I am Sarah Gavigan. I was raised in Columbia, Tennessee, an hour south of Nashville, and spent nearly twenty years in Los Angeles before my husband and I relocated to Nashville with our daughter in 2010. That’s where this story begins. But first, a bit about how I got here.
One day, I realized I am ramen otaku.
The word otaku has many meanings. To the older generation in Japan, otaku isn’t a compliment—it refers to someone obsessed (usually with anime or ramen), with no outside life. A serious geek. In the U.S. the term has crossed over to become a badge of honor, referring to a geek or nerd who embraces their obsession with intense verve. For me, it’s ramen. But what does it really mean to be otaku? It means I will go to great lengths for a great bowl of ramen. Why? Let me explain.
In Japan, you’ll find groups of otaku kids (and adults) hanging around ramen shops, chattering about every last detail of the bowls within. There are magazines the size of a Sears catalog to describe only some of the shops in Japan. Some otaku even go so far as to create costumes that represent their favorite anime characters, who often eat ramen. I, however, am not your typical otaku. I’m an Italian American wife and mom, raised in rural Tennessee, who spent seventeen years in Los Angeles working in the film and music industries. I discovered ramen in my twenties, and professional cooking relatively recently, just after I said a bittersweet good-bye to my career and life in California and moved back to Nashville. I had no idea I was ramen otaku until I found myself boiling fifty pounds of pork bones in my backyard at two a.m. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a surprise, after all . . .
All through my twenties and thirties, while living in the City of Angels, I became increasingly obsessed with food. I trawled the famed Santa Monica Farmers Market on Wednesdays with an extra coffee in my hand, peeking over the shoulders of the city’s great chefs—people like Ludo Lefebvre, Neal Fraser, Suzanne Goin, and Joaquim Splichal—with naive curiosity. I had a move: “Hey, Chef, want a coffee?” I would ask. When they said yes, I’d hand over the extra cup and ask, “So what are you going to do with that?” gesturing toward whatever produce they were holding.
I was always in search of new ingredients to cook in the wood-fired oven that my husband built in our backyard in Venice Beach. I hosted twenty-person-plus dinner parties with my best friend, Jennifer, who supplied specialty foods to restaurants all along the West Coast. We’d spend a week planning our menu and several days cooking. No ingredient was out of our reach. Jennifer was the kind of friend who would call me and say, “Would you be offended if I gave you a twenty-pound tuna loin for your birthday?” No, I most certainly would not be!
If I wasn’t working, I was traveling to all corners of the city in search of my next great meal, with Jonathan Gold’s book Counter Intelligence (the veritable guide to ethnic food in LA) in my car at all times. This was the late 1990s, when ramen was not even a discussion yet, except in college dorms—there was no trend to speak of. I was often the only white person in any shop I visited. Yet Jonathan directed my attention toward Santouka, a Japanese chain that has a stall in the food court of a Japanese grocery store called Mitsuwa, just up the street from my house in Venice. It quickly became my own personal wonderland.
By otaku standards, Santouka’s ramen is not the bowl to beat, yet to this day it’s the version against which I measure all other ramen. My favorite there was shio, or salt-flavored ramen, with a silky tonkotsu broth, clouded with pork fat that coated my lips as I slurped. The noodles were always perfectly cooked—not too soft—and the toppings were simple slices of roast pork chashu and thinly sliced scallions. One bowl in, and I was hooked—Santouka quickly became my local go-to.
I was grateful for it. My nonstop career as a music and film agent often left me stressed out, hungover, or beat down, and ramen was my cure. At night I would wine and dine clients at the hippest new restaurants in New York and LA, all the while thinking about the bowl of ramen I would inhale the next morning. Ramen became my refuge. I would show up in the morning at Santouka in LA, or Ippudo in New York, full of eager questions for my servers, who seemed perplexed by my disheveled appearance and slightly annoying curiosity for what is essentially considered highly revered fast food in Japan. Now, I say “fast” only for the speed at which the food is being consumed. Nothing is “slower food” than ramen, as you will soon discover. At home, I began dragging my friends and family farther and farther afield in search of my next great bowl. My husband and I often set out on weekend food crawls through the Asian enclaves around greater Los Angeles with our young daughter in tow.
