Supper With Sylvia #13 The Ramen Lord Mike Satinover

If you are a true ramen enthusiast, you’ve probably heard whispers of The Ramen Lord, but in Chicago those whispers turn into full blown reverence when the name Mike Satinover comes up.  A self taught master of Japanese noodle science, Satinover spent years daydreaming and obsessing over the nuances of ramen.  Now, he’s perfected everything from the silky handmade noodles to deeply layered broths and spices.  On this episode of Supper with Sylvia, Satinover reveals a few little secrets, and how to score a coveted seat at his Logan Square hot spot Akahoshi Ramen.

Show Notes:

Akahoshi Ramen 2340 N. California Ave. Chicago

Instagram :https://www.instagram.com/akahoshiramen

This episode is produced by Jane Stephens

Audio engineering and original music by Donnie Cutting

Social Media and Promotions by Magali Blasdell

Check out SupperwithSylvia on Instagram.
Email us at SupperwithSylvia@gmail.com

Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:07.736)
Hey everybody, today's podcast is gonna be fun. Mike Santinova's obsession with ramen all started when he was going to college in Japan. What began as a fun nickname on a Reddit thread called Ramen Lord, it turned into pop-ups and eventually one of Chicago's hottest spots, Akahoshi Ramen. In this episode of Suffer with Sylvia, we dive into what fuels his passion and what it takes to get one of his award-winning bowls.

Speaker 2 (00:38.198)
Okay, Mike Santenova, also known as Ramen Lord, thanks for joining me today.

Happy to be here.

So excited to have you. I want to give everybody a little background. I heard about Ramen Lord about two years ago. I was at this foodie restaurant with some friends, one of whom I believe is a friend of yours, Mike, and they were saying, have you ever heard of the Ramen Lord? And I was like, no, I gotta know. Please tell me more about this. So this reputation was building, who is this Ramen Lord? He's doing these pop-ups at his home. He's making the best.

ramen in Chicago. fact, think there was, correct me if I'm wrong, Mike, there was a article, the headline was, the best ramen in Chicago, you'll never get to eat something like that, right? Okay, so let's first of all start with how did the name Ramen Lord come about?

Something along those lines. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:32.75)
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people assume I must be some very cocky, arrogant person for calling myself this, but the reality is that I came up with that name, I don't know, 12 years ago, kind of as a joke. I was unemployed, living in my parents basement basically at the time. I had just graduated college and I was, you know, this is like what, 2012, so the job market was not amazing. And I'd been looking for like six months. I was just kind of depressed basically and trying to burn time. And I made a Reddit account and

I don't know, I just sounded really stupid and funny to call myself something so ostentatious. I didn't even think about it in the context of ramen. I just knew at the time I really liked ramen. You know, I had been eating ramen in Japan and occasionally making it. And so there was no real fortitude or advanced planning for this name. I just thought it sounded kind of funny and it seemed like it could be memeable. So I just made a Reddit account and then

Gradually as this hobby of mine continued to develop it actually kind of started fitting in its own weird and precise way.

Well, I think you manifested it. You know, they say if you say something and put it to the universe, it can come true. And it sounds like you made that happen. So, everybody, how did you become obsessed with ramen? Because this isn't just somebody that I'm talking to who likes ramen. This is somebody who has an unusually incredibly high obsession with ramen. How was this born?

I had been studying Japanese both in high school and in college and I was living in Hokkaido, studying abroad at Hokkaido University. And I was a poor college student with no money and I needed food. The notorious K-Teki dormitory at Hokkaido University, which cost me only $50 a month to live in. And so you can imagine what the situation was like to live in that vicinity. I needed food and Sapporo, the city where Hokkaido University is located,

Speaker 1 (03:27.982)
has a really excellent food scene. think that most people who visit Japan will probably agree with this. And one of the dishes that emerges from Japan, or emerges from Sapporo specifically, is miso ramen, which was invented in that city in 1955. The actual date is probably contested, but that's the generally agreed upon one. And I like foods that are of place, if that makes sense. know, I like to find, especially while living abroad, I wanted to feel like I was entrenching myself in the city and learning about it.

