I should have known that the airport ramen wouldn’t be very good. I mean, it’s airport ramen. Any rational person would tell you that it’s not going to be very good.
To be fair, the Sapporo airport actually has an impressively sprawling selection of restaurants, including a whole section dedicated to ramen joints that’s filled with airport locations of acclaimed restaurants.
Alas, that area was (unsurprisingly) very crowded, and with my flight looming, I just didn’t have the time.
So I headed to the plain old regular food court, and got a bowl of ramen from the anonymous ramen joint within.
Their specialty is a bowl of miso ramen topped with corn, chashu, and a crab claw.
It’s not good. It actually gave me a new appreciation for the comparatively complex bowl of ramen I had at Aji No Karyu.
Aside from the noodles, which had a nice chewy bite, this could have been a bowl of instant ramen and I don’t think anyone would know the difference.
Actually, that’s not technically true — the bowl was incredibly greasy, leaving your mouth unpleasantly slick with fatty oil. There’s no such thing as a bowl of instant ramen with that much grease.
Other than that, the flavour was one-note salty, with vaguely unpleasant fatty/porky undertones, and a mild miso flavour that barely even registers.
The toppings aren’t much better. The chashu is dry and tastes like yesterday’s leftovers (or the day before yesterday… or the day before that), and the crab was surprisingly difficult to even bite through.
The whole thing was — by far — the worst bowl of ramen I’ve had in Japan. It darkened my day. I wish I had never eaten it.
Location: Bibi, Chitose, Hokkaido 066-0012
How to find it: It’s in the food court closest to the domestic departures area (pre-security).