🍜🍿 Tampopo

A lorry driver in a cowboy hat stops at a failing roadside noodle shop run by a widow called Tampopo, tells her the truth about her soup, and stays to help her fix it. They spy on rival shops, recruit an old master and rebuild the bowl one component at a time. Around this the film wanders off into a dozen unrelated scenes about people and food.

Friday evening on the sofa with Jonas, day seven of the cold I brought back from Hamburg, the first day I could taste anything. A library disc he had been saving.

It is a western in which the frontier town is a ramen shop and the gunfight is a tasting. Nobody in it thinks noodle soup is a small subject. An old man teaches a young one how to eat a bowl: look at it first, greet the pork, drink some broth before touching the noodles. It is played for laughs and it is also correct.

What I liked most is how the shop gets better. Not by inspiration. They take the bowl apart:

• Broth: time it, skim it, never let it boil hard.
• Noodles: the right firmness, measured in seconds.
• The cook: can she see every customer's face from the stove, and does she watch the bowls come back empty?

That is a process audit with a happier ending than mine usually have.

The side stories are odd and some have aged oddly. One, a dying woman cooking a last meal for her family, went past me too quickly to defend against.

Afterwards I got up and made 🥘 Weeknight ramen, the first thing I had cooked in a week. Overdone egg. I gave the broth its full fifteen minutes and warmed the bowls, which I have never bothered to do, and it was the best version so far.

When I am well: the counter at 🍽️ Noodle Bar Kumo, and I will watch what the cook watches. Logged under 🪁 Cooking too.

For the next bowl

• Warm the bowls with boiling water while the noodles cook
• Time the broth: fifteen minutes at a bare simmer, lid off
• Take the egg out at six and a half minutes, not eight
• Sit at the counter at Kumo and watch the stove end, not the menu

• The man in the white suit who opens the film by talking straight to the cinema audience about people who make noise during films. Then he has a picnic.
• The noodle lesson from the old master. Look first, then the broth.
• The etiquette class: a teacher shows a table of young women how to eat spaghetti without a sound, a man at the next table eats his loudly and happily, and within a minute the whole class has gone over to his side.
• The business lunch where every senior man orders the same safe dish and the most junior one, who actually knows the menu, orders properly.
• The rice omelette made for a small boy in a borrowed kitchen in the middle of the night, by a man with no home and perfect technique.
• Training: she carries pots of water up steps against a stopwatch, like a boxer.
• The final tasting. Five men at the counter, and she watches to see whether they drink the broth to the bottom.