Are You Ready for Some Breakfast Ramen?
Among the dozens of famous ramen shops that keep broth flowing across the five boroughs, the top-ranked spot on the ratings app Beli belongs to chef Rasheeda Purdie’s four-seat counter stall in the Bowery Market, which specializes in a completely original version of asa-ra, a.k.a. morning ramen. The thing is, the stall has been closed for seven months. Or at least it was. Next month, Ramen by Ra will return in an upgraded form, with a new space and an expanded menu.
The spot, which the chef has envisioned as a New York café built into a prewar apartment, houses a new counter with room for two extra seats, bringing the total to six. Opening hours begin early, with broth and baos being offered from 9 a.m. onward. One hour later, the five bowls Purdie offered before — such as bacon-egg-and-cheese shoyu — will carry over, and she’s introducing a sixth item here as well: a savory-sweet sausage-and-maple ramen that celebrates her southern roots and was inspired by a recipe for her grandmother’s collard greens.
Cooking is Purdie’s second career. She was a fashion stylist before culinary school led to stints at Untitled and Red Rooster. During the pandemic, stuck at home, she sought comfort in ramen — and the movie Tampopo, whose titular hero takes over a noodle shop and whose journey inspired Purdie: “If someone asked, ‘Where did this idea come from?’ it was the fantasy of Tampopo,” she says. “If I could have that moment like her, what would it look like?” She decided to find out. “I would just read, and then I started picking up on documentaries and I went to YouTube.” She also acquired the two books she keeps at the shop as talismans: George Solt’s The Untold History of Ramen and Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook, written by self-titled princess Pamela Strobel, the South Carolinian Black chef who operated two East Village restaurants in the 1960s; the first, the Little Kitchen, was a 12-seater she ran out of her apartment. Purdie, who has family in South Carolina and lives in that neighborhood, felt an instant kinship with Strobel. She couldn’t have known she’d end up opening a restaurant of her own there, too — the coincidence remains a source of wonder.
In addition to hers being the only asa-ra shop in town, Purdue’s traditional Japanese breakfast ramen is built on a soy base that further differentiates her bowlfuls from the pork-based tonkatsu style that’s so common in New York. “She does represent what I would like to see — American ramen chefs focusing on these lighter styles that are showcasing nuance,” says author Sho Spaeth, whose cookbook Homemade Ramen was published this fall and who’s planning to host a few local dinners to celebrate its release.
For both Spaeth and Purdie, the goal is to expand diners’ expectations around what ramen can be. “I’m going to make sure I represent the feminine side and the masculine side,” says Purdie, who made the deliberate choice to design a space that looks more “feminine” than typical noodle spots. “Ramen is a balanced food culture in the sense of who is eating it and who’s obsessed with it,” she says, “but the balance has to relate to who is making it.”