In recent years, ramen business is booming in Singapore. 10 years ago, ramen did not have a reputation it has now and it has that trendy image so to speak -eating ramen. Now, I am always amazed how Singaporeans are so pro-Japanese food and with the recent launch of hot-shot star rated Japanese dining at MBS and Sentosa, the recognition (Japanese food) is getting even bigger (I am glad to witness that because I love Japanese food, quite naturally). Anyway, I do not eat ramen in Singapore because I am there to eat local food so I won't comment on how good Tonkotsu King is or Ippudo is. Actually, I don't frequently eat ramen in Tokyo either and I don't go hunting ramen trends here in Tokyo. I just eat at my comfortable nearby places. To a foreigner like me, Singapore is a noodle heaven with wide ranges of noodle dishes from coconuty laksa to irresistible bak chor mee, lor mee, char kway teow, hokkien mee, prawn mee, wanton mee.... the choices are simply mind boggling -and they are all amazing -textures and flavors. I am not comparing ramen and local noodles (let me simply call it mee here). But I think this "mee" is taken for granted, its got a lot of potential to be better but cannot. Why? Correct me if I am wrong, a bowl of ramen costs 12-SG$15. That means, they could spend more money on quality ingredients so, if the food cost is 30% (average on ramen), they spend $4-$5 on ingredients! The photo pic, claypot laksa at Depot Rd. Zhen Shan Mei for a small size is only 3 bucks. If they use a higher quality ingredients and sell it for say, $7, they will go out of business because people will start patronizing other stalls that sell laksa for a lesser price. My point is, a famous stall such as this laksa stall cannot raise prices in order to improve the flavor of their current laksa. The selling price is determined by the consumer not the stall owners. In the past 10 years, prices of ingredients and utility bills have inflated but the bowl of noodles remains the same or simply 50 cents or so higher. This means the profit margin is getting less and less for the stall owners. Low profit margin means bad business. On top of this low profit margin, comes long hours of hard work, day off once a week, namely, hard labor. Popular ramen joints do purchase, high quality ingredients and that is why the soup tastes good or toppings such as braised pork tastes good. Food is all about ingredients of course. Lame ingredients yield mediocre food, it's a fact. Singapore mee dishes have a lot of potential because people cooking it do not have such liberty to use better ingredients (although, with cheap ingredients, I think they do a great job selling it for 3 bucks...) given the current selling price. If they use better ingredients, their food would taste even better of course. I do not mean use lobster in prawn mee or those kind of gimmicky make-over. Just better ingredients like more shells or pork bones for example -an ingredients needed to beef up the flavors. If the Singaporean consumer do not have a mind shift in hawker prices, this is not going to happen (don't get me wrong though, I do also acknowledge that some people cannot afford to pay $5 for a bowl of mee, what I mean is, there should be more places with stalls with differing selling prices like ramen -you can find ramen in Tokyo for 300yen or you can find it 5 times that price, easily. The difference is quality ingredients.). Sadly, with high food cost and long working hours, working at a hawker stall is not a dream job for young Singaporean to-be-cooks or young entrepreneurs. Lack of successor is a grave problem and it definitely is starting to show.
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