Chef Profiles
Mr. Noodle
By Steve Burgess published Jan 1, 2008
At his new restaurant, Daiji Matsubara has perfected the art of ramen. He just needed to bend a few rules along the way
Ramen is a deceptively complicated subject. For many the word has come to mean packaged instant noodles, which are to real ramen as Kraft Dinner is to homemade Italian pasta. Ramen may be a quick meal to make but real ramen broth is no easy thing to master—that struggle lies at the very heart of the epic 1985 Japanese comedy Tampopo, which chronicles the efforts of a woman and her truck-driving mentor to create the perfect bowl. When Tampopo was released there was really no place in Vancouver to satisfy the cravings it inspired. That finally changed in 1999. Seven years after arriving from Tokyo, Daiji Matsubara opened Kintaro Ramen in a rather dingy little shop on Denman that had earlier housed a failed attempt to offer okonomi-yaki, another of Japan’s fast-food favourites. There was no guarantee Kintaro would have any more luck.
Things were slow at first. Unlike his film counterpart, Matsubara had no mentor. But he knew the territory. Having grown up in Tokyo’s Ogikubo district, where ramen shops scramble for business along the Chuo rail line, Matsubara understood how the real thing should taste. After a few years in which his ramen was inconsistent—“Not the same in the morning as the afternoon,” he admits—he turned a corner: “I learned how to make good ramen all the time.”
The locals needed education, too. “At first, Canadian customers would look at the menu and leave,” Matsubara recalls. For most, ramen still meant instant packaged noodles. But word of mouth eventually worked its magic. Before long lines snaked out from Kintaro and down the block.
Some apprentices study under a ramen chef and branch out; others start franchise operations and get a recipe. The best, Matsubara believes, are the dedicated, self-taught individuals who pursue perfection on their own. His own studies have led to the entirely new menu offered at Motomachi Shokudo, his new restaurant just down the street from Kintaro.
