Rokurinsha

Tsukemen separates the noodles from the soup. You get a bowl of thick noodles, cooked and then rinsed cold, and a second smaller bowl of very concentrated hot broth. You dip a few strands at a time and eat them, and the noodle stays firm throughout the meal instead of softening in soup.

Rokurinsha’s broth is a dense gyokai-tonkotsu: pork bone stock combined with dried fish – typically bonito and sardine powder – reduced to something closer to a sauce than a soup, with a marine depth behind the pork. It is thick enough to cling to the noodle, which is the whole design. The noodles are fat, chewy and deliberately cold, and the temperature contrast is the point.

This style is what a large part of Tokyo tsukemen now imitates, and Rokurinsha is one of the shops that made it the default. Order the standard tsukemen on your first visit rather than a variant.

Finish with soup-wari. When the noodles are gone, hand the dipping bowl back and ask for soup-wari; the counter will thin the remaining broth with hot stock so you can drink it. It is included, it is expected, and it is the intended end of the meal. Most foreign visitors leave without it.

Tokyo Ramen Street is a basement corridor of ramen shops on the Yaesu side of Tokyo Station, inside the station complex. Rokurinsha is the one with the long queue; it has been the anchor tenant of the corridor since it opened and it is the reason a lot of people know the street exists at all.

The practical value of this branch is that it converts dead time into a good meal. If you have an hour before a Shinkansen, this is a considerably better use of it than the platform bento. The queue is real – commonly thirty to sixty minutes at peak – so judge it against your departure rather than your appetite, and do not join it with twenty minutes to spare.

Finding it is the other difficulty. Tokyo Station is enormous and Ramen Street is in the First Avenue Tokyo Station basement on the Yaesu side, not the Marunouchi side. If you come out of the restored red-brick facade, you are on the wrong side of the station and have a ten-minute walk through it.

The Osaki main shop is the original and the one purists prefer, a short ride south on the Yamanote Line. It is a destination rather than a convenience, and the queue there is made of people who came specifically.

Buy from the ticket machine before joining the queue or as directed by staff, then hand the ticket over at the counter. Cash is the safe assumption. Extras worth having are the marinated egg and, if you are hungry, the larger noodle portion – which usually costs nothing extra and must be requested when you order, not afterwards.

Tokyo Ramen Street has around eight shops and they are deliberately different from each other: miso, shoyu, a vegan option and more. If the Rokurinsha queue is impossible, the corridor is not a consolation prize.

Tokyo Station is a ten-minute walk from the Imperial Palace East Gardens – which close on Mondays and Fridays – and is the obvious lunch stop on that morning. For the history of the dish, see tsukemen; for the other end of Tokyo ramen, Nakiryu.