I began to acquaint myself with different styles of ramen: rich, milky, pork-based tonkotsu broth, creamy white chicken paitan, light and clean shio. I learned how important it is to begin eating ramen immediately, as it degrades the longer it sits; and I watched and learned how to properly “crush” a bowl—take in the aroma first, a sip second, and then slurp your noodles loudly. The sound of slurping became the real indicator that I was in the right shop. I was, in short, beginning my journey as a ramen otaku, and I didn’t yet know how far it would take me.
In 2010, my husband and I made the difficult decision to leave our lives in LA and move to my hometown, Nashville. I wasn’t particularly happy about it, but we were facing the realities of the economic downturn, and there simply wasn’t the work opportunity there once was for us in California. Plus, we wanted a smaller city to raise our then six-year-old daughter in, so Music City it was. The move was harder on the three of us than I had imagined it would be—life in a small city in the South was worlds apart from the international hub of Los Angeles. I didn’t have much work, or many friends, but the worst was the absence of ramen, which had become my security blanket. Suffice it to say, I was not at my emotional best.
I spent two years preaching the gospel of ramen to my fellow Nashvillians, who met me largely with blank stares. Eventually, my restlessness and ramen cravings turned into threats to start making it myself. “Well, when are you going to stop talking about it and start making it?” asked Miranda, a local restaurateur in Nashville.
That was all I needed to hear. It was time to stop feeling sorry for myself, and start getting to work.
The very next day, I drove straight to Porter Road Butcher, looked the guy dead in the eye, and asked for fifty pounds of pork bones, proudly announcing that I was about to make tonkotsu ramen. Again, a blank stare. No matter, I thought. How hard can it be? It’s just boiling bones. Little did I know just how much I had to learn.
In those early days, the only sources of instruction available to me were YouTube videos of Japanese ramen shops and DVDs friends had given me of televised ramen competitions, along with a few articles I found here and there that didn’t tell me anything about how to make the broths or create the tare (liquid seasoning). Lack of information plus lack of any real culinary training in a city that has few to no Japanese restaurants made my goal a daunting one. In Japan, ramen chefs apprentice for years with a master and are notoriously tight-lipped with their recipes, and no one knew anything about ramen for hundreds of miles in any direction from Nashville. So my first few attempts at broth were pretty simple: Dump bones in pot, fill with water, and boil until the marrow started to leach out, which took about fourteen hours. The result? About ten quarts of murky, dirty broth that smelled not unlike the inside of a gym sock. I refused to give up, though, and in fact, I loved every minute of those early days.
My Pop-Up . . . and the Tweet That Changed the Game
Soon, I began to make plans to host a pop-up ramen dinner of my own. Sure, I’d never worked in a restaurant; no, I didn’t go to culinary school; and it’s true that I had never cooked for more than forty people at once. But none of that fazed me. I started to refine my broth technique, and invest in better equipment to get the job done. That involved buying not only a heavy-bottomed fifty-gallon stockpot (to keep the bones from burning) but also a propane turkey burner upon which to heat said pot in my backyard and a massive second freezer (that lived in my newly renovated dining room) to house my finished broth.
I’d start cooking my broth in the morning, and kept it cooking until the wee hours of the next morning, tending to the giant vats while the rest of my house slept. I remember one very early morning, around two a.m., I went to bail my stock from the backyard in my vinyl gloves and rubber apron, looking like a mortician. I tried to move 150 pounds of liquefied pork fat and boiling water off the stove to strain it. As I worked, I felt the pot handles begin to slip out of my hands, and visions of melting the lower half of my body flashed before me. With adrenalized strength, I recovered my stance and secured the pot. My heart was beating so fast I could hear it, but all that mattered was saving the stock. Things were getting weird, but I had a pop-up to prepare for, and I couldn’t stop now.
