Pizza Hut joins forces with beloved ramen chain Tenka Ippin for a one-of-a-kind two-in-one meal.
It didn’t take long for Pizza Hut Japan to grab our attention when they announced they’d teamed up with popular ramen chain Tenka Ippin to create a ramen-topped pizza, and it didn’t take long for us to make a solemn vow to eat one as soon as we could. So when the Kotteri-fu Ramen Pizza was released on January 22 for 1,980 yen (US$13.65), we put in our order right away.
Kotteri-fu means “thick-style,” referring to thick, extra flavorful ramen broth in this sense. Sure enough, taped to the lid of our delivery box was a packet of very viscous liquid.
The writing identified it as “PH Ramen Sauce,” and we’re guessing the abbreviation is for “Pizza Hut,” not the acid-or-base-determining potential-of-hydrogen scale.
Opening up the box, at a quick glance you might mistake this for a pizza with salami and diced peppers. Go in for a closer look, though, and you’ll see that those are slices of chashu pork and negi (green onion), two of Japan’s favorite ramen toppings. Most importantly, you’ll also see that there are ramen noodles all over the place.
Just to be clear, ramen pizza isn’t really a thing in Japan, and it’s clear that Pizza Hut is counting on the shock value to help convince customers to try this audaciously idea. Novel food concepts, though, don’t always translate into being tasty ones, so we had a little apprehension as we lifted up a slice for our first bite.
We decided to take our first taste without adding any of the PH Ramen Sauce, and were immediately surprised at not just how good it tasted, but how the flavor didn’t seem weird at all. Yeah, the concept and visuals of ramen pizza may be a little out there, but the taste here is great, and not because of any stimulating strangeness in the flavor profile. It turns out that ramen and pizza ingredients actually go really well together, and between the crisp crust and chewy noodles, even the texture was satisfying.
Next it was time to pour on the PH Ramen Sauce, which, as promised, is incredibly thick.
Turning the packet on its side, it takes a good two or three seconds for it to go horizontal.
The result was exactly what we had expected and hoped for: a ratcheting up of the ramen flavor while still harmonizing beautifully with the cheese and crust.
So it turns out that Pizza Hut’s ramen pizza isn’t some weird thing that’s only worth eating once for the experience, but something we’d be happy to eat again and again. Unfortunately, it’s only going to be available for a limited, unspecified time, but we’re definitely going to have to get at least one more while they’re still around.
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