Every ramen menu you will ever read is a rearrangement of about ten ideas. The soup changes, the noodle changes, the region stamps its name on it, but the grammar stays. Here is the grammar, one style at a time, with a note on where each sits on our own menu.
1. Shio
Salt tare, the lightest and oldest school, a clear pale soup that tastes of chicken, dashi and restraint. Hakodate, the port city on Hokkaido, is credited with the oldest shio bowls, and the style keeps the profile of the Chinese noodle soups ramen grew from. The discipline is unforgiving: with nothing to hide behind, the stock has to be worth drinking on its own.
2. Shoyu
Soy tare, the Tokyo standard, a clear brown bowl with curled noodles that most people picture when they hear the word ramen. Tokyo's first dedicated ramen shops in the early 1900s built the style, and it remains the benchmark by which cooks are judged, because soy has to season the soup without drowning it.
3. Miso
Fermented soybean tare blended into a rich soup, the cold-weather heavyweight. Sapporo is the home, credited in the 1960s, and the northern habit of adding butter and sweet corn to a miso bowl came from the same climate. Our Miso Ramen carries the miso tare on the Kyushu pork bone base, a south-north hybrid that Singapore eats all year.
4. Tonkotsu
Pork bone soup boiled until it turns white and opaque, the Kyushu signature, born in Kurume in the 1930s and raised in Hakata. It is our house soup and the subject of its own article on this site, so here the note is short: if a menu says Kyushu ramen, this is what it means.
5. Chicken paitan
The chicken answer to tonkotsu, chicken bones boiled to the same creamy opacity, a style that has grown fast in the last two decades as cooks looked for something lighter than pork and richer than clear stock. The word paitan means white soup, and the technique is the same emulsion that makes pork bone soup white, run on a lighter bird.
6. Tsukemen
Dipping ramen: the noodles come cooked, rinsed and cold-ish in a bowl, the concentrated soup comes separate, and you dip each mouthful before eating it. Tokyo's Taishoken is credited with popularizing the format in the middle of the last century. The logic is texture, the noodles never sit in hot soup, so they hold their bite to the last strand.
7. Mazemen
Brothless ramen, a small amount of intense sauce tossed through the noodles like a warm salad, with toppings doing the work soup would do. It is the newest of the families on this list and the most chef-driven, since nothing dilutes a mistake.
8. Tantanmen
The Japanese reading of Sichuan dandan mian, rebuilt with sesame paste or soy milk, minced pork, chilli oil and spring onion over a soup base. It arrived with Chinese cooks and became a Japanese standard with its own personality, milder and soupier than its ancestor. On our menu the spicy direction runs through the jigoku series instead, same appetite, different map.
9. Jiro-style
Brute ramen: a mountain of thick noodles, ultra-rich pork soup, mountains of cabbage and bean sprouts, slices of chashu laid on like roof tiles. Born in 1960s Tokyo, it is less a style than a philosophy of abundance, and you will know a Jiro shop by the queue of students outside it.
10. Hiyashi chuka
Cold ramen, the summer answer, chilled noodles with a vinegar-soy or sesame sauce, shredded egg, ham, cucumber and crab stick arranged like a pinwheel. It appears on menus when the weather turns and disappears when it turns back. Ours runs as the Hiyashi Ramen, in cold sesame sauce, and it is the bowl to order when the equator is doing its worst.
That is the whole vocabulary. Learn the ten and you can read any ramen menu in Japan, or ours at 3 Pickering Street, in one pass.