ホット・エアー・コーポレーション (Hot Air in Tottori Prefecture)

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ホット・エアー・コーポレーション

Hot Air in Tottori Prefecture garnered a bit of fanfare when the Michelin Guide recognized their ramen. The shop is also connected to a used car lot. It was a food writer’s dream come true. Top-class ramen in the middle of an unknown prefecture at a used car dealership. B-rate journalists of the world rejoice! FYI, the ramen is really nice.

Hot Air Ramen officially opened in 2015. It’s named after the connected Hot Air Corporation car lot. An auto shop serving noodles in a relatively unknown onsen (hot spring) town. The line of hungry customers before the shop opened doubled the town’s population. What’s the deal?

The deal is an excellent bowl of chicken ramen. Soup made from local chicken, two kinds of konbu, dried sardines, and pure mountain spring water. Rare chashu from local pork and a kind of chicken “ham” for toppings. Shio tare for their signature Kiwami Shio (極み塩) is a blend of three natural salts.

The whole bowl is very well thought out.

Wonderful stuff. It’s definitely on the lighter side, with some subtle flavors for foodies to discuss. It’s also a nice change of pace from all the beef bone ramen shops you’ll find in Tottori.

The noodles are made by Kyoto-based Menya Teigaku using a blend of domestic flour.

Katsumi Yoshida and his wife Kaori run the shop. It’s true, this is a ramen shop inside of a functioning car dealership. Yoshida-san was a bit of a foodie, traveling around and eating different food across Japan. Tabearuki (食べ歩き) is literally eating-walking. Travel for food. Foodie life. He started cooking ramen at home and serving it to his customers at the auto shop. As the recipe slowly improved, word got out. The local news ate it up. National news followed suit. Finally, the Michelin people showed up. I like to think they dined at $1000-a-plate crab restaurant Kaniyoshi the night before, and this ramen was good enough to satisfy them the next day.

These days, Yoshida-san keeps the auto dealership as a scaled-down business, only selling to friends. His ramen has massive lines to contend with. He also scaled down his tabearuki blog, but you can check it out here.

Hamamura Onsen is a very minor onsen town. Most of the place was falling apart, but that is par for the course in countryside Japan. Among the shuttered stores and retro ryokan, there are gems, like this guy’s personal bonsai garden with a few hundred tiny trees.

As for Tottori, this prefecture is tops.

The Shoji Ueda Museum of Photography (植田正治写真美術館) is worth a stop on a clear day.

Architect Shin Takamatsu designed a stunning building to house works from the local photographer.

I’ll never forget when we rolled up on this rice farmer. I picked his brain about the rice harvest and he was happy to answer all my mundane questions. As we left he gave us a bag of persimmons. “I can’t eat them with my dentures anyways.”

Then I climbed Mt. Daisen and went home!

Still reading? Did you know that I released a ramen cookbook? It’s available wherever fine cookbooks are sold, aka Amazon. Can’t wait to see what recipes you come up with!

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