The ramen counter at the end of the snow
In a Sapporo alley barely wider than a bicycle, eleven stools, one pot, and a broth that has been going since before I was born.
Ines Halvorsen
Sapporo, Japan
Ganso Ramen Yokocho is not a secret. It has a sign. It has been in every guidebook since guidebooks were invented, and in February there is a small forest of tripods outside it. But it is also a real alley, roofed against the snow, with seventeen shops that each seat about eleven people, and if you go at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday in a blizzard you will find that fame has not changed the broth at all.
The one I chose had no English name on the door and a woman behind the counter who looked at my snow-caked boots and said something that was clearly, in any language, a mother telling a child to stamp its feet. I stamped. She nodded. I sat. There was no menu that I could read, so I pointed at the bowl in front of the man beside me, who was eating with the concentration of somebody defusing a device, and she laughed and turned to the pot.
Sapporo miso ramen is a winter argument. The broth is pork bone and miso, fried first in a wok with lard and garlic and bean sprouts so that it arrives at the table still furious, and then a slab of butter goes on top and a small hill of sweetcorn, which sounds like a mistake and is not. The noodles are thick and yellow and curl in a way that holds the soup. You do not so much eat it as negotiate with it.
You do not so much eat it as negotiate with it.
The man beside me finished, exhaled, and said the first thing he had said the whole time, which was that the pot had been kept going since 1971, topped up but never emptied. I do not know if this is true. I choose to believe it. It fits the alley, which has the feeling of a place that has been kept warm by continuity rather than heating.
A broth can be a kind of archive.
Outside, the snow was doing the thing that Hokkaido snow does, which is fall so thickly and so quietly that the city seems to be being erased in real time. I walked back to the hotel through Odori Park with my face burning from the garlic and my hands in my sleeves, and I thought about the pot, and about how a broth can be a kind of archive, and about how I would be back tomorrow, and I was.
