The Ramen Collector

The joy of making something easy

I’m a little embarrassed by the whiteness of this statement, but the moment I realized you could prepare ramen, and it wasn’t just tossing it into a pot of boiling water and adding some packet of unidentified powder that was supposed to taste like chicken at 5 in the morning after a bartending shift, was my personal culinary equivalent to the apes learning to use the bone as a weapon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not only that, but it’s a soup you can prepare with a slice of American cheese melted on top. We find so many reasons to hate on American cheese, but ramen begs you to embrace it.

In the pantheon of soups, ramen is high on the list. And like—almost—all other soups, nothing beats it when you make it at home. Just on a pure sensory level alone, the smell and sight of a good bowl of ramen is another level of soup greatness. With the little dots of oil floating around the green chives and red kimchi that’s popping out a little above the yellow broth’s surface, it’s almost as comforting to just stare at it as you let it cool as it is to eat it. You take a whiff, and depending on what you made it with, you can get lemongrass, peppers, ginger, garlic, sesame, and several other scents at once. When it’s finally at the right temperature for you to start eating it and everything in the bowl starts to mix together, the taste develops with every chopstick- and spoonful. Most people consider ramen a noodle dish, but I think the broth is what truly counts, so I say it’s a soup. And it’s one of the only soups that evolves with each taste.

With the exception of my analyst who was approaching her 90s when she keeled over a few hours before we were supposed to meet in her cavernous office on Washington Square Park that I could only assume she’d worked out of since at least the 1970s, all of my shrinks have worked above 14th Street in Manhattan in the area of the city considered Midtown. I know there are sessions taking place everywhere across New York where people are opening up about their anxieties and past traumas, but I’ve decided that Midtown has the highest concentration of psychologists prying into the minds of their patients in all of NYC. This might be wrong, or it could very well be a documented fact that I’m simply too lazy to look up, but I think the sheer amount of mental exorcisms going on all the time below 59th Street in the middle of the city is the top reason the area’s energy is so odd. Some blame the guys dressed in ratty Elmo outfits, the armies of vested-up finance bros marching to get salads at Chopt, or the sweet scents coming from Nuts 4 Nuts carts that I’m pretty sure is some sort of poison gas they pump into the air to fool people into buying reheated pecans that have been sitting and calcifying for days, but I believe it’s all therapy going on. People get stuff off their chests and all that rage and sadness has to go somewhere; my theory is it collects into this unseeable cloud that hangs out right above the Times Square Olive Garden, and rains back down into the air we breathe. I’m not sure exactly what part of Midtown is “right in the center of it all,” but I’d say it’s between the Herald Square and Times Square train stations, which also happens to be where my doctor’s office is. I call that area the Shrink District.

My guess is that there are so many shrinks concentrated in that one specific part of town simply due to real estate. Space is plentiful and I’ve heard the rent is about as reasonable as you can get in a centralized part of Manhattan (i.e., not reasonable at all compared to any other part of the country), but it never isn’t funny to me that so many of us go in for our hour in hopes of dealing with our sadness and stress, then we walk right back outside into full-blown chaos of cars honking, people asking if you’ve got a second to help save the environment, or Swedish tourists trying to find the M&Ms store. It’s like getting a great massage, then going back to your job unloading cinder blocks off the back of trucks. For awhile I felt like like I could use time towards the end of each session talking with my doctor about my future PTSD from all the selfie sticks flying at my face whenever I pass the Empire State Building, but I ended up finding the perfect comedown after my sessions: Wandering around the H Mart that’s on my way back to the train.

For my money, Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart is the perfect book title. It works perfectly for the memoir itself, but it also sums up the experience of going into the supermarket. I can’t think of another supermarket in America that truly provokes some sort of emotional response from me. I’ve only been to a handful, so I couldn’t tell if you if every single H Mart is great, but the one I visit after I talk to my shrink unexpectedly became my happy place. I walk in and I don’t know if it’s the lighting or the way products are organized, but the mood inside of there is not just wildly out of place in Midtown, but it laps almost every American grocery store I’ve ever been in. I think the last grocery chain that felt pleasant to walk into was Wild Oats Markets before Whole Foods tried to buy the company in the aughts and everything went downhill from there. Wild Oats at least had enough weird, crunchy feel of suburban health food stores that were tucked away in the corner of shopping plazas and served as the one refuge for teenage vegans looking for anything to eat besides Boca Burgers and popcorn in the 1990s. The H Mart I visit is modern, sleek, and clean, but it’s hardly the sterilized, mind-controlling nightmare some grocery stores feel like. I don’t feel like I’m being hypnotized into buying a box with Taylor Swift’s boyfriend on the front and a bag of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Lucky Charms, and Reese's Puffs inside.

I don’t usually walk into an H Mart with any one particular thing in mind to buy, although I usually go check out the dumplings and almost always end up with one bag of snacks from Korea (I implore everybody to try the sweet garlic bread nuts, I swear they will change your life), but no matter what, I always stop to admire the ramen section before checking out.

Before my stops into H Mart, I didn’t give that much thought into what flavor I bought. The idea was I know enough basic kitchen skills that I could just use some of my own chicken stock and doctor it to my liking for the perfect bowl. Since I didn’t have a lot of money for most of my life, Maruchan ramen was a constant. I probably tried every flavor, but I still keep a few packs handy because it’s usually the least-expensive and easiest thing to make in my cabinet at all times. It was only when I started going into the Midtown H Mart that I decided I wanted to start seeing what other flavor packets from other companies had in store for me. And for my introduction into the world of various ramen flavors, I went as weird as I could and got Buldak cream carbonara. The combination just seemed off to me, but after one bite I was convinced I’d never go and eat boxed mac and cheese again. I have always loved a nice box of Annie’s every once and a while, but the ramen broth had actual cheese flavor and not some lab-created version of something resembling cheese flavor. I was intrigued enough that I went back and bought a few more packets of other flavors.

As of this writing, I’ve tried 26 different flavors of ramen since I started buying up whatever caught my eye at H Mart as I walked to catch the Q train home. I thought I was really starting to understand the various complexities and nuances of ramen flavors, but then I made the mistake of going online. I shouldn’t be surprised there’s a whole culture dedicated to something as wonderful as ramen, but as I started scrolling through the pages of reviews posted by the Ramen Rater, and after watching too many hours of ramen reviews and hacks on YouTube and TikTok, I stopped considering maybe logging down and writing about each of my own ramen experiences, and decided to simply have them and move on. I didn’t need to make my ramen explorations into a thing. I also don’t need the extra sodium and carbs, but that’s another story.

But by not writing about all the ramen I’ve tried so far—a number which pales in comparison to the amount eaten by some ramenheads, I’ll admit—I’ve noticed that the experience of making it for myself and sometimes my wife is actually more pleasant. It’s this quiet, fast, easy thing I do that’s all mine, and it brings me a little shot of joy every single time.