While I was gearing up for the pop-up, I began hosting an informal series of ramen tastings at my house for friends and family, where I worked out the kinks of the rest of my bowl: the tare, or seasoning that gives the broth its flavor; the toppings, like roasted pork and soft-boiled eggs stained in soy sauce; and even a few of my own inventions, like cast-iron chicken and shredded pork confit, aka pulled pork. This was when I began to develop my own style of ramen, one that’s firmly rooted in my Southern surroundings. The other important event during this period was the arrival of Erik Anderson, the chef at the then newly trending Catbird Seat, to my house to taste my ramen—before I’d ever even served a bowl of it to the public.
“Hey, this is pretty good,” he said. I was shaking too hard underneath the table to really do anything other than pelt him with questions about how to make a fatty stock broth. His response was simple: “I don’t know much about ramen stock, but I would think you would want to use a pressure cooker.” I brushed off his suggestion, as I had never seen anyone do that before. “Do you mind if I tweet a picture of this from the Catbird Seat account?” he asked. Mind? I most certainly did not! I was floored that an award-winning chef was in my house, eating my ramen, and telling me he thought it was good enough to publicly endorse.
“COMING SOON: The best bowl of ramen Nashville has ever seen!”
The moment that tweet went out, my life was changed forever. Erik’s tweet had pushed me out of the nest. I went from underground to aboveground in a matter of moments. Soon after his post was up, it was re-tweeted by tons of local press—word travels fast in a town like Nashville, especially about something that had basically never been seen there before. I was excited and slightly nauseous all at the same time. I was now fully committed, and there was no backing out—it was time to serve my ramen to the public.
I set the official date for my first pop-up, and 225 tickets sold in less than a week. Erik Anderson continued to be a giant support, helping me find cooks, and Kevin Ramquist, another local chef, was kind enough to let me cook broth in his kitchen. Two hundred twenty-five presold bowls meant eighty-four quarts of broth, requiring roughly two hundred pounds of bones. This was no small operation, and apart from Kevin’s borrowed stove for extra broth, I was running the whole thing out of my house.
I tackled my prep with the vigor I had been taught in the film industry. I made lists upon lists, complete with timelines and schedules. Once my broth was strained and ready to go, it had to be stored. No one restaurant had enough room in their walk-in refrigerator for all my broth, so I put one container here, one there. I had a map that looked like a game of Twister to tell me where it all was.
The day before the event, the cooks showed up at my house looking ready for war with their knives and whetstones. I set them to work, and had prep running smoothly, when the doorbell rang. It was a photographer from Food & Wine, asking to shoot my ramen on behalf of Erik, who had apparently selected me as one of his top five picks for the best food in Nashville. Was I really being featured in Food & Wine before I had even sold my first bowl? Apparently, yes.
The event came and went in a blur, and it was a massive success. Looking back a few days later, I realized that I had loved every second of this crazy thing. And I was moved by it, too: I’ll never forget the look on the face of one guest as he ate my ramen, because I knew what it meant to him. You see, a few weeks before the dinner, an older gentleman contacted me about tickets, asking if this was indeed the “Japanese-style ramen” that he had eaten some fifty years ago while stationed in Japan. I served him and his wife personally, quickly running to watch him from behind the kitchen door as he reached for his spoon and chopsticks. First he took a moment to close his eyes and take in the aroma, next a sip of broth, and then finally a giant slurp of noodles. He set both his hands back on the table, straddling the bowl, closed his eyes and let his head tilt back a little, then smiled. I literally began to weep. I had actually done it. I had rung the memory bell for this man, fifty years after his last bowl of ramen. At that moment I knew—not only was I doing this, but I was made to do this.
After that first night, I started hosting ramen pop-ups at restaurants and markets all over town, sometimes serving up to 450 bowls of tonkotsu in one night. Meanwhile, I was prepping everything in my house, creeping around the backyard propane burner to tend to my broth while my family slept, unaware. I’d already bought a giant second freezer that had nowhere to live but the middle of the house, but it soon became clear that I couldn’t go on prepping ramen in my home forever.
