My boyfriend and I thought we found the Japanese equivalent of a New Jersey diner: an all-male clientele, some tucked into a suit and tie, others strapped into a messenger bag,  and everyone hunched over rice bowls, with lit cigarettes waiting for them in between bites. The chef, who doubles as the server, marches from the kitchen to the counter, offering no unsolicited advice. No chatting. No bullshitting.

We sit at the counter. And wait. The server/chef sees us but doesn't acknowledge us. We watch him bring food to others, but he barely glances our way. It's Day 4 for us in Japan, and we've become accustomed to not communicating easily in restaurants.

I'm trying not to exaggerate here, but I somehow remember waiting a full five minutes — five minutes is long at this quick-stop — before our breakthrough.

A new customer walks in. He doesn't sit right away. Instead, he walks directly to a machine in the back. A machine we never even noticed. It has buttons, like a vending machine, but there's no food inside. It's similar to the touch screen I remember at the McDonald's at American University a few years back.

The new customer swiftly pushes buttons, slides coins inside and takes his receipt. He sits and the server/chef walks over to collect his printed order and returns to the kitchen.

Embarrassed, we walk to the machine. And stare. Lots of buttons. No English. Lots of pictures.

We can identify some of the food pictured, such as eggs — both yolk-exposed and shelled — in bowls. But we can only guess what kind of animal makes up those thin, long, and scraggly edged pieces of meat. Like McDonald's, the machine offers combo-meals. So we go for it, knowing we'll be given plenty of food, even if we don't know what everything is. Again, it's something we've become used to.

We sit down in our same seats. But now the chef walks right over, almost in relief, and takes our ticket.

Returning quickly with broth (every meal is served with a variation of a fishy sea broth!) and a small salad, our anxiety over the machine dissolves.  But wait! There's six different squeeze bottles in front of us. What to use for the salad?

I motion to the chef, point to the salad, then to the array of liquids, and back to the salad, finally raising my shoulders while tilting my head sideways. He squirts the dressing on the cabbage for me, and realizes that, aside from being our waiter and cook, he must also act as our babysitter.

While I still can't believe that no one in this small, casual place pointed us to the machine while we just sat there, the broth put me to ease. And then I thought: Why can't broth automatically come with my bagel, egg and cheese order back home?

Within five minutes the chef/server/babysitter arrives with our food: a large bowl of white rice, caressed with prosciutto-thin beef, both gnarly and deliciously edged with globs of white fat. That bowl makes sense. The small glass bowl, containing a shelled egg, does not.

The chef, forgetting his unspoken babysitting duties, is only a few feet away, but already in the kitchen.  I motion for him to come back. More pointing and raised shoulders: What do I do with that darn egg? (It was early, you know.)

He cracks the egg in the bowl, whizzes it around with chopsticks and motions for it to be poured over the rice. I smile wide, whisking the egg for another second and swirling it over the rice. The egg melts into the meat, adhering it to the steamy rice. Maneuvering the chopsticks over top and underneath, I incorporate the saucy egg around every grain of rice. Into every crevice of fat. The chopsticks feel heavy as I slide as much rice and meat as possible into my mouth.

But now, only four months later, I can't remember if the beef tasted particularly salty that morning. I can only remember feeling slightly helpless in an English-less land. And how all those buttons overwhelmed me at first, like that 14-hour flight, but how I soon realized it wasn't all that miserable. I also remember how we figured it out. How food makes everything better. Especially in Japan.

Editor's note: Ren's Ramen's closing date has been pushed back to Sept. 3.

Love it or hate it, David Chang’s ramen has to be the most fussed-over bowl of soup in the entire goddamn U.S. of A. The chef devoted more than 15 pages to building the perfect ramen in his debut cookbook, Momofuku, right down to the homemade alkaline noodles. I sampled Chang’s soup the last time I was in New York, and it’s breathtaking in its depth, flavor, and unadulterated porkiness. D.C. has no ramen shop with a chef of Chang’s celebrity stature, let alone his obsession with Japanese tradition—or at least the next tastiest thing to Japanese tradition. But Ren’s Ramen in Bethesda is a superb stand-in when you have a jones for the stuff. Owners Yoko and Eiji Nakamura serve up Sapporo-style ramen that digs on swine every bit as much as Chang’s version. Their pork-based broth, whether miso- or soy-flavored, comes loaded with succulent roast pork, lengths of crunchy bean sprouts, ringlets of chopped scallions, little clumps of ground beef, a flat of seaweed, and thin strips of shinachiku, otherwise known as preserved bamboo shoots. Don’t be satisfied with this bounty in a bowl, though: Make sure to add a seasoned egg, which acts as a big time-release capsule, gently unburdening its rich, partially cooked yolk into your soup. Go for the fatty pork, too. The geological slabs alternate between layers of flesh and fat, so gooey and rich they’re like salted pig candy. You can also order a vegetarian version of Ren’s ramen, but, really, why bother?

