Kitakata: the town that eats ramen for breakfast

Most of the world eats ramen for lunch, or late at night after a few drinks. In Kitakata, a small town in the mountains of Fukushima Prefecture, people have long eaten it for breakfast.

The habit even has a nickname: asa-ra (朝ラー), short for asa rāmen, "morning ramen". It sounds like a dare. Once you know the bowl, it sounds like common sense.

A gentle soup, a slippery noodle

Kitakata ramen is gentle in exactly the places other styles are loud. The soup is a clear, light-brown soy broth, usually made from pork bones and niboshi (煮干し), small dried sardines, then seasoned with a soy-based tare. It's savoury and clean, with a faint sweetness and a whisper of the sea from the fish.

There's no thick lid of fat and no wall of garlic. It's the kind of soup you could drink first thing in the morning and feel better for.

The toppings are classic: chashu pork, menma (seasoned bamboo shoots) and chopped green onion. Many people order the version with extra chashu, the slices laid across the surface until the soup barely shows.

If the soup is the quiet partner, the noodles are the star. Kitakata noodles are wide, flat and wavy, a style called hirauchi chijiremen (平打ち縮れ麺), roughly "flat, crinkled noodles". The dough is made with plenty of water, which gives them a soft, plump, almost silky chew.

The shape is the point. Flat noodles have more surface to carry soup, and the waves stop them lying flat against one another, so each mouthful arrives slippery and well coated. They are gloriously slurpable, and this is a bowl where slurping really pays off: drawing in air with the noodles cools them and lifts the aroma. If you're shy about it, I make the case for noisy eating in slurping etiquette.

Why breakfast?

Nobody seems entirely sure how asa-ra began, and the explanations vary. The ones you'll hear most often involve workers: factory staff coming off a night shift, farmers back from early work in the fields, people from the town's breweries wanting something hot. It may be all of these, or none. What's clear is that a light, clear soup and soft noodles make a far better breakfast than you might expect, and that the habit has become a point of local pride.

Ramen itself goes back a long way here. Local accounts usually trace Kitakata ramen to a cook from China who began selling noodles from a street cart in the late 1920s, and the town's shops multiplied from there.

These days Kitakata is often named alongside Sapporo and Hakata as one of Japan's "three great ramen" (日本三大ラーメン, nihon sandai rāmen). It's a popular saying rather than an official ranking, but it says something that a town this size gets mentioned in the same breath as Sapporo's miso and Hakata's tonkotsu.

A town of storehouses

Kitakata has another claim to fame: its kura (蔵), traditional storehouses with thick, fire-resistant walls. The town is known for having a great many of them. Over the years they've been used by merchants and by breweries making sake, miso and soy sauce, and plenty survive today as shops, homes and places to eat. They give the streets a handsome, unhurried character, and wandering among them is a big part of a visit.

Brewing and ramen share a quiet link here. Good water from the surrounding mountains is often credited for both the town's sake and the clean taste of its soup.

How to do asa-ra

A few suggestions if you find yourself in Kitakata:

• Make your first bowl a breakfast one. If you're staying overnight, try it in the morning. It feels completely different from a lunchtime ramen.
• Start with the soup. It's delicate, so taste it before adding pepper or anything else.
• Slurp. These noodles were made for it.
• Consider extra chashu. It's the town's favourite upgrade.
• Check before you go. Shops set their own hours, and not every one serves in the morning.

Our Kitakata city map shows the shops we know about in and around town.

A different kind of morning

I find something quietly radical about a town that starts its day with noodles. Asa-ra is a reminder that breakfast is less a menu than a mood: what matters is something warm, gentle and restoring before the day begins. A clear soy broth and a tangle of soft noodles happen to fit the bill rather well.