canal city raumen stadium: battle bowl royale
by rameniac | 26 Mar 2008
When it comes to tonkotsu ramen, Kyushu is truly king. And a rameniac in southern Japan would do well to visit Canal City, a gloriously overwrought, crescent-shaped shopping mall designed by architect Jon Jerde to invoke the American west. I couldn’t even begin to imagine why. But though ramen lovers are not necessarily modernist architecture freaks, this Fukuoka landmark houses the Canal City Raumen Stadium, also known as “Raumen Stadium 2,” kid sibling to Yokohama’s famed Raumen Museum and home to an ever-rotating assortment of top-tier ramen shops.
Ordinary shopping malls have food courts; Canal City has a ramen “stadium” where residency is determined by a competitive if friendly customer voting system. Diners fill out forms evaluating their meals, then drop them into a centralized ballot box. The rankings are posted each month.
Unlike the Raumen Museum, which features legends from across Japan, Stadium 2 is located in central Fukuoka and emphasizes the best of up-and-coming Kyushu ramen shops. At any given time, four or five of the eight tenants will hail from across the southern island — from places like Kitakyushu, Kagoshima, and Miyazaki — and most will serve variations on pork bone soup. Admittedly, the voting isn’t exactly unbiased; Hakata residents typically crown their local favorites as king, and Kurume Taiho and Shoudai Daruma have pretty much monopolized rankings for as long as I can remember. It’s like if every US presidential election were contested solely in Washington D.C., Marion Barry might well be the leader of the free world. But when it comes to Hakata-style ramen, I can overlook a little rigged balloting.