A cheap, delicious, affordable, readily available, widespread food is a clear winner for that kind of engagement. So you just started eating it and eventually you just kind of, for me at least, just became all consumed by it. You know, we're not talking a $40 bowl of food here. We're talking something that at least in Japan is arguably seven to $10. So it just kind of scratched all the right itches simultaneously.

both for my own personal anxieties of living abroad and not having a lot of money, to also needing that comfort, that sensation. And so I just started diving in and exploring more to the point that I literally did an independent study on this in my second semester of study abroad. But I don't really know if that's where my obsession began. It more was like the catalyst that started it off. That happens after when I leave Japan and suddenly I have no rum.

So, you I'm eating around all the time and not having it ever. And from there, I was just kind of forced to learn about it, to make it, because there was no other way to continue this thing. So it transitioned from something that was very like comforting and approachable to something that was like a chase of nostalgia, if you will. And that's kind of where I still am.

back where you still are because you're always learning. So then is that when you started this Reddit account, the ramen lord account where you were learning?

Speaker 1 (05:18.958)
I started after living in Japan. I think it was almost after I graduated, honestly, like several years later. I wasn't really sharing this with anybody. I wasn't really doing anything. was just making ramen. Yeah, just typical, typical Tuesday, right?

We're just making ramen as one does.

Speaker 2 (05:38.808)
So you start making this ramen and you get on this Reddit thread that is all about ramen and you are practicing your ramen, you're trying to perfect it, you're putting your recipe online. People apparently are trying your recipes and saying, okay, this guy's name is the ramen Lord for a reason.

I don't know if it would go that far. think the thing is in the early days of this subreddit, the ramen subreddit, there just wasn't much people. There weren't that many people making ramen. I mean, it is a difficult job. It's a tough job. There's no question about it. We do it even in our restaurant today and it's still difficult. Doing it at home is a whole nother beast in terms of its complexity. You're dedicating days of effort to make this thing. So when I started making ramen, there just were not that many home cooks making it.

Most of the activity on the subreddit was people eating it. And so I think people just found some crazy guy making ramen in his apartment very compelling. It's like, who is this guy? Why is he doing this? So I felt compelled to share whatever it is I was learning as I was going along. So crazy guy in his apartment making ramen and also spilling the beans, very rare dynamic duo that is. And eventually it caught on. People became very transfixed with what was going on.

Okay, so what made you decide, you know what, I want to start doing pop-ups. How did that come about?

As I started making ramen and people started asking like well, how do I try this? How do I eat this ramen because the ramen was starting to look pretty good I mean it took about six years, but it's starting to look pretty good after about six years So, you know a couple things happened one people started writing about this I don't know how I how anyone decided this is a good idea to write about me But they started which further pushed me into the public in terms of like there is this person making ramen at his house Which is kind of crazy and so eventually a front another front

Speaker 1 (07:28.334)
home cook friend of mine, his name is David Chan. He invited me to do a pop-up with him in New York City. And this is, I just kind of said yes. I was like, okay, sure, we'll do it. Not really realizing when I was getting myself into. We did it for a week. I got hooked immediately. And when I came back to Chicago, I was on the hunt for a space to do pop-ups in. And, you know, frankly, they were very successful very early on. And so that further kind of,

like the flywheel effect, it further made me want to keep doing that, is that each one subsequently was more popular than the last.

Yeah, 50 pop-ups later. Okay.

Probably about 50 or 60. Somewhere in that ballpark.

what point do you decide, okay, I'm going to do it, I'm going to open a restaurant?

