Ramen Shop

Although it offers no threat to Juzo Itami's 1985 classic Tampopo Eric Khoo‘s Ramen Shop is a tidily-crafted tale of cross-cultural relations and fusion cooking that will offer enough heart-felt moments and mouth-watering dishes for audiences to forbear the tendency to mawkishness.

Takumi Saitô plays Masato, a young Japanese chef working in his emotionally-distant father’s ramen restaurant in Takasaki, who after the latter's sudden death visits Singapore in search of his long-deceased mother's Chinese origins and the secrets to her culinary skills which he recalls so well from his childhood.  Rounding out this story is the broader one of confronting the memories of the Japanese invasion and occupation of Singapore during World War II, something which although he was unaware of it lies in the estranged relations between Masato's Japanese father and his mother’s Singaporean family.

Although initially, particularly for a Western audience, it is difficult to know where we are as the film jumps between past and present, Japan and Singapore, gradually we get our bearings and follow the engagingly quiet and thoughtful Masato on his quest to discover his personal history. 

As with all good food films the culinary delights are a central feature of the film. Thus we get an almost travelogue-ish depiction of Singaporean street hawker food (you’ll be going online to look for cheap flights once the film is over), a menu of Japanese dishes made by Masato’s courting father for his bride-to-be, Masato’s mother, and Masato’s own culinary effort to win over his stubborn grandmother (Beatrice Chien). And also as always with this delectable genre, food is the means of emotional persuasion and transformation even reaching to the level of political and historical reconciliation with Masato’s creation of a dish combining Japanese ramen noodles and Singapore's signature bak kut teh (created by chef Keisuke Takeda especially for the film).  

 

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