The Story of Ide Shoten: 70 Years of Wakayama Ramen

The bowl you eat at Gomen Ramen started as a street cart in Wakayama, Japan, in 1953.

Wakayama is a small prefecture on the Kii Peninsula, south of Osaka. It has its own ramen tradition — a style called chuka soba, built on a rich pork-bone broth blended with soy. It's the kind of bowl people in Wakayama grew up on: served fast, meant for lunch or after a shift, made from stock that had been simmering since morning.

The cart that started it

In 1953, a woman set up a ramen cart in Wakayama City. She had a recipe — a pork-bone broth pulled from a pot she kept going all day, blended at service with tare and finished with hand-pulled noodles. She named her cart after the family: Ide Shoten (井出商店).

Her son, Norio Ide, grew up in that cart. Later he took it over. Over the decades, the cart became a shop — and the shop became one of the most respected ramen destinations in the city. People in Wakayama argue about a lot of things, but on Ide Shoten they mostly agree: the broth is right.

Seventy-something years later, the shop is still open. The recipe hasn't changed. The pork bones still simmer for twelve hours. The tare still gets mixed the same way.

How the recipe crossed the Pacific

In 2002, a young cook named Koji Takeda traveled from California to Wakayama. He wanted to learn ramen — specifically, he wanted to learn Ide Shoten's ramen. Norio agreed to teach him.

Koji spent months in the Ide Shoten kitchen. He learned the recipe, the technique, and — Norio told him more than once — the patience. Twelve hours of broth. The right noodle for the right bowl. The respect for what came before.

When he came back to California, Koji opened a shop in Stanton, Orange County, and named it Gomen Ramen. It was the first place in OC to serve ramen the Ide Shoten way.

That was 2002.

Twenty years on Katella

For over twenty years, Koji ran the kitchen. Twelve hours of pork bones, every morning before service. The same broth Norio taught him to make.

In July 2022, Koji passed the recipes and the shop on to the current owner. Nothing about the food changed. The broth still simmers for twelve hours. The noodles are still pulled in-house. The bowl you eat today is the same bowl Norio Ide taught Koji to make, two decades ago, in a small kitchen in Wakayama.

Koji has since retired. Later that year, after his retirement, he flew back to Wakayama and visited Norio at the Ide Shoten head shop — a small pilgrimage back to where his recipe began. There's a photo of them together, standing outside the shop. Four people: Koji and his wife, Norio and his wife. Two generations of one recipe, in front of the door where it all started.

The point of all of this

We're a small shop in a strip mall on Katella Ave. There's nothing fancy about the space. We don't do trends or seasonal reinventions. We make one thing very carefully, and we've made it that way for a long time.

If you eat here, you're eating the same broth someone in Wakayama has been making since 1953. That's the point of this shop — carrying that lineage forward, in a kitchen we can walk into every morning at 6 AM.

Twelve hours of broth. Every day. That hasn't changed in seventy years, and it isn't about to.

Come find us at 7147 Katella Ave, Stanton. We open at 11.