Speaker 1 (08:14.894)
Because I wanted it to be conducive to what I had felt like ramen was like in Japan, which is that it's just ramen. There's not a lot of other stuff on the menu. There's not appetizers and entrees and desserts. I really just wanted a ramen shop. I did not want a full-fledged restaurant. So we took a long time to find a space. It's just one of those sort of like meandering, wandering pathway stories that you hear most people's lives are about, right? It's like, you don't really know how your life is going to go, but you pursue the opportunities to kind of present themselves and hope that it works for the best.

And here we go, here we are. you're about to celebrate your one year anniversary, aren't you? So I want to come back to you and how you tackle your ramen because you want it perfect. I understand that there are a few terms I want you to go over with me and they involve, here's what I'm hearing. You measure soup viscosity. You look at the specific noodle hydration and that you actually measure the air with a pocket.

correct.

Speaker 2 (09:14.022)
a humidifier gauge in your restaurant? Yes. Okay. my, my mind is about to blow. This is what's going into this delicious bowl of ramen that you're making me. Why are the

I don't think what I'm doing is that rare, but I will dive into it. If you have too much water versus too little water, the ratio can change and the soup can taste either too intense, too viscous or not intense enough, not viscous and watery. And one way to measure this is with a tool called a refractometer. So the way this is currently used in our shop is we like to just make sure that we haven't accidentally overboiled the soup, right? We haven't concentrated it down too much because then the soup is going to taste very intense.

and it's gonna be really rich on the pout in a way that's kind of unpleasant. We wanna make sure that we have done the right extraction, yes, but we also wanna make sure that the soup is pleasant to drink down to the last spoonful. So we measure the viscosity of it with a refractometer, and that allows us to identify we need to thin it out, if we need to make sure that's at the right level, basically.

Now let's talk about hydration, noodle hydration.

So ramen noodles are kind of interesting in that they're not a very like wet dough. And so that means that small adjustments in the amount of water that you add to the noodle can have very large dramatic effects on the final product. Even one percentage point change in terms of hydration makes a completely different noodle. So we have to measure these things very precisely when we make noodles. And at Ako's Ramen, we make all the noodles. We don't buy any. We have four different noodles in current rotation right now. So we need to be precise.

Speaker 1 (10:47.214)
We need to be very precise about what is going to happen. So the way to measure hydration is just scaling everything out. We weigh everything for the noodle making process, but it does get kind of scientific because we're talking like sometimes like 10, 15 grams for an entire batch of noodles.

Gosh. Wow. So, and then you've got this, you actually measure the air quality in the restaurant or tell me about that. have that.

We measure the temperature and we measure the humidity of the restaurant every time we make noodles. Why? Yes, good question. So two reasons. One, as I mentioned, ramen noodle dough is low in water content, so it tends to dry out quickly in particularly dry months. And we need to know how dry it is. Otherwise, it's going to affect how easy the dough is to work with. If there's not enough air in the surrounding environment, the dough, which is already dry, will dry out too quickly.

and it will not behave in the same way that we want it to. So we need to adjust the recipe based on that. The second reason fundamentally is flour itself can hold onto as much as 1 % of its own weight in excess water just trapped in the air in suspension. So on a particularly humid day, we need to make sure that the flour is not over hydrated. We need to reduce how much water we add to the dough to avoid problems with

it becoming too sticky or too slimy. And we only know this if we check the humidity of the air. It's the only way we can check this. I don't have like a tool that I can plug into flour and like check its humidity. That would be crazy. I would probably buy it though.

Speaker 2 (12:21.774)
going to say, in the short time I've gotten to know you, think you would purchase that. So all of this goes into this bowl of ramen that you are serving. I understand that the sheets of dough that you make in one day would actually stretch longer than a football field. I read that. Is that true?

Probably true, yeah, because, yeah, we make a lot of dough. Yes, you do.

That's crazy. tell me how much time it takes to make everything, not just the noodles, but how much time does it take? I want to appreciate that bowl that you're serving me. How much time was involved in that bowl of ramen?

