Shibuya ramen restaurant’s new dish contains copious calories but no noodles.

“Get fat now!”

That’s not the sort of signage we expected to see while walking around downtown Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood. But there it was, a command that was both startling and strangely compelling, and which stood out all the more because it was written in English, and also with a pig snout-rendering of the O in the middle of the word “now.”

Things started to make sense, though, when we looked up and saw that the restaurant ordering us to gain weight with all available haste was none other than Yarou Ramen.

Let’s pause for a quick linguistics side dish. Yarou is a Japanese word that means “person” or “people,” but which has a coarse feel to it. Depending on the context it could be considered either confrontational or jovially macho, but in any case yarou carries a boisterous, unrefined quality. From that, you can probably guess that Yarou Ramen’s take on ramen isn’t dainty or lightly flavored, but full of bold flavors and heavy ingredients, and as photos of their ramen show, the bowls are packed with chashu/char-siu pork.

As such, there were already a number of ways to pack on pounds by eating at Yarou Ramen, but the especially urgent-sounding sign is trumpeting a new path to delicious weight gain, the Ikinari Buta Yarou! (buta meaning “pork”), or the “Get Fat Now!! Char-siu Pork.”

▼ Yes, the official English rendering has an additional exclamation point.

The Get Fat Now (as we’ll call it, for short) comes in two sizes, regular and ippon/full 2.5 times, which gets you two and a half times as much meat as the standard order. You also get a boiled egg and veggies, but no noodles, because this is Yarou Ramen putting a chashu spin on Japan’s steak set meals, like the ones at unrelated casual steak restaurant chain Ikinari Steak (ikinari meaning “suddenly” – last vocabulary note, I promise). The standard-size Get Fat Now is priced at 2,780 yen (US$18.90) as an a la carte item (which actually includes the vegetable sides present on the hot plate), and 3,080 yen for a set meal with rice and miso soup, which is what our intrepid reporter Mr. Sato opted for in his taste test.

Even though he’d prepared himself for a massive meat serving, Mr. Sato still got a shock and a thrill when the server set his plate down before him. We’re used to seeing chashu in slices, but this was like a log of pork chopped from some sort of magical chashu tree!

The pork was topped with garlic chips and garlic butter sauce, and also sitting in a shallow pool of additional sauce bubbling from the heat of the iron plate.

The waitstaff informed Mr. Sato that the chashu is so soft that it can be cut with a fork, but they actually give you two of the utensils, as the meat is thick enough that it’s difficult to cut all the way through the center without some sawing motion. That sort of made us wonder why they didn’t just give us a fork and a knife, until we remembered that ramen restaurants in general aren’t stocked with a lot of knives for customers to use, since so few of the items they serve require cutting.

It’s easy enough to tear off a piece using just one fork, though, and as soon as Mr. Sato filled his cheeks, he felt a surging sense of joy! The taste is in no way subtle, with marvelously meatiness wrapped in immensely strong garlic and rich butter notes immediately informing you that you’re getting a lot of calories, but also making it feel totally worth it.

However, there is a lot of food here, and there’s a chance that your taste buds will become saturated before you eat everything. Should that happen, Mr. Sato recommends mixing things up a bit by, for instance, getting some meat and some rice in the same bite, or using some of the available condiments like curry powder.

▼ Rice refills are free with the Get Fat Now set meal, by the way.

Mr. Sato has actually been trying to eat healthier recently, so this was his first time gorging himself on so much meat in quite a while. He was happy he gave himself a pass for this meal, though, as it was as satisfying as it was fulling, though he’s not sure he’s got the stomach capacity for the extra-large 2.5-times-size Get Fat Now, which also comes with an eye-popping 8,900 yen price tag for the set meal.

Though Yarou Ramen is a chain, the Get Fat Now is exclusive to its Shibuya Center-gai branch. Oh, and note that when we ordered the standard size, we were told it takes 20 minutes to prepare, though given how filling it is, having some extra time to get even hungrier while you wait might not be such a bad thing.

Restaurant information
Yarou Ramen (Shibuya Center-gai main branch) / 野郎ラーメン（渋谷センター街総本店）
Address: Tokyo-to, Shibuya-ku, Utagawacho 25-3
東京都渋谷区宇田川町25－3
Open 24 hours
Website

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