A review by sanjana_datla
Ivan Ramen: Love, Obsession, and Recipes from Tokyo's Most Unlikely Noodle Joint by Ivan Orkin, Chris Ying

informative

4.25

Half recipe book half memoir, Ivan Ramen captivated me more than most cookbooks. Often (for me) cookbooks are purely for inspiration and occasionally for reference. I might pop one open on a slow day and dream of all the things I could whip up. Then I would dream of grocery stores with endless aisles of exotic ingedients and kitchen utensils. And I remember the meager offering at the local supermarket and put the book away. There are very few cookbooks that I have read cover to cover, and Ivan Ramen is in that rarifed group. I can't speak to the replicability of the dishes because, despite globalization, I still don't have easy access to a good 70% of the ingredients listed. However the story of how Ivan Ramen came to me gripped me like few non fiction tales do. I like reading about good people eking out an earnest life. It's more gratefying to me than tech billionaires and fortune 500 CXOs telling me how they disrupted the system with their inherited millions.

PS: If you are just looking to learn how to make a good bowl of ramen, start 100+ pages in with the chapter Ivan Ramen's Shio Ramen. 
PPS: If you want a definitive guide on all things ramen, this isn't the right book for you.