Sky Drop

I had the evening to myself, so I went to a neighborhood restaurant for dinner. I don’t visit often enough to call myself a regular, but I like to think I have found a little place for myself there: the manager and I know each other well enough by now to exchange a word or two.

Today, two other customers were already there, trading quick, easy banter with the manager. Feeling a little guilty, I made their three-way conversation the accompaniment to my bolognese.

According to the manager, the ramen business is unusual. There are not many kinds of business that routinely have people lining up outside. A café might suddenly become the talk of the town, but it is rare for queues to be part of our mental picture of an entire kind of restaurant. If demand outstrips supply, you would think the answer would be to increase supply or raise prices until demand settles down. Yet with ramen, it feels as though demand falls away the moment the price goes up. That familiar feeling: “It’s ramen. Even an expensive bowl ought to stay under, say, ¥1,200.”

Ramen with a delicate, clear broth might be able to take the chic, high-end route. But for some reason, I don’t want a rich tonkotsu bowl to be too expensive. I found myself grinning at this modest advance in my understanding: consumers’ stubborn ideas about what a product ought to cost can shape the supply and demand curves themselves.

While I was thinking all this, the conversation had moved on to whether the bottleneck behind ramen-shop queues was the cooking or the prep. When the manager noticed that I was eating noodles too, he apologized: “Sorry for the odd conversation.” It had made such a delicious side dish that, if anything, it felt like a treat.

The manager had apologized for making me think of ramen. That evening, he drained the pasta with a full-on Sky Drop. Things like that are why this is one of my favorite places.