Japan is small on the map and long in the hand, a chain of islands that stretches through enough climate to change how the country eats. Ramen follows the weather. The north feeds a person against the cold, the south feeds a person against the clock, and the distance between a Sapporo bowl and a Hakata bowl is the whole story of the style. We cook the southern half of it, so this is also the story of why our menu looks the way it does.
The northern kitchen
Hokkaido is the north's ramen island, and its winters wrote the menu. Sapporo gave the world miso ramen, a blended fermented paste in a rich soup, topped with the northern signature set: butter, sweet corn, bean sprouts, stir-fried vegetables. It is a bowl engineered to hold heat and stick to ribs. Asahikawa, across the island, built a shoyu soup famous for its double stock, seafood and chicken together, and for a thin film of oil on the surface that works like a lid, keeping the soup hot in sub-zero weather. Kitakata, on the same latitude, cures its noodles with extra water so they come out soft, curly and thirsty for a lighter soup.
North of Tokyo the pattern holds: bigger bowls, curlier noodles, richer seasoning, a soup you finish because the street outside is trying to kill the meal. The noodles are cut with more water, which makes them softer and better at holding heat, and they curl, which traps broth in every tine.
The southern kitchen
Kyushu, the southern island, runs on pork bone. The soup is tonkotsu, bones boiled for half a day and more until the broth turns white, and the canonical bowl is Hakata style, named for Fukuoka's port district: strong soup, thin straight noodles, minimal toppings, served at speed. The noodles are cut with less water, which makes them firm and quick-cooking, and they go soft fast in a hot soup, so the southern bowl is sized to finish fast, a portion smaller than a northern bowl on purpose. The southern meal assumes you have somewhere to be in twenty minutes.
The middle holds the scales
Between the two halves sits Tokyo, the shoyu capital, clear brown soup and medium noodles, a bowl that borrows weight from the north and speed from the south. The capital's role is referee. Most of the styles people argue about are northern and southern extremes; most of the bowls people eat weekly are Tokyo compromises.
Where we stand
Beppu Menkan cooks the Kyushu school, which is also where our name comes from: Beppu is an onsen city on Kyushu's east coast. The soup is pork bone, the noodles run thin, and the chilli ladder is the southern heat the city loves layered onto the southern soup. When the founding kitchen opened in Singapore in 1999, most local Japanese cooking leaned on the chicken stock of the centre, and the pork bone of the south was the rarity. It still is our difference, and now you know its address.