It may be true, as scientists tell us, that you can discover whole worlds in a drop of water, but Rickmond Wong would prefer to explore a bowl of soup. Not just any soup, but ramen.
On the Internet, Wong just about owns the subject. He is the Rameniac.
Wong's Web site, rameniac.com, is a lively compendium of all things ramen, one of the best of the food sites by single-topic fanatics. There is an in-depth discussion of Japan's regional styles of ramen (22, according to Wong). There are reviews of ramen restaurants, reviews of packaged ramen, even videos of ramen being made and slurped.
Wong says that he eats ramen several times a week when he's at home in Los Angeles and that he'll slurp almost nonstop when he visits Japan. "Last year, I ate 18 bowls of ramen in 14 days," he says. "I came back and ate only salads for a month. But while I was there, I had to get my ramen."
Rameniac is all about the noodles. It's wised-up without being snarky, and though it is plainly a love song to ramen, it never veers into cheap romanticism.
A mop-topped 33-year-old who was born and raised in California's San Gabriel Valley, Wong is the child of Cantonese immigrants. He works as a Web designer for Universal Studios and, with a partner, has just started a Los Angeles clothing store dedicated to Japanese street fashion.
Sitting in the bustling food court of the Torrance, Calif., branch of Mitsuwa Marketplace, Wong takes a slurp of soup and deftly plucks a nest of noodles. This is ramen from his favorite restaurant, Santouka.
"This is the best ramen in town because of the depth of flavor in the soup," he says.
He explains that Santouka's home base of Hokkaido is in the extreme north of Japan and that its ramen is made from a rich pork stock that is also flavored with seafood. The broth is, indeed, extraordinary. In fact, so is the whole dish. The soup is deeply flavored and complex. The noodles are perfectly al dente. The slices of pork alternate between buttery smooth and chewy and muscular.
At its most basic level, ramen is very simple. There is a soup, which consists of a stock and a seasoning. There are the noodles. And there are the garnishes.
There are two main families of stock - a clear one made with pork and chicken cooked relatively briefly, and a milky one called tonkotsu made from split pork bones that have been boiled for hours. Traditionally, there are three seasoning choices - salt (or shio), soy sauce (or shoyu) and miso paste.
The stock is determined mostly by regional preference and by the style of the individual ramen maker. The choice of seasonings is left to the eater, though most ramen shops will emphasize one, even if very subtly.
The overall effect of the soup can range from almost unctuously fatty to very light and brothy. It's this initial base that determines the quality of a bowl of ramen, Wong says.
"The quality of a ramen is dictated by the broth, and the depth of flavor in it is what determines a great ramen," he says. "By that, I don't mean that it should be super-salty or something like that. The soup has to have lots of things going on in it. It's complexity and umami that makes the difference."
Though ramen is made almost exclusively with wheat noodles, every region has a slightly different style. Hakata ramen from northern Kyushu has noodles that are very thin and very firm. Kumamoto ramen from central Kyushu has thicker noodles, nearly spaghettilike.
And with garnishes, the range of possibilities extends. Pork is one of the most common, called chashu. There may well also be such things as cooked eggs, wood ear mushrooms, green onions and mustard greens, seafood and even fried cubes of pork fat.
Even with all of that, ramen is essentially street food - cheap and filling.
"Ramen is perfectly suited for geeks," Wong says. "Otaku is what they call them in Japan," usually indicating someone with an obsessive interest in an arcane topic such as anime (Japanese cartoons) or fashion. "It's cheap and it's hedonistic."
The obsessive appeal of ramen makes it perfect for the Internet, which sometimes seems like nothing so much as a global geek meet-and-greet. In this group, Wong feels right at home.
"I've met a lot of food bloggers recently and I have to say that a surprising number of them share the same demographic as me -Asian Americans, late 20s to early 30s, just out of college and working in a cubicle job," he says. "It's like we've done the things we were supposed to do and now this is how we have fun."
Russ Parsons writes for the Los Angeles Times.