Is it a food court or a museum?
Founded in 1994, their website touts they are the world's first ramen-themed amusement park. After paying a 450 yen ticket, I headed downstairs to see an amazing scene from the past. They've recreated a shopping street scene from the late 1950s with different ramen restaurants incorporated in the old-looking buildings.
The strategy is to pick the restaurants you want to try, with each featuring their own unique regional take on ramen. A huge board showed the queue times for each restaurant and line up for each one.
You buy your food ticket at each restaurant's kiosk, which has an English option. Unique to this place are smaller taster bowls so you can hit more than 1 restaurant to make good use of your admission. Staff are on hand to calculate the numbers while you are in line and to collect your ticket beforehand, so when you sit down, your ordered item should pop into your hands shortly.
I ended up trying 3 shops and they served good ramen. For the taster bowls, it still has a good portion of noodle but only 1 piece of meat, so it definitely is not enough for a proper dinner. However, waiting times for the most popular restaurants were long. I had arrived after 5pm but had to wait up to 40 minutes in line. Multiply that across 3 restaurants (I had encountered long lines for 2), and the whole meal gets chopped up across 2 hours. The worst part was some restaurants don't bring in customers as tables become available but hold their empty tables until they have a big batch of them and collect a whole group from the line at once, wasting everyone's time.
After dinner, I headed back upstairs to explore the re-created alleys featuring different shopfronts from the old days. While I probably wouldn't come back for a full meal but maybe hit one shop for a snack at most, the admission was worth exploring the architectural details that they've done with the space.
