Tsukemen

The problem tsukemen solves is that ramen noodles start dying the moment they hit the soup. Eight minutes into a bowl the texture has gone soft and the last third is worse than the first. Take the noodle out of the soup and it stays firm to the end.

That allows two other changes. The noodles can be much thicker, because they are not relying on the soup to carry flavour and they can be chewy in a way a soup noodle cannot. And the broth can be far more concentrated, because you are only taking a coating of it with each mouthful rather than drinking a bowl of it.

The result is a dish with more texture and more intensity than soup ramen, and one that works much better in summer, since only the broth is hot. In a Tokyo August that matters.

The standard modern broth is gyokai-tonkotsu: pork bone stock combined with dried fish, typically bonito and sardine, cooked down until it is close to a sauce. The fish gives it the marine depth that distinguishes Tokyo tsukemen from a straightforwardly porky bowl.

Dip a few strands at a time. Not the whole nest. The broth is intended to coat, and drowning a large quantity of noodle in it makes the dish salty and heavy and empties the bowl before you have finished.

Ask for the noodles warm if you want. Many shops offer atsumori, noodles rinsed and then re-warmed, which is the better order on a cold day – the standard cold noodle chills the broth quickly in winter.

Extra noodles cost nothing at many shops, but must be requested when you order, not when you run out. Look for omori on the ticket machine.

Finish with soup-wari. When the noodles are gone, pass the dipping bowl back and ask for soup-wari. The counter adds hot stock to thin the remaining broth so you can drink it as soup. It is included, it is the intended end of the meal, and the great majority of foreign visitors never do it.

Taishoken, in its various successor shops around Higashi-Ikebukuro and beyond, is the historical answer – Yamagishi trained a very large number of cooks who went on to open their own places, which is why the Taishoken name appears all over Tokyo in shops with no corporate relationship to one another.

Rokurinsha is the modern standard-setter and the most convenient, with a branch in Tokyo Station’s Ramen Street – noting that the Osaki main shop and the station branch are different outlets with different hours, which is a distinction a lot of guides miss.

For soup ramen rather than dipping noodles, Nakiryu is the Bib Gourmand counter to know about. And the general rules apply at any of them: buy from the ticket machine, carry cash, eat and go.