The Ramen Shop That Opens at 4:50 A.M. — and the One Whose Owner Sleeps Two Hours

Most ramen shops in Japan open for lunch. These two open in the dark.

In Machida, on the western edge of Tokyo, Ramen Shop Yamamura unlocks at 6 a.m. The owner arrives at 2:52. He says he sleeps about two hours a night.

North of the city, in Kazo, Saitama, on a road with nothing around it but rice fields, Ramen Shop Kitakawabe opens at 4:50 a.m. It has been doing that since 2002. The owner gets up at three.

By six, both counters are full of men in work clothes eating a very large bowl of noodles before their shift. What follows is drawn from a 55-minute documentary by the Japanese food channel Fun Eats.

What a ra-sho is

Ramen Shop — ra-sho to regulars — is not one restaurant. It is a loose network of independently run shops trading under the same red awning, scattered along highways and truck routes. Each one makes its own soup. That is the whole point, and it is why people talk about individual branches rather than the brand. Kitakawabe's owner puts it plainly:

The variation in flavour is that shop's flavour. Each shop's way of doing it is slightly different.

The house bowl is tonkotsu-shoyu: pork-bone broth cut with soy, a slick of back fat on top, and a mound of negi — spring onion shredded into fine white threads and dressed in a sharp, salty sauce. You order it with three dials: noodle firmness, broth strength, fat.

It is not delicate food. It is food for someone who has to lift things for the next nine hours.

Watch the video

Machida: open at six, two hours of sleep

Kato-san, who owns Yamamura, pulls up at 2:52 a.m., raises the shutter, turns on the lights and starts prep. The doors open at six. That is a little over three hours to build a day's soup.

Cars, construction and food — thirty years each

His main business, it turns out, is not ramen. He runs a car shop. He has been in construction for about thirty years. And in food for about thirty years. Asked whether that made him a multitasker, he agreed without hesitation.

Yeah, I'm multi.

Yamamura itself is new. It opened on 12 September.

Two hours a night

What time he arrives depends on how much prep got done the night before. If it did not, he has to be in by three. The night before filming, he got home at 2:30 a.m.

I only sleep about two hours a day.

Asked how anyone functions on that, the answer was short.

There's nothing to do but do it. I'm the only one here this early.

There is an apple in the soup

Into the stockpot go pork femur bones and pork spine, then water, then the batch prepped the day before. Garlic, spring onion, carrot, kombu — and an apple.

Most places don't put it in, do they. I think it tastes better with apple. That's just me.

Even cleaning the bones has a fixed order. Some shops pull the blood line out raw; he says that is obviously slower. He boils the bones first, then pulls it, scrubs them with a brush, breaks them down and sets them aside. He does this between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m., in the lull.

One stockpot

Lunch service ends when the soup runs out — usually by 1:30, at the latest 2:30. Regulars asked him to keep going into the evening, so he now preps a second, half-size pot to carry a dinner service.

If I could fit another big one in here, it would be completely different.

Gas costs him 250,000 to 300,000 yen a month. It is not city gas, so the conditions are different again. Three pots would let him rotate and actually rest. He has one.

150 grams is the regular portion

A regular portion of noodles here is 150 grams. Most shops, he reckons, run 120 to 130. A large is two blocks, 300 grams. Rice comes small (150 g), medium (220 g) or large (300 g). Morning customers usually take a medium rice, or go large on the noodles.

TKG was added later, because staff and customers kept asking for it.

The regulars at six in the morning

At six the sign goes out, the shutter goes up, and customers arrive immediately. You buy a ticket from the machine and hand it over with your preferences: firm, strong, extra fat. Grated garlic and doubanjiang sit on the counter.

One regular, 63, works in manufacturing and starts at 6:30. He came three times last week. He used to drive out to Sagamihara for his ramen; now the shop is on his commute.

I see the place on the way to work and I just end up stopping. I'm hooked.

His serving suggestion: wrap the negi around the noodles and eat them together. That is the best part, he says.

Another customer, on his second visit, admitted he had checked the online reviews before coming and found them low.

The ratings were a bit low, but honestly it's nothing like that.

