Ramen Burger / ラーメンバーガー

B-graded Gourmet "Ramen Burger" at Cinco de Mayo
シンコ・デ・マヨで見つけたB級グルメ「ラーメンバーガー」

I went to Cinco de Mayo festival held in Yoyogi Park during Golden Week, which is about a week off with national holidays starting from the end of April to early in May.

Cinco de Mayo is of course not a Japanese holiday but this year, they brought it here to celebrate and introduce some Latin American cultures and foods.

Every time there's some sort of festivals, I see random food stands which are not related to the theme.
And this time, it's not exceptional; there're Jamaican, Turkish, and Japanese food stands.

One of them was selling "Ramen Burger."
I've heard about it but never tried one, so I decided to buy one.

Ramen Burger became famous when B-graded gourmet started getting popular.
Maybe you wonder what B-graded gourmet is, here's a short explanation.

We call it B-kyu Gurume, "kyu" here means "grade," and "Gurume" is the way we pronounce "gourmet" in Japanese.
The definition is "ordinary folksy food and drinks which are not extravagant and cheap."
So-called local dishes are pretty much B-graded Gourmet.
However, B-graded Gourmet is not local cuisines since they're not connected to the rural cultures and don't have a long history. 
Yet this B-graded Gourmet is used to revitalize the towns and since 2006, B-graded Grand Prix  is held every year and the triumphed dish makes a lot of change to the town and reactivate the city a lot.

The Ramen Burger stand I went to had this sign with prcie; 500 JPY, which is an average price for food stand I think.
The way it's cooked was interesting.

There're steal plate with pockets which were similar to muffin cups but much shallower.
The guy who was selling put noodles into the pocket and placed a little weight over it and fried the noodle.
But as you can see some noodles shaped into flat circle, he used one of them after reheating in the hole.

While he's preparing, I asked him how many years he's in this business, then he said it's been a couple of years and this was one of the vanguards of B-graded Gourmet about 2-3 years ago (back in 2010) when the boom just has started.

There're two flavors; soy sauce or pork flavor and I chose soy sauce.

On the fried noodle, he put starchy and thick soy sauce paste (or broth), and added thin slices of naganegi onions.

Then he added mianma (bamboo shoot), naruto (steamed fish minced and steamed), then also char siu.
So basically the toppings were the regular ones you usually see on ramen bowl.

This is how it served in a paper wrap.

It was quite good like you're eating ramen with thickened soup.
However, the bun (made of ramen noodle) was so fragile that it's impossible to eat it without making a mess and wiping my mouth.

I'm not sure if you can get whenever there's a festival in Yoyogi Park, but if you find it, this could be interesting enough to try.

I found a website you can actually buy a set of frozen Ramen Burgers online, which has nothing to do with this food stand, but all you need is to reheat and put them in order and eat.