6931 Arlington Road, Bethesda (301) 693-0806

Near the bottom of the menu that hovers over the cash register at Toan, there's a small-but-telling sentence. It states that the Silver Spring noodle house does not use MSG in its soups. To say I was startled would be an understatement.

"You really don't use MSG?" I asked the young man behind the counter.

When he said no, I raised a question about standard practices at pho parlors: "Don't most pho shops use MSG?"

"Yes," he said, "but that's why our soup is darker than other places'."

"How long do you simmer the broth?" I asked.

"We simmer for almost 24 hours," he responded. The cooks also take extra care to maintain the fat layer atop the simmering pho, he added, so that the soup doesn't lose heat or flavor. He even mentioned that Toan offers customers the option of ordering a side of spring onions in melted fat (picture below), for those who like to bolster the flavor of their pho. Vietnamese apparently love their noodle soup with added fat.

Sold!

The pho at Toan goes down like liquid foie gras. Or pate soup. Or rendered beef marrow. You get the idea: The broth is slippery rich. It's so rich, flavorful, and full bodied, in fact, that I feel very little need to doctor the broth with Sriracha sauce and hoisin.

It's a good thing I'm so taken with the broth. The proteins I requested — rare eye of round, fatty brisket, and soft tendon — are in short supply in my large serving of pho ($7.35; $6.45 for small). Once I popped the few slices of beef into my mouth, I was left with a dense wad of soft rice noodles.

While I wanted more beef in my pho, I still found plenty of other pleasures in that bowl. First among equals was the interplay between the silken noodles and the crunchy sprouts, a contrast of textures that, for reasons I couldn't ascertain, was more pronounced in this pho. It was a soft crunch that I returned to again and again, as fascinated by the interplay as a baby with a shiny object.

On my way out the door, I asked the man behind the register what Toan meant. Without missing a beat, he said it was Vietnamese for "perfect." I'm not sure about the validity of his translation, based on some quick searches I conducted, but I will say this about Toan's pho broth: It comes pretty close to perfection.

The miso ramen at Ren's Ramen in Bethesda

Ramen may be a Chinese import, but Japan has made the noodle all its own. The pleasures of eating true ramen soup are almost too many to catalog: the salty savory broth, the richness of the partially cooked yolk (should you add the seasoned, soft-boiled nugget), the eggy chew of the noodle, the roasted meatiness of the pork, the essential crunch of the sprouts. And that doesn't even include the butter candy known as pork belly, for those who select the fatty add-on.

Then there's the sheer pleasure of sucking down the noodles themselves. It's one of the few times that you get to loudly and enthusiastically slurp at the table. Consider this passage from Shizuo Tsuji's book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art:

Like sipping piping hot Japanese soup, to really enjoy noodles, one must imbibe them fast with a cooling intake of breath. To do this involves a decided sucking sound, which easily deteriorates into a slurp. But no one minds in Japan, since the whole point of noodles is to eat them fast while they are very hot. Noodles are just too hot to eat in puckered silence, so you have to open your mouth a bit wider than necessary to accommodate the slippery pasta and suck in with a fair amount of gusto. For a Westerner, picking up the knack of noodle-eating may depend on how quickly he or she can abandon the taboo on noise in eating. I know how hard it is for those trained to eat noiselessly. My own daughter finds it almost impossible to eat noodles properly, having been trained at an English boarding school. But eating noodles too quietly can be mistaken in Japan for a lack of enjoyment of this food.

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

This pho parlor in the Eden Center turns out stellar noodle soups. My most recent order came swimming with thin slices of richly fatty brisket, crunchy/chewy tripe, perfumed beef broth, and a garnish plate brimming with sliced jalapeños, Thai basil, bean sprouts, and even that rare saw-toothed leaf, culantro. Pho Saigon also pays attention to its noodles; they’re soft, supple, and so easy to slurp. This tiny shop, overstuffed with trinkets and pictures and boxes of kitchen supplies near the bathroom, would remind you of a crowded Vietnamese street stall if not for the overhead flat-screen TV set to the Speed Network, where racing school buses provide a little redneck comfort. Yep, you get a melting pot here along with your noodle soup.

