How to put together and serve bowls of ramen

akira
When you visit a ramen shop for a bowl of ramen, the chances are the bowl you order is assembled to order. That means, at a ramen shop (at least most of them), most of the items have been prepared in advance and ready to be put together in a bowl. Noodles, base stocks, motodare, flavored oil, and toppings are already prepared and assembled to each order. What are the ways a bowl of ramen should be put together? Is there an order in which each item should be put together? In fact, there is a reason why a bowl is put together in a certain order. And if not, using exactly the same items, your bowl of ramen may not be as good.
Let's explore how we can put together and serve bowls of ramen in this article and how we may want to set up a serving station so that we can serve our customers in the quickest way possible.

Why do we cook ramen noodles first?

When we take an order and start preparing a bowl of ramen, the first action we want to take is to throw a serving of fresh ramen noodles into a noodle cooker. Why do we start with noodles? It is because among all the processes in serving a bowl of ramen, it tends to take the longest. So, we put a serving of fresh noodles in boiling water and start the next process while noodles are being cooked. This is important to understand. We first need to identify the process which takes the longest to finish. Because all the other processes have to follow along to complete one bowl of ramen, we need to begin with that process and finish others.
In order for us to optimize our operations, we want to align all the processes to the one that takes the longest time. Because that process determines our performance (in this case, the time it takes to serve one bowl of ramen), we want to start it first. Fortunately, as we can just leave the noodles after throwing them into a cooker, we can work on and finish the other processes.

Design the best way to serve your ramen

What menu items will I be serving at my ramen shop? And how many servings of each will I be doing in one day?
These are the questions you should be asking before designing your floor plans. Because answers to these questions will determine what equipment you'd need to have and how your floor plans should be designed, please give them some thoughts first.
Designing good layouts and floor plans for your ramen operations will save tremendous amount of time both for your business and customers. There's a lot of stake and money buried in the design. Without understanding how things move and flow from point A to point B, it is difficult to design good layouts. So, we need to understand the order of putting together bowls of your ramen first.
Then, we can design floor plans with the operational flows in mind. These plans can save us thousands of unnecessary steps we would have to make. These "wasted" motions we make translate into thousands of dollars in value. And we would be costing our customers the time to wait for extra minutes.
So, it would be great if we can visualize our smooth operations first and design the floor plans that help optimize the operations.
With good layouts designed for your ramen operations, your ramen business will operate flowless and make the best performance consistently.
Let's think about and give your best answers to those questions and start visualizing your ramen operations. 

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