Instant Ramen Gets a Glow-Up

The origin story of the instant noodle, as told by its inventor, Momofuku Ando, is a parable of resilience. On August 15, 1945, the day Japan announced its surrender to the Allied forces, ending the Second World War, the thirty-five-year-old Ando was wandering through the streets of Osaka, a city ravaged by aerial bombings, when he was struck by the sight of an ad-hoc ramen stall near a train station, with a crowd of people lined up before it. A bowl of noodle soup, he realized, was a thing of extraordinary power, able to bring people together, to give them comfort, to rouse them from devastation. He went on to perfect a technique for flash-frying noodles, making them both speedy to reheat and almost infinitely shelf-stable. “Mankind is noodlekind,” he once said, according to the employee handbook of Nissin, the company he founded. Today, more than a hundred billion servings of instant noodles are eaten each year, according to the World Instant Noodles Association. Instant Noodle Factory, a newish restaurant in Long Island City, is here to help you do your part.

For many Americans, instant noodles might seem like the antithesis of a restaurant food: a punch line, the cheapest of the cheap eats, the culinary provenance of the broke and the dorm-dwelling. This perspective is decidedly not universal; outside the American bubble, especially in Asian countries, instant noodles are ubiquitous, beloved, and—perhaps most important—a starting point, a wiggly foundation upon which to build a glorious meal of meats, vegetables, condiments, and seasonings. The owners of Instant Noodle Factory, Tat Lee and Cierra Beck, a couple whose relationship began over a shared love of instant noodles, drew on this more expansive vision. In particular, they were inspired by Lee’s childhood in Hong Kong, where extravagantly dressed-up instant noodles are a popular street-vender breakfast, and by Korea’s D.I.Y.-instant-noodle shops, where you can select your preferred packaged noodle, pick your toppings from a buffet-like array, cook the whole thing on-site, and then sit down to devour it.