Unique Japanese food, from ramen-flavoured ice cream to rice pizza, shows the nation’s ‘punk rock spirit’
- Served only at Yokohama’s Cupnoodles Museum, the Cup Noodle-flavoured ice cream uses the same powdered soup and freeze-dried toppings as in actual Cup Noodles
- Rice pizzas, developed at Domino’s Pizza Japan, are built on a base layer of pre-cooked Japanese-cultivated white rice instead of pizza dough
A nation’s food can be seen as a window to its soul.
Take hamburgers, for example. Handheld, quick to assemble and eat, hamburgers embody a quintessentially American idea that founding father Benjamin Franklin put to paper in 1748 and which still powers those on Wall Street and beyond: “Remember that time is money.”
In China, food is so omnipresent in the national psyche that people greet each other with the phrase “chi fan le ma?” – have you eaten? – and French food snobbery prompted French President Jacques Chirac to once quip unkindly of the British that: “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.”
Which leads us to the Cupnoodles Museum in Yokohama, Japan.
Yes, there is such a place (more than one – there are two in Japan and another in Hong Kong) and, yes, instant noodles have plenty to say about the Japanese traits of inventiveness, risk-taking and an openness to adapting and upgrading foreign influences that helped Japan recover after World War II to become an economic, cultural – and gastronomic – titan.