Keizo Shimamoto’s ramen burger made the information earlier than he bought a single one. In 2013, Shimamoto had turn into fixated on burgers with fried pucks of ramen for buns, which he encountered whereas finding out ramen in Tokyo. After tinkering with the dish, he introduced on his common ramen evaluation website Go Ramen (which he kinds Go Ramen!) that he’d briefly convey it to Smorgasburg, New York’s then two-year-old meals competition. It blew up on-line, incomes Shimamoto an invitation to look on Good Morning America. By the point he made it to Smorgasburg later that day, the ramen burger was primed to turn into an icon.
“In my thoughts, I used to be simply going to do that one-time occasion — that’s it,” he says.
He was improper. Although Shimamoto didn’t have the correct grills or the right setup, and it was raining that first day, the burger was a success. It was a sight to behold with layers of scallions and arugula, and its secret shoyu glaze, packed between Solar Noodle ramen. Over 200 folks lined up for simply 150 burgers.
The following time he confirmed up at Smorgasburg, he bought 360 burgers in three hours, resulting in a residency for the entire summer season. From there, it simply saved going. In 2014, Shimamoto leveraged the burger’s success right into a New York Metropolis ramen store, Ramen Co. By 2015, he was promoting 1,200 to 1,500 burgers at every Smorgasburg look. In 2016 — the identical 12 months Crimson Robin launched its personal rendition on the burger — Shimamoto opened Ramen Shack, the place he served the ramen burger and rather more.
“I wasn’t creating it to have it go viral. The ramen burger is form of a mash up of me.”
“I wasn’t creating it to have it go viral,” Shimamoto says. He simply needed to place his personal spin on an idea he loved. The ramen burgers he ate in Japan have been normally made with pork, however having grown up consuming In-N-Out in Los Angeles, Shimamoto noticed burgers as synonymous with beef. As a Japanese American, he provides, “The ramen burger is form of a mash up of me.” The primary time he nailed the sauce, he recollects, he jumped with pleasure in his lounge.
When the ramen burger hit Smorgasburg that first wet Saturday, he couldn’t have predicted the strains, not to mention the rise of social media or the very concept of viral hype meals. Instagram was nonetheless largely a venue for collating and sharing experiences quite than the advertising and promotion instrument it’s at present. The eating public was considerably simpler to entice. In that context, the ramen burger’s affect was stunning.
It caused “this sheeple impact,” says Smorgasburg co-founder Eric Demby. “Making an attempt it and acquiring it [became] the aim.”
Following the KFC Double Down (launched in 2010), web sensations just like the Turbaconducken, and the rise of the Cronut (launched in Could 2013), the meals world was on the cusp of a significant overhaul. Proper when social media was beginning to flip eating experiences into social forex, the ramen burger’s novelty created a fervor.
Whether or not he deliberate to or not, Shimamoto helped usher in a pessimistic new age of meals, one through which producers developed formulation to ensure social media success. The ramen burger turned the poster youngster for a flood of mashups that had gone and would proceed to go mainstream: the sushi burrito, the sushi pizza, the sushi burger, the spaghetti doughnut, the scallion pancake burrito, the Yorkshire burrito, birria ramen, birria pizza, and so forth. Judging by what makes it to my feed at present, these strategies nonetheless work. We’d see fewer ramen burgers now, however we’re nonetheless residing within the ramen burger’s world.
Earlier than 2013, the rising stars at Smorgasburg have been operations like Salvatore Bklyn ricotta, Mast Brothers chocolate, and Mighty Quinn’s barbecue. “Plenty of distributors that got here via have been taking off,” Demby says.
The competition was about distributors getting artistic with meals that you simply couldn’t get anyplace else. In that sense, the ramen burger match proper in. Previous to its look, Smorgasburg didn’t have a burger vendor, Demby recollects; burgers have been too commonplace. “After which the ramen burger got here alongside and we have been like, There’s our burger,” Demby says. “It’s not a burger burger.”
However Shimamoto’s work additionally represented a break. Most different distributors traded within the sincere-seeming meals of the artisanal, hipster second. This was the period of “farm-to-table” eating and back-to-the-land authenticity, which, at instances, might be treasured to the purpose of parody. “There was this concentrate on the way you made it,” Demby says. Whereas Shimamoto invested the identical kind of time and a focus into his product, the ramen burger’s high quality and taste have been nearly inappropriate for a lot of shoppers.
Mike Chau, one of many metropolis’s unique meals Instagrammers, sees the ramen burger as a turning level; the burger’s success led to an “escalation” of individuals not solely ready in strains but additionally “getting meals for the sake of posting about it,” he says. Instagram, which had launched in 2010 and hit its first 100 million customers in 2013, was starting a interval of speedy progress. (Chau distinctly remembers the ramen burger’s first weekend, however along with his spouse days simply away from giving start, “the road was so lengthy that we simply gave up,” he says. If you happen to stay in NYC, you in all probability acknowledge that child: Chau runs the favored account @foodbabyny.)
