Ippudo Akamaru Hakata Tonkotsu Cup Ramen — 129g

The bowl Ippudo serves as Akamaru Modern, built into a three-minute cup: a pork-bone broth with a soy seasoning base, black garlic oil and a spicy miso that go in at the end. It's made by Nissin, supervised by Ippudo, and sold in Japan only inside 7-Eleven and its sister shops, so any of it on a shelf here has come from there. If you've eaten at the Ippudo in Sydney, this is that bowl's recipe rather than that bowl.

一風堂 赤丸新味, the name on the lid, if you're matching it to something you saw in Japan.

What you're getting

• Taste: Rich and faintly sweet, creamy rather than heavy, with none of the barnyard funk people expect from Hakata pork-bone broth. The noodle is thin, straight and non-fried, so it holds a clean bite instead of going soft.
• Where a cup stops being a restaurant: worth knowing before you order, because it's where people are disappointed. The soup is the part that travels. What doesn't quite come with it is the noodle, which is a little drier than the restaurant's, and the chilli miso, which several people find they can barely taste. Judge it as a very good cup, not as a bowl of Ippudo.
• It is not as spicy as it looks: two Australian sellers put "Spicy" in the title of this product and that oversells it. The chilli miso is a warm note rather than heat; someone who says outright they can't handle spice took to it without trouble.
• Tonkotsu means pork bone: the broth is simmered from pork bones, so it isn't vegetarian and it isn't halal. (It's also not tonkatsu, the crumbed pork cutlet, one letter apart and a common mix-up.)
• Four sachets, and the order matters: two go in before the water, two after the three minutes. Getting it backwards is the single most common complaint about this cup in Japan, and it's the difference between a thin broth and a thick one.
• Allergens: Contains egg, milk and wheat. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours, and if you avoid sesame or soy, read it especially carefully, because the previous version of this cup declared both.

Two things to check if you're comparing listings. This is the current pack: 129 g, with 「とんこつ熟かさね」 across the top of the lid; the older 121 g and 127 g versions are still being sold here, and the lid on those reads 博多とんこつ instead. And if you already know our Ichiran box: that's a five-serving stovetop kit with a clean broth and no toppings at all by design, where this is one cup with chashu, wood-ear mushroom and spring onion in it and a much bolder, layered broth. Different ends of the same Hakata family.

It's one cup: a single serving, and a good one to try before committing to a five-serve box.