Yeah, I it's, I would actually say in the context of things, our ramen does not take as much time as another from scratch ramen's place. You know, we're doing a very clear delicate chicken soup predominantly. That soup takes about seven hours. So we start that at around 7 a.m. and it will finish at one or two o'clock depending upon kind of what's available.

Does that include the noodles though?

Speaker 1 (13:23.95)
That's just the soup. Just the soup. So ramen is five components, right? You think about ramen in its context of five components. The first is that soup. That soup's gonna take seven hours, but a lot of it's kind of idle cooking time. The thing that's difficult is we also have to do noodles and noodles are very hands-on. There's no like, I just said it and forget it thing. Noodles is a full-time job. For the first six months of the restaurant, I was the only one making noodles and it was my only job besides working on the line because it would take, you know, we can do about

100 portions in two hours. So we're selling anywhere from 150 to 200 bowls a day. So this becomes a process of like two to four hours of just hands-on work to make the noodles every single day. And it depends on which noodles we're making. Some are more complicated than others. So all in all, it's hard to say how much time it takes each day. It takes a lot of time though. A lot of people working very diligently to make it happen.

And we'll be right back.

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Speaker 1 (15:22.754)
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Speaker 1 (15:38.914)
today.

Speaker 2 (15:46.668)
I feel like after your description, I need to be paying $150 for a bowl of your, your own. Okay. So you have four different types. Is that correct?

We actually have five because we four kind of main staples and then we have like a fifth special that we

So what's the most popular traditional one? What's the name of that?

Hands down, the namesake bowl of the Aka Hoshi Niso. That's the most popular.

Okay, can you help me visualize and help our listeners visualize what is in that bowl? I want you to build that bowl for me.

Speaker 1 (16:18.766)
Sure. So the build on that bowl is very akin to how ramen is made in Sapporo, Hokkaido. You know, it's the flavor that I was chasing that I discussed kind of at the top of this podcast. starts with a specific noodle that we've designed exclusively for that dish, the Sapporo noodle, as we call it. That noodle is cooked for exactly two minutes and then placed in the bottom of a bowl with the aroma oil that we made earlier.

that aroma oil is made from lard and it's been infused with onion, garlic and ginger. So we put those two in the bottom of the bowl. While that's happening, there's a wok on the side that we start heating with a little bit more lard. And we saute very aggressively bean sprouts in that wok. Like they're blowing up. There's flames everywhere. It's a very hot wok. I think the wok's like 140,000 BTUs or something crazy like that. We then add something called, we add the tar, the seasoning, which is a

blend of different misos and aromatics. We add that to the wok and we actually let it sear in the wok, kind of develop and caramelize flavor before adding the soup to that wok and whisking it all together to kind of combine the miso and the bean sprouts and all that deliciousness. And we pour that over the noodles that have been sitting in the bowl. So you, it's a little different from most ramen approaches, but this is the way that it is done in Hokkaido where you do things in a wok and you kind of build that flavor in that wok first before transferring it over the noodle.

From there, we top it pretty austerely. We add a couple pieces of pork belly, we add some bamboo shoots, and we add some very thinly sliced green onions. And that's the fundamental crux of the bowl. There's nothing else that goes on the bowl. I want people to understand the complexity of the soup and the complexity of the noodle, and I want that dish to really showcase those components. Because ultimately, that's what ramen to me is. It is a noodle soup dish. So I want people to experience that the most. You can add an egg if you'd like. I don't.

We usually add an egg. Not to that Yeah. In general, I mean, I really like eggs, but I just feel like a ramen bowl is just ramen. It's delicious. It's about the noodles in the soup, you know.

Speaker 2 (18:24.174)
Um, are there ever days where you finished a batch and you're like, this is just not what I want as far as how it turns out.

Yes, but I always have little tricks up my sleeve to correct it. You know what I mean? And it's gonna depend on what the problem is. I think that every chef who's ever opened a restaurant knows that every problem under the sun will emerge at some point. you know, I've never been in a position where I didn't feel like we could correct it. In the handful of instances where that has happened, we just...

that that dish is not on the menu anymore for the day. We'll correct it the next day. I haven't gotten to the point where it's like close the restaurant, everything is bad, luckily. But I've definitely had things where I've needed to correct.

