Ramen is a pork dish by default, and the default has a name: chashu. But the meat map is wider than the classic bowl suggests, chicken runs the lighter styles, beef appears in modern shops and old menus alike, and the sea claims its own bowls outright. Here is what lands on the noodles, style by style, and where each one sits on our menu.
Chashu, the standard
The word comes from Chinese char siu, the roasted barbecued pork of Cantonese shops, but the Japanese ramen version took the name and rewrote the method: pork belly rolled and tied into a log, braised in soy, sake, mirin and sugar until the fat turns to silk, sliced into discs and laid across the soup, the fat edge glossing the broth as it melts. Shoulder cuts run leaner and hold their slice, and some shops sear or blowtorch the slices to order for a charred edge. Our Char Siew Ramen carries four slices, the founding amount, and the same slices top the Miso, the Kyushu and the Beppu Ramen. The braising liquid is an ingredient too, it seasons soup and marinates eggs, and nothing in the pot is wasted.
Chicken, the lighter register
Chicken belongs to the central-Japanese soup tradition, and in modern shops it does double duty: chicken bones in the paitan pot and chicken chashu, thigh rolled and braised the belly way, sliced clean and pale over the soup. It is the meat of chicken-paitan and some shio bowls, where pork would bully the broth. On our side of the menu the bird arrives in other costumes: the fried chicken of the Oniyama Jigoku, the best seller, the chicken chop udon, the chicken sukiyaki pot, and the chicken karaage don at lunch.
Beef, the rare guest
Beef is the uncommon one. Traditional ramen uses little of it, beef stock bowls are a recent Japanese development, but sliced beef as a topping has an old seat on menus that wanted richness without pork. Our founding Kamado Jigoku, the cooking-pot hell, was built for beef-lovers, sliced beef over black fungus in the Kyushu soup, and the sliced-beef udon carries the same idea in dashi. The Beppu Ramen, the signature, stacks beef alongside the sea and the pork, the whole shop in one bowl.
The sea, the other soup
Seafood ramen runs on shellfish and crustaceans, shells boiled into the stock for sweetness, flesh added at the end. Our Umi Jigoku is the local case, mussels, scallops, prawns and crab meat stick over the pork bone base, and the salmon and salmon belly ramen run the northern fish through the southern soup. The seafood hot pot does the same work in nabe format.
And the bowl with no meat
The strongest vegetarian position on a ramen menu is the mushroom bowl, our Shiraike Jigoku, enoki and shiitake with the vegetables in Kyushu-style soup, and the founding Chinnoike offered a vegetarian soup option that survives to this day. Between the fungus, the sea and the four-legged options, the menu at 3 Pickering Street has a meat answer for every table, and the chilli count runs to sixteen on all of them.