On or about December 2010, the ramen republic — the idea that it’s okay to be inspired by, learn from, and honorably craft another culture’s signature dish — made its first known tentative inroads into Nashville. It did not go smoothly.
“How much for pork bones? I would like to make Tonkotsu broth.”
The words came from the lips of Sarah Gavigan, now head chef and owner of Nashville’s Otaku Ramen, and went into the ears of the blinking, befuddled butchers at Porter Road. “Tonk-what-su broth? You mean you just want bones?”
Wind back to Los Angeles, early 2000’s, and zoom in on Sarah having a bad day — up all night working on some commercial only to have her creative efforts summarily dismissed in the morning by some producer. California dreaming could sometimes make a creative mind want to do some California screaming. But, instead, Sarah kept her cool and took her grumpy mood out to lunch, to a Japanese place she had read about in the L.A. Times by the late Jonathan Gold. The dish he described: something called Tonkotsu style ramen. Sarah orders a bowl: a dining decision that will prove life changing. Sarah doesn’t yet realize it, but she’s about to go otaku — obsessed-nerd-enthusiast — for all things ramen.
“I sat down in a miserable mood,” she recalls, “and stood up in an excellent mood. I didn’t understand then why that particular food made me so happy. But it did.”
A native of Columbia, Tennessee, Sarah had found that her ultimate comfort food was a raft of fresh Chinese wheat noodles floating atop a bowl of hot Japanese broth, a multicultural dish from the get-go. Later, she would discover that the mood lifting effects from a well-crafted bowl of ramen come from the way the soup’s symphony of ingredients act in concert to trigger our tongues’ umami receptors, the taste buds for all things savory release dopamine and serotonin like so much molecular brain candy. Quite literally, a well-crafted bowl of ramen is an open invitation to slurp one’s way to happiness. For this reason, it is little wonder that the ramen republic has become a worldwide phenomenon, the dish having spread, according to Japan’s Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum, “from France and Germany to America and Australia,” countries where, the Ramen Museum avers, “it will be drawn to intermix with the local climates, environments, and food cultures of each country, giving way to new regional ramen styles from the around the globe.”