BODY: Running a ramen shop is brutal work. Running one in a video game, it turns out, is a decent way to find out exactly how brutal — and then to get obsessed with one oddly specific customer.
That's the setup for the latest installment of 4Gamer's long-running column Ore no Collab Cafe ("My Collab Cafe"), published on the fourth Saturday of every month. The premise is simple: working chef Tetsuya Onishi picks a game, declares an unauthorized collaboration with it, and cooks the dish the game put in his head. This is Menu 093.
The game this time is Japanese Ramen Simulator, a shop-management sim that drops you behind the counter — sourcing, prepping, pricing, and surviving the rush. Onishi came away with a new respect for the grind of actual shop owners, the kind of appreciation you only get after watching your own virtual business wobble.
But the recipe came from a detail most players would scroll past: among the customers who walk through the door is a Buddhist monk. That sent Onishi toward shōjin ramen — a bowl built under the rules of shōjin ryōri, Japan's Buddhist temple cuisine. No meat. No fish, which in ramen terms means no pork bones, no chicken, no katsuobushi, no niboshi. And no gokun, the five pungent vegetables — garlic, onion, scallion, chive, and leek — traditionally avoided as agitating to the spirit. Strip all of that out of a ramen bowl and you've removed essentially every standard source of depth it has. Building flavor back is the whole challenge.
The insider take
The joke lands harder in Tokyo than it might abroad, because shōjin ramen is not hypothetical here. Komaki Shokudo in Akihabara's Chabara has been serving temple cuisine to salarymen for years, and T's TanTan inside Tokyo Station has made a business of vegan ramen for commuters who don't know or care that it's vegan. Meanwhile, the real industry the game simulates is genuinely struggling: Japan has seen record numbers of ramen shop bankruptcies, squeezed between rising ingredient costs and the infamous "1,000-yen wall" — the psychological price ceiling customers refuse to cross. A sim that makes you feel that pressure, and a chef who answers it by cooking the hardest possible bowl, is a fittingly Japanese pairing.
Originally reported by 4Gamer.net − 最新記事 (Japanese).