Eventually I found a commercial kitchen in a nondescript strip mall in East Nashville and started working there, much to the relief of my family. Now I could really get serious about my production and the consistency of my pop-ups.
Around this time, I took the opportunity to enroll in an intensive ramen education course at Sun Noodle (the noodle company that supplies me and most top ramen shops in America) Ramen Lab in New Jersey. I had decided to wait a year to learn as much as I could on my own—I wanted to make my own mistakes before taking the leap. I believed that because of my general lack of culinary training, I had to rely on the skills I did have, which were research and knowing how to talk to people. The chefs I befriended along the way were all French trained, and now I can say with certainty that making ramen stock is the complete inverse of making a French stock. I can recall more than a few times when I had the chance to chat with very accomplished chefs about ramen, who usually met me with the same blank stare that I had grown used to from all my friends. But a few came back with the same suggestion that Erik Anderson had made: use a pressure cooker to make the stock. Again, I refused this idea at first, as it challenged fifty-plus years of ramen culture. But when I attended “ramen school” at Sun Noodle, the ideas all crystallized.
At the Sun Noodle factory—really a warehouse outfitted with a small kitchen—I met Master Chef Shigetoshi “Jack” Nakamura aka Naka, who taught me the traditional methods for making broth. Not just tonkotsu but also the golden chintan chicken stock and the rich, creamy chicken broth called paitan that I had rarely eaten, let alone made. When I got back to Nashville, I started incorporating what I’d learned at Ramen Lab into my menu, playing around with new bowls that reflected my background and Southern surroundings—a roasted-lemon chicken paitan, for example, that nods to my Sicilian heritage while staying true to the traditional Japanese techniques for broth and seasoning.
Meanwhile, the building that housed my kitchen sold to a new owner, and he approached me about putting a restaurant in the space. I came up with the idea of turning the entire place into a sort of culinary incubator for new and emerging chefs, called POP. This concept tapped into a crossroads of my skills and my needs. POP allowed me to keep my commissary kitchen for ramen, and use my networking and marketing skills to invite chefs and restaurants to do pop-ups in the space. The first theme the new owner desired? A ramen restaurant. My ramen restaurant. Which was awfully convenient, given that I was prepping everything right there in the kitchen.
Otaku South opened at POP in May 2014 for a one-year residency. Subsequently, Otaku found a permanent home in the Gulch area of Nashville, opening as a standalone restaurant in December 2015 as Otaku Ramen. When I began this journey, Nashville was on its way to becoming nationally recognized as a killer food city, but there was little ramen to be had. I reveled in bringing my obsession to my new city of Nashville. I wanted to help introduce my friends and neighbors to the “traditional” ramen you’d see in Japan, but I quickly realized that there’s no such thing—ramen is always shaped by its surroundings. So I started making bowls that reflected what Nashville knows and loves: smoked pork, pickled vegetables, hot chicken, and more. I developed my own personal style—one that’s rooted in Japanese technique but distinctly tied to my own terroir.
I continued to make ramen at home, and started developing some tips and tricks that made it much easier for the home cook than what I had been taught along the way. My experiments revealed that my chef friends were right—a pressure cooker can produce golden chintan chicken stock and some of the creamiest paitan broth in one-tenth the time it takes on the stovetop. I reverse engineered my favorite tare, or the liquid seasoning that gives each ramen its distinct flavor, out of pantry ingredients that keep indefinitely. And I built relationships with my vendors, which I will share with you to make sure you can get the proper ingredients, such as the noodles themselves.
Now, I’m ready to share my story and my recipes. Some of the greatest ramen chefs in the world are tight-lipped with their knowledge, but I’m a Southern girl who likes to talk and likes to teach. I’m proud of what I’ve learned and what I’ve built, and I want to show home cooks that it is indeed possible to make great ramen in their own kitchens. And I want to inspire a new generation of ramen otaku to create their own personal ramen styles, built upon their own tastes and surroundings.
