08.31.07
That Mango Will Blow Your Damn Mind
My god! My friend sent me this article about the dining and food in Japan. It soo crazy, that you just have to read it for yourself. There is a brief bit about ramen at the end— any myself being a ramen otaku (ramen geek) am compelled to include an excerpt about the ramen museum (Note: I like kimchi too, and during a trip to Seoul, Korea, I visited the kimchi museum).
The museum, which opened in 1994, was the brainchild of a local real estate developer and avowed ramen otaku—”ramen geeks,” Bryan Harrell told me, “they are the worst”—who thought it would be a popular idea to bring all the different styles of Japanese ramen together under one roof. He was right. The three-floor facility attracts more than a million visitors a year, many from neighboring noodle nations such as Thailand and Singapore. At lunchtime on weekends, according to Osamu Hitoe, the museum representative who greeted me, the noodle shops are jammed with as many as five thousand people. Indeed, the museum’s popularity has given rise to other epicurean theme parks across the land. There is the Sweets Forest, in Tokyo, and if you ever happen to visit the city of Yamanashi, in central Japan, you will find a modern glass-and-chrome museum devoted entirely to fruit.