The most famous film ever made about ramen is not a documentary. Tampopo, released in 1985 and directed by Juzo Itami, is a comedy about a widow running a failing noodle shop, a truck driver who takes up her cause, and the training montage by which a bad bowl becomes a great one, and its American marketers sold it as the first noodle western, a genre label that stuck because the film earns it. A stranger rides into town, a wrong needs righting, and the showdown happens over stock. It remains the cinema's clearest statement that cooking ramen is a craft worth a plot.
The etiquette scene
Everyone who has seen the film remembers the old master. A young man approaches a ramen counter beside his teacher, and before the bowls arrive the elder instructs him in the full liturgy: observe the bowl, appreciate the bowl, caress the pork with affection and whisper to it that you will meet again soon, then take up the noodles and eat them with reverence while they hold their form. The scene is played as a martial-arts briefing, and it is played for laughs, and it is also, inconveniently, correct. Soup first, noodles at speed, the toppings in their time, everything the etiquette piece in this series teaches appears in miniature, deadpan, thirty years ahead. The teacher even finishes by pointing to the bowl of a man eating in silence beside them: he has mastered it.
The rest of the banquet
Itami framed the main story with a string of food vignettes that have aged into legend: the couple who treat a yolk like the last intimate act available to them, the gang of gourmands who smuggle a feast into a cinema, the kitchen brigade racing to save a drowning woman's last meal. The through-line is appetite as a form of devotion, occasionally comic, occasionally deadly serious, and the effect on audiences was durable. For a generation of Western viewers, Tampopo was the first explanation that ramen was not a cup of instant noodles but a discipline with masters, and the shops that later opened across America and Europe served, in part, the audience the film created.
Why it still plays
The film's training sequences read today like a documentary about tare and stock that happens to have a plot, the old man who teaches the heroine to see customers rather than bowls, the quest for the perfect stock, the discipline of the kitchen crew assembling at dawn, and the finale, the shop full and thriving, the widow feeding her own baby the way the film opened, closes the circle the way the good ones do. Watch it before or after reading this series' broth and tare pieces and it lands twice, once as comedy and once as notes from the field. Then do what the film has made every viewer do since 1985, go find a bowl, and apologize in advance to the chashu.
The film's long shadow
The food-film genre that Tampopo opened has kept its doors since, and the lineage runs through some distinguished kitchens, Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman built a family drama on a banquet, Jiro Dreams of Sushi turned a Tokyo counter into a meditation on craft, and every chef's-table documentary since owes Itami the discovery that cooking can hold a camera for two hours. But the noodle western remains the branch head, because it understood the comic register the genre needed, food is serious, people are funny, and the laugh keeps the reverence from curdling. Ramen shops around the world still hang the poster, and staff of a certain age can recite the pork apology in two languages. Itami made a case that a bowl of soup could carry cinema, and forty years of audiences have kept agreeing with him.