At 7:52 a member of staff arrives. He has been there less than six months and eats the ramen five days a week. He recommends the negi chashu-men, noodles firm. His previous job was at a curry shop. On the owner:

Kato-san is a bit boyish. He gets excited straight away.

Kazo: open at 4:50, twenty-four years in

Kitakawabe sits alone on a road through rice fields in Kazo, Saitama. The owner is Tetsuo Sakamoto, 53. He opened in 2002; this June he began his twenty-fifth year.

4:00, a car pulls into the lot. 4:20, prep starts. 4:26, an employee arrives. 4:50, the doors open. There is no slack in it.

You have to do it by the second or you won't make it.

He gets up at three. Every day.

A soup that never finishes

He explains the differences between branches with one term: takidashi soup — a pot topped up with water as it goes, so it never gets too concentrated, and never actually ends.

You add hot water so it doesn't get too strong. It's all made by hand, at each shop.

His own bowl he describes this way:

It's rich, but the soup isn't so thick. Easy to drink, easy to eat.

The rice is cooked in boiling water, straight up. The chashu is domestic pork shoulder and belly, two cuts, simmered the day before in the soup itself. The miso blend for the miso ramen is his own. Jazz plays in the kitchen.

The spring onion is a local brand, and there is never enough

The negi is Kazo negi, grown locally. It goes through a machine, then gets portioned out. Asked whether the mountain of it in front of him was a day's worth:

Not even close. I cut more partway through service.

He also runs the cafe next door

At 5:15 he leaves the kitchen to his employee and opens the shutter next door. Cafe Vanilla normally runs 10:00 to 17:00; in the mornings he runs both at once.

Inside are motorcycles and a display case — a secret base, in his words. The Kawasaki Z is this year's model, about 2 million yen, on a ten-year loan.

The question is whether I'm still alive by the time it's paid off.

The models in the case were built by a part-time employee, who asked if he could put them there.

From Fukushima, from Ibaraki, from a trailer truck

4:52 — two minutes after opening, the first customer sits down. Chashu-men, firm noodles, rich. From order to bowl is a matter of seconds.

The furthest travelled that morning had driven from Fukushima Prefecture, leaving before 2 a.m. Not for work. He had taken a weekday off to come.

The moment I took a sip of the soup, I thought, wow, this is good.

Before six there were two young men on their way home from a night out, who take their negi chashu-men with black vinegar and shichimi. A local man on his seventh or eighth visit was heading to the pachinko parlour afterwards. A carpenter from Ibaraki was heading to a site.

I can't eat right after I wake up, so I have breakfast on the way to work.

One customer put three heaped spoons of grated garlic on a large ramen. At 6:37 an enormous trailer truck pulled into the lot — the parking here takes vehicles that size, which is part of why the shop works where it is.

The peak is 7:30 to 8:00. After eight the commuters thin out, and drivers who have finished unloading take their place.

The thing you cannot let people down about

Asked what keeps him getting up at three:

I want people to know there's a place here where you can eat something good first thing in the morning.

Underneath it is a specific view of who his customers are.

People work hard all day. The least I can do is give them something good when they eat out.

On rising costs he is unambiguous. He will not quietly downgrade ingredients to hold a price.

Even if it costs a bit more, what you want is the flavour you remember. If it has to change, make it better. Customers enjoy that more.

It's what they look forward to all day. You can't let them down on that.

On what customers say to him — that was good, that'll keep me going, I'll be back:

It stops being about money, in the end.

Side by side

If you are going

Ramen Shop Yamamura (Machida, Tokyo)

Ramen Shop Kitakawabe (Kazo, Saitama)

Hours and closing days are as filmed. Yamamura stops for the afternoon when the lunchtime soup runs out. Worth confirming before you go.

How it works: buy a ticket from the machine, hand it over, say how you want it — firm noodles, strong broth, extra fat. Then eat, and go. Nobody lingers.

The part text cannot carry

Two things do not survive the transcription.

One is the speed at Kitakawabe. From the ticket landing on the counter to the bowl arriving is genuinely a few seconds, over and over, with no visible hurry in it.

The other is what six in the morning sounds like at Yamamura. Almost nobody talks. There is the fryer, the ticket machine, and eight men eating.

Both are in the video: the 45:49 mark for the men eating before a shift, and from 53:23 for Sakamoto-san on why he does it.