With its potential to attract prospects primarily inquisitive about posting on-line, the ramen burger shortly started to outshine its neighbors. “Lots of people got here to Smorgasburg for the ramen burger after which they found the remainder of Smorgasburg,” Demby says. Different distributors took discover. It turned apparent that it was essential to face out from the competitors, each in individual and on-line. “Folks all began to search for their shot to make one thing like [the ramen burger],” Chau says. Just a few years later, the raindrop cake debuted on the competition.
The ramen burger modified Smorgasburg — and Smorgasburg modified meals tradition. As consuming more and more turned an exercise and an aesthetic promoted via social media, folks started to chase culinary spectacle over substance outdoors of meals festivals. Virality turned a brand new manner of partaking with meals in practically all contexts. Ruby Tandoh writes in her forthcoming e book All Consuming that the rise of Instagram “allowed you to bypass pondering altogether and simply look.”
The ramen burger’s components for a viral meals nonetheless holds true. Author and pastry chef Tanya Bush not too long ago theorized in i-D that step one towards virality is manipulation (you give a well-known meals a tantalizing new look) and the second hybridization (you mash it up with one other meals that individuals already know). Nail these two steps, because the ramen burger did, and also you improve the probability of a dish that individuals will make an effort to hunt out.
It might be cynical to color purveyors as shrewd manipulators of the eye financial system and diners as disloyal clout-chasers. However it’s the sport.
Nobody is basically fooled anymore. Viral meals tendencies don’t appear as natural now, in accordance with Allyson Reedy, writer of The Cellphone Eats First Cookbook, a compilation of “social media’s greatest recipes” revealed earlier this 12 months. In contrast to 2013, when meals just like the ramen burger might make the information principally unintentionally, viral meals is now extra clearly “a manipulation,” Reedy says. “It’s extra strategic and intentional.”
Maybe that’s why the ramen burger turned so polarizing. Earlier than the dish was even a 12 months outdated, it was already drawing ire together with imitators. By 2025, Style Atlas, the publication whose meals rankings are calibrated for social media engagement, put the ramen burger at No. 7 on its listing of the “worst rated meals on the planet,” proper between jellied eels and blood pancakes. It nonetheless routinely makes the rounds on Reddit’s r/stupidfood discussion board. Some shoppers determined the ramen burger was the second web meals tradition jumped the shark (even whereas its up to date, the Cronut, skated by on Western esteem for French pastry tradition).
Shimamoto himself has been let down by social media-famous meals. Within the early days of Instagram, “even when [food] was [made] for the ‘gram, folks have been nonetheless placing their coronary heart into the flavors,” he says. Now, “it’s actually arduous to guage” what he sees on social media, Shimamoto says.
“If you will get remembered for one thing, you’ll have prospects for a very long time.”
Shimamoto’s cooking was at all times about greater than virality. Whereas the novelty of the ramen burger was the bun manufactured from noodles, the “coronary heart and soul” was its shoyu glaze, he explains. “That juice from the meat and the sauce, after which that texture from the noodles, is basically what makes it.” Whereas the burger might need gotten folks within the door at Shimamoto’s eating places, he hoped to flex his broader culinary expertise on bowls of ramen too — one thing on which he was an professional, as his weblog proved. In Critical Eats, Sho Spaeth as soon as described Ramen Shack as “essentially the most thrilling place to eat ramen in the USA,” although the ramen burger’s success “at all times risked occluding [Shimamoto’s] true talent as a ramen-making savant with seemingly excellent taste-memory.”
In 2019, Shimamoto closed the New York Metropolis location of Ramen Shack. In 2022, he closed the Ramen Shack location in Orange County, California, as properly, citing staffing adjustments and private well being points. Whereas he says that he by no means grew to resent the ramen burger, the enterprise round it might be “overwhelming at instances, with everybody making an attempt to get a bit of the pie.”
Smorgasburg’s method to picking distributors has additionally crystallized over the previous decade-plus. Meals that works at Smorgasburg needs to be good, Demby says, nevertheless it additionally has what he calls a “second of theater.” “You’ve bought to get identified for one thing,” he says. “If you will get remembered for one thing, you’ll have prospects for a very long time.”
The ramen burger has rather more competitors now, however curiosity in it has remained comparatively regular since 2017 (although vastly decreased from its 2013 to 2016 heyday). “I didn’t shut my outlets as a result of I assumed that the ramen burger was now not sellable,” Shimamoto says. Each time he posts the ramen burger on Instagram now, commenters are inclined to reminisce in regards to the good outdated days.
And at any time when his youngsters or mates request one, he’ll make the ramen burger — simply on a smaller scale now. “To today, it’s nonetheless nice,” he says.
