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For the most part, I have very few complaints about air travel. Maybe I’m just incredibly lucky, but usually when I fly, I get through the check-in and security lines fairly smoothly, and while I’d never choose to outfit my living room with seats from an airliner, I can generally put up with them until I reach my destination.

I’ve even largely made peace with the unappetizing flavor of airline food, often sidestepping the issue by picking up something else to eat before I get on the plane. Selecting my last tasty meal for the next couple hours can be tricky, though, and sometimes I’ll find myself waffling between two options, such as ramen or a rice bowl.

Thankfully, a new to-go item at Haneda Airport eliminates that dilemma, though, with a ramen-flavored rice bowl from one of Tokyo’s most popular noodle emporiums.

With its original branch located in the Higashi Ikebukuro neighborhood, Taishoken is part of the select group of Tokyo restaurants that ramen enthusiasts come to from all across the sprawling city.

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The house specialty is tsukemen, in which you dunk the noodles into the separately served broth before eating them.

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Taishoken is so popular that there’s now a branch inside Haneda Airport. While that’s great for travelers who give themselves enough leeway to sit down for lunch or dinner before their departure, not everyone has that much time, so Taishoken also offers food to-go.

But a bowl of ramen can be tricky to enjoy in the sky, where a patch of turbulence or even the normal vibrations of the fuselage can send broth splattering all over you and your neighbors. So to keep everyone’s taste buds satisfied and their clothes clean, Taishoken has developed what it’s calling the raadon, a combination of “ramen” and “donburi” (rice bowl).

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From above, the radon looks like a bowl of ramen with a generous selection of toppings, consisting of char–sui pork strips, spicy ground chicken, a soft-boiled egg, bean sprouts, fermented bamboo shoots, seaweed, and pickled ginger. What you won’t find in the bowl, though, is any noodles. Instead, underneath everything is a bed of rice, cooked with the same broth used for Taishoken’s tsukemen.

The raadon costs 880 yen (US$8.70), which doesn’t seem at all unreasonable for something that should taste better than the in-flight meal and also be a lot more filling than the bag of peanuts.

Related: Taishoken Haneda Airport branch
Source: Entabe
Top image: Entabe
Insert images: Tabelog (1, 2), Entabe