Yokohama-style ramen slides on top of a pizza with help from the creator of ie-kei.

Here at SoraNews24, we love ramen, and we love pizza. But would we love ramen pizza?

That was the question we suddenly had a burning desire to answer with the release of Pizza Hut Japan’s Yokohama Ie-kei Ramen Pizza. This new flat fusion food draws inspiration not only from the ie-kei style of ramen, with its distinctive hybrid tonkotsu (pork stock)/soy sauce broth, but specifically from the restaurant where ie-kei originated, Yoshimuraya in the city of Yokohama. The Yokohama Ie-kei Ramen Pizza was created with help from Yoshimuraya’s founder and owner, Minoru Yoshimura, and so it has the ramen pioneer’s approval, but now it’s time to subject it to our own taste test.

Right off the bat, you can tell this is no ordinary pizza, what with the slices of chashu pork, like you’d find in a bowl of ramen. Then, of course, there are the ramen noodles themselves, and the fact that the sauce is ramen broth-brown instead of the traditional tomato-red. There’s spinach too, which would ordinarily be sort of an unusual pizza topping but here gets overshadowed by all the other weirdness going on around it.

But the Yokohama Ie-kei Ramen Pizza looking unusual doesn’t mean it doesn’t look good, especially when we sprinkled on the shredded nori (dried seaweed) that comes in a separate pouch and added an enticing green glisten.

Taste-testing duties were snatched up by our Japanese-language reporter Daiki Nishimoto, who’s an ardent ie-kei ramen fan.

As for why the sauce is brown, that’s because it’s meant to mimic the flavor of ie-kei ramen broth. Rich with a touch of sweetness, Daiki’s taste buds’ immediate reaction was “Oh, are you hooking us up with some teriyaki pizza?”, but as he chewed, the rich, and familiar to fans, flavors of tonkotsu and soy sauce made their presence increasingly distinct, making Daiki’s heart dance with joy.

The biggest surprise, though, was the pizza’s outstanding texture. The Yokohama Ie-kei Ramen Pizza’s noodles are broad and chewy, once again taking their cues from how Yoshimuraya makes theirs, which helps the flavorful sauce easily cling to them. The firmness of the noodles isn’t an exact match for that of the crust, giving you a variety of pleasing sensations as you bite into a piece of the pizza.

The enjoyment Daiki got from chewing through a mouthful reminded him of other popular carb combinations in Japan, and if you were drawing up a family tree of them, he figures that Pizza Hut’s Yokohama Ie-kei Ramen Pizza would be a cousin to yakisoba bread and Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki.

By the way, we mentioned the packet of nori that the ie-kei pizza comes with, but there’s another add-it-yourself ingredient that’s included, garlic vinegar.

▼ Nori (left) and garlic vinegar (right)

This is here as a pizza-oriented interpretation of the pressed garlic paste that’s often put in ie-kei ramen broth, sometimes when the diner is half-way through their bowl. Similarly, Pizza Hut recommends starting off without any garlic vinegar, then adding a squirt to create an invigorating changeup in the flavor profile.

Pizza Hut has done a great job balancing the shock novelty of the concept of an ie-kei ramen pizza with making something that genuinely tastes good, and will appeal to a wide variety of people, not just ramen fanatics or avant-garde pizza iconoclasts. It’s so tasty and approachable that, after eating it, we feel like it wouldn’t be at all out of place on the permanent Pizza Hut Japan menu, but it’s only available for a limited time, between now and March 31. It’s priced at 2,230 yen (US$14.50) for takeout, and since it’s only available as a medium size, we’ve got room for at least a couple more before the end of the month.

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