Yeah. And I have to ask you, did you have any idea this was going to explode as it has? Because I mean, Bon Appetit voted you one of the best new restaurants in 2024. Word has spread like wildfire. People are standing in line to get in. This has exceeded your expectations.

would definitely say it exceeded my expectations. mean, candidly, I don't think I would have opened a restaurant if I didn't think there was this strong possibility of its success. having since done 55 of those events and them all being very popular, all being, if not sold out, very quickly sold out, very full, I just knew that there was demand for the kind of ramen that I was making. People wanted to eat the ramen. And I recognized I could make a living doing that. So I opened the restaurant thinking,

Speaker 1 (19:59.662)
I think this is gonna work, but you never know. I'll tell you, I opened the restaurant the day after Thanksgiving last year. So Black Friday was our first full day and it was the worst Thanksgiving of my life because I was so anxious about what was gonna happen. But you know, things work out, so.

So when you're not eating ramen and when you're not working, what's your go-to restaurant in Chicago?

Honestly, right now it's probably Daisy's. I know they're around the corner from my shop, but I feel like I have been there more than any other restaurant this year, in part because of proximity, but also because I think they just do everything really well. Their breakfast program is amazing and they have an incredible baking program. They have great sandwiches for lunch and dinner. They have this amazing pasta program with really phenomenal, phenomenal local ingredients. I love Daisy's.

consistently across the board that restaurant is just awesome and it's it's a little more expensive but it's still in that like approachable lane of like I can just grab a sandwich and it's amazing do you know what mean? Oh absolutely. It really hits the mark for me.

delicious. I'm curious now that you are celebrating one year. What are your plans for the future? Any possibilities you might open another spot? What are you thinking?

Speaker 1 (21:11.758)
Yeah, I get asked this question all the time. And I wish I could tell you like, yeah, I've got like a five year plan, but I didn't even think that we would get this far. Do you know what I mean? Like, I guess like I couldn't see past two feet in front of me when we opened the restaurant. I was just nose down, looking down, getting things done. We're at year one now and I think things have gone very well and I don't see any signs of us slowing down. So I'm optimistic for the future, but I don't really know what the future is gonna be. I just am enjoying the ride right now.

having a good time making ramen and having a team of people who like to make ramen too.

I'm so glad to hear that. so finally, let everybody know how they can actually get a reservation at the restaurant. Please give us a little secret here.

Here's the secret. We release reservations up to five weeks in advance on OpenTable at noon every Monday. And I'm literally pressing a button to do it. So trust me, it's happening. I'm there. So at noon, if you are on the page, noon, Monday, OpenTable, there will be new reservations that drop. And usually those are available for most of the day. So if you are able to get there around the time that those reservations drop, you can get a reservation.

it will require a little bit of planning, will require a little bit of dedication. You have to be willing to plan out more than a couple of days, but they are there. The second thing I really wanna be clear on, and I think there also is a misconception about this is we are a ramen shop. So we honor the time tested tradition of ramen shops, which is no reservations. And that half of the restaurant is just for walk-ins. So if you ever feel like, I couldn't get in, come by the restaurant. There's a good chance we can see you in less than 15 minutes. That's all I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (22:47.03)
You're saying, okay, well, it's been so much fun talking to you. If you were to describe yourself and what you're doing and what you want people to walk away with, what would that be? Final words.

That's a tough one. I don't know. I hope people will understand the passion and care that goes into everything that we make and that they can see that ramen, even though it's cheap, can be made with a level of craft and dedication and respect. That's what I hope people will see when they try our food.

And I think after this, lot of people, they listen,

Thank you, I appreciate the time.

This podcast is produced by Jane Stephens, audio engineering and original music by Donnie Cutting, social media and promotions Magali Blasdell.