麺屋武蔵 (東京, 新宿)

It was at this ramen shop where my locust friend and I faced our first real challenge in Japan.  The smell of ramen was very tempting, but... neither of us could read Japanese.  It's fine when they have Chinese characters which we could guess the meaning to some degree.  Unfortunately, that wasn't the case here.

At  麵屋武藏 there was this very interesting ticketing machine, which you put coins and bills in it and choose what  you want to eat.  You then give the ticket to the chef in behind the counter and they'll make you the ramen.  And we didn't have a clue what that load of Japanese was about.

As a result, we decided to just choose the most expensive ramen of the two series (see, in the photo, there is a red row and a yellow row.  We chose the right-most button of the two rows).  I'd be glad if somebody with more knowledge of Japanese would enlighten us on what we had chosen.  In any case, we settled down and waited for our ramen.

It turned out that one of the two colours meant "mixed" ramen (i.e. soup on the side) and the other one was normal ramen in soup.

The ramen was slightly underdone when served (which I do prefer) and was superb after a short while.  The pork that came with the ramen was very fat and very soft.  Not the healthiest kind of pork but was marvellous.  Egg was among the best I've eaten, and was cooked just right.  The attached photos says it much better than I can.

In a cold, rainy evening and just after a whole day of travelling, there couldn't have been a better option for dinner other than this hot, tasty ramen (and it was close to the hotel as well!).  Now although it's likely that I would never revisit this shop, as I guess I'd be better off trying other places, this is definitely a shop which I would recommend to my friends.