ANTCICADA in Tokyo

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ANTCICADA

ANTCICADA is a new ramen shop / fine dining restaurant that serves, you guessed it, ants and cicadas! Insects are at the center of the menu here, and you can expect some interesting, unique dishes if you come for the dinner course. Lunch is simple ramen. Cricket ramen. Yes, the soup at ANTCICADA is made with 91% cricket broth. The noodles contain cricket powder. A lone deep-fried cricket sits on top. And the whole thing is actually quite good.

The shop is only open on weekends, and may only be serving the ramen on Sundays. Though they have been open for almost a year as of writing, they haven’t started their full operations. Please check Google for updated hours if you plan on going.

And please don’t follow the Google Maps directions exactly. You’ll be led to this closed shutter that gives the impression the shop is closed. Walk around the block to the other side for the actual entrance. Yes, those are vintage bicycles left unlocked. Gotta love Tokyo.

The concept here is the brainchild of a few foodie friends. Yua Shinohara, aka bug boy, was interested in insects from an early age. Ayumu Yamaguchi is the shop’s head fermenter, handling various aspects related to booze. ANTCICADA works with distilleries around Japan to make their own custom gin and spirits. Shota Shiratori is the head chef. He spent six years as a chef at the Michelin 3-starred L’Effervesence as well as doing stints in Denmark at Ralae, Manfreds, and Koks.

Here’s Shota and my fried Igor realizing they will never escape turnips. Both of them worked at L’effervesence in Tokyo. One of the restaurant’s signature dishes is a turnip cooked sous vide. These gentlemen tell stories of gently carving hundreds if not thousands of the things. Out on the Faroe Islands at Koks, perhaps the most difficult to access fine-dining restaurant in the world, turnips are one of the only local vegetables to match with fermented lamb and seafood. I miss travel.

Back to the ramen at ANTCICADA. Soup made from 100% crickets is blended with a bit of vegetable dashi for balance. A special cricket soy sauce is high in glutamine, aka umami. Maruyama Seimen makes custom noodles with a bit of dried cricket powder inside.

And a single fried cricket topping. If it weren’t for the cricket topping, most people wouldn’t realize that this one is made from insects. That’s the beauty of dashi. Dashi’s purpose is to present umami, those special amino acids that give a wonderful meaty flavor to food. This is done via seaweed, dried fish, mushrooms, and in this case, insects.

I’ve been to Shota’s apartment before. It’s a massive place that he shares with other members of the ANTCICADA team. Jars of fermented liquids line the shelves. Terrariums of insects can be found in every corner. They aren’t just throwing random bugs into pots, they are feeding the guys different foods to see what happens. One of the crickets they use comes from Tokushima Prefecture in Japan. They feed them sudachi, a rather strong green citrus. The crickets take on the flavors of their feed. Is this the future of what we eat?

Only time will tell, but in an ever-changing world of protein depletion, we may rely on insects in the next few decades. Good to know they’ll be tasty.

Fried chicken with cricket powder. Not sure what the cricket brought to it, but these were great with a highball made with their original gin.

The original gin is made with these water bugs. Once a year they release strong pheromones. Ask the staff if you can smell the bug. These smell like pineapples and mangos. Once a year giant water bugs create a tropical-smelling scent to lure a mate. Here, they turned it into gin.

They are happy to show you ingredients, both live and cooked. The two kinds of crickets that go into the soup are a common European cricket and a smaller Japanese breed. Hundreds go into each bowl, meaning tens of thousands get cooked up weekly.

Official site here.

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