outside:

We’ve been on television and YouTube a lot, so people come up and say “you’re always packed, aren’t you”. And really, we aren’t. I want people to know they can get in. We’re waiting.

If you’re going

Closing time and days off are not shown in the video, and the prices are as filmed. Check before you travel.

One note on manners: this is a family kitchen with three part-timers, and the giga dishes take one wok out of service for several minutes. If you order one, order it because you want to eat it — and take the rest home rather than leaving it.

The part text can’t carry

What the writing loses is the tempo: ten gō of rice breaking apart in a wok, the dull give of bamboo against dough, the noise a room makes when a cone of fried rice comes past on a turntable.

The build of the giga fried rice from 16:05, and the Ashikaga Dam going up from 35:07, are worth watching rather than reading.