Ramen

Ramen is a Japanese noodle soup whose name is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese lamian, hand-pulled wheat noodles first described in a Ming dynasty dietary guide of 1504. Despite the borrowed name, Japanese ramen noodles are rolled and cut rather than hand-pulled, and the dish as it developed in Japan is modeled more directly on Cantonese-style noodle soups than on lamian itself. The dish's establishment as a distinct Japanese food is generally traced to 1910, when a former customs official named Ozaki Kan'ichi opened Rai-Rai Ken, the first Chinese-style restaurant in Tokyo's Asakusa district owned by a Japanese national, serving a soy-flavored noodle soup topped with roast pork, dried seaweed and fish cake that added more substance than the Chinese noodle soups already familiar in Japan. Ramen's global reach expanded enormously after 1958, when Momofuku Ando, founder of Nissin Foods, invented instant ramen, seasoned and precooked noodles that only needed hot water; it was voted Japan's greatest invention of the twentieth century in a national poll. Ramen is best understood as a genuinely Japanese dish built from a borrowed name and a borrowed technique, not as a regional variant of a Chinese one.