In this book, we’ll cover the fundamental techniques and recipes that all ramen otaku should master as a foundation, then I’ll share some of my favorite recipes for unique craft ramen that build off those fundamentals.
Home Cooks Rule the World
Let’s get something straight: First and foremost, I am a home cook. The life of being a professional cook and chef came to me at the age of forty-two. I got here by being a passionate and obsessed home cook. And I am and always will be a cookbook-aholic. It’s where you dreamily get to be transported into someone’s mind and kitchen. My goal with this book is to give you the knowledge I have gained by searching, testing, tripping, sliding—and getting back up.
There are a few immutable aspects we have to work with in home kitchens as opposed to a commercial-grade kitchen. Heat is the biggest. The power of a gas range in a restaurant is roughly ten times what is legally allowed in a home kitchen, and ramen broth requires high heat. We will get to that. All stovetops are not created equal and time can be a cruel mistress, but you will have options.
This book is the culmination of four years of work to understand the shrouded world of ramen. The complete bowl is broken down here into its elemental parts. And I provide the recipes and methods that come straight from our ramen shop combined with the knowledge you need to replicate our bowls and then go on to create your very own signature bowl of ramen.
I, a chef and the author of this book, am not a wizard with magical powers used to make a secret and unreplicable bowl of ramen. I am the Alice in Wonderland of ramen. I fell down the rabbit hole and fell in love with the process of making and serving ramen.
If you are here, then I bet you will, too.
Is This Ramen Authentic?
Before we move forward, I want to tackle the prickly topic of authenticity. If you have not figured this out yet, I am a middle-aged white woman who is a mother and a wife. I am not Asian, and I am not a tattooed chef with a flat-bill hat and a bunch of punchy things to say on Instagram. I don’t slaughter my own pigs. Does that stop me from making a great bowl of ramen? No. Does being Asian ensure that you know how to make a great bowl of ramen? Well, in a word: NO.
Let’s explore the value of the word through our country’s own greatest food export, the cheeseburger. Does the cheeseburger belong to the United States? Sure, we gave birth to it, gave it a name, and it is our national food, but let me tell you I had the best hamburger of my life in Japan. Does that make it less authentic? Nope, it just makes it GOOD.
The literal dictionary definition of the word authentic is “at its origin.” So what is the origin of ramen as we know it? Japan. I am not in Japan and I am going to bet the majority of ramen you have consumed was not in Japan, either.
Japan has a world of ingredients and dizzying methodology that makes food grown and made there unique to that country. We cannot make Japanese ramen in the U.S., nor are we going to attempt to. But what we are going to do is take the foundation of how to make a bowl great, how to create umami and flavor and texture from the origins of the motherland, using (largely) ingredients from your surroundings. So take the word authentic out of your vocabulary right now. It won’t serve you here. Good, tasty, and balanced are the only words we need.
American Ramen Godfather Chef Ivan Orkin gave me an incredible piece of advice once on how to handle criticism of my ramen. “You just have to understand that I will never know what you taste.” He’s right. It’s a simple thing to come to terms with, which is that everyone has different tastes for salt and flavor. I am going to teach you what you need to know to make these decisions for yourself.
GO EAT A BOWL OF RAMEN
This food is important for many reasons that I will tell you about in this book, but also for no other reason than it’s simply magic. I want to make a recommendation before diving into the book: Go eat at a proper ramen shop. Have that experience by yourself. Just watch the whole process, put your phone down, take off your glasses (that’s what I have to do), tuck your napkin into your shirt, and dive in. Tackle the noodles first, a little broth, more noodles, toppings, then drink the rest. Don’t stop till that bowl is finished. Do not check your phone. Do not waver from this bowl of ramen. The simple task of eating a bowl of ramen with only your own thoughts can change the course of your day. Okay, I know that sounds a bit lofty, but just do it.