Pho Saigon, 6795 Wilson Blvd., Falls Church, (703) 677-0523

The sectioned container includes a bowl of homemade beef broth, parboiled rice noodles, raw slices of prime eye of round, sprouts, jalapeno slices, raw red and Spanish onion rings, a small container of Sriracha and hoisin sauce, a wedge of lime, and leaves of cilantro, mint, and Thai basil. Once you get the package home, you remove the small bowl of broth and microwave it for a few minutes. While it's nuking, you arrange your preferred ingredients at the bottom of the larger section of the plastic container and then dump the hot broth over them.

Voila, pho!

James, a former accountant turned chef, had been wanting to add pho to the deli menu for months now, but it required the right packaging and the right flavors before she could get the green light from Wagshal's owner William Fuchs Jr. It's been available for about four weeks now, James says.

To build her pho broth, James leans on the superior ingredients available at Wagshal's Market, which sells prime, dry-aged beef. She uses about three pounds of brisket as well as six pounds of marrow, neck, and oxtail bones to prepare her broth. To that mixture, she adds ginger, onions, star anise, sugar, hoisin sauce, cinnamon sticks, fish sauce, and rice vinegar.

The resulting stock, I tell James, is decidedly sweeter than the liquids I'm accustomed to at my preferred pho parlors. Customers, she responds, should balance out the sweetness by applying appropriate amounts of Sriracha and lime juice, which should then give them the four flavors characteristic to Vietnamese cooking: sweet, sour, spicy, and bitter.

If my broth never achieved that balance — at least on this trial run, which leaned toward the sweet side even with enhancements — I chalked it up to my particular palate and the flavors I prefer in my pho. I like my pho to channel rich beef flavor, with small nuanced hints of, say, star anise or cardamom or ginger. I don't want sweet beef.

Still, I have to say, even with the frontal assault of sugar and cinnamon, the beef flavor comes through well enough in James' pho. It's assisted, of course, by the raw slices of prime eye of round, which may be the single best beef I've ever had in a bowl of pho. As the slices slowly cooked in the hot broth, they released more flavor into the liquid, while providing an rich, chewy element on their own.

If I had to gripe about one other element, it would be the rice noodles, which I found too thick and too al dente to offer that slick, slurpy experience that I love about pho. These were chewy noodles. There were also too few noodles to pair with the generous amount of broth provided in this bargain-priced package of pho. I'd happily pay a buck more than the $5.99 sticker price for an extra handful of noodles, especially if they were a little softer and a little thinner.

But I really like the concept of a Lunchables-style pho, and I enjoyed the process of putting it all together. What I found frustrating was that I couldn't manipulate the flavors to my satisfaction, like I can at my favorite parlors.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

As I had noted in an earlier item, D.C. is not exactly awash in noodle shops. So I was excited to visit Saigon Bistro this weekend, a handsome new Dupont Circle operation that's run, according to its Web site, by some folks who "recently emigrated to the U.S. after running an exquisite Vietnamese gourmet restaurant in their native homeland."

I wasn't as excited when I left the place.

I don't know what it is, but the few places that serve pho within the District's borders just can't compete with the operators in the suburban hinterlands. Maybe the economics just don't work well in the high-rent District. Maybe owners have to cut corners to make a buck on a soup that no one—and I mean no one—will pay more than $10 for (unless, of course, Jose Andres turns it into some deconstructed dish at the minibar, with the rice noodles transformed into a powder, which you'd suck through a straw and chase with a beef gelatin cube and a demitasse of pureed Thai basil, jalapenos, and lime).

Whatever the reason, Saigon Bistro only confirms my bias against D.C. pho shops. I ordered No. 49, a "Special Beef Noodle Soup" with well-done brisket, rare beef, and tripe. The broth had a wan yellowish tint to it and barely registered on my internal beef-o-meter. Even the usual fragrances of pho—star anise, cloves, and cardamom—were so faint that you'd need a bloodhound to sniff them out. I typically resist the urge to load my pho with too much Sriracha or hoisin or fish sauce, lest I drown out the exquisitely perfumed broth. But in this case, the broth cried for condiments; without them, the sliced meats ferried very little flavor.

And just think: I paid $8.99 for this, which is a good two dollars more than I pay for pho in Maryland that's 10 times better.

It's long been a truism that if you wanted good (or even decent) pho or ramen or soba soups, you had to drive to the 'burbs, whether Falls Church or Rockville, to get your fill. But there's been encouraging news lately for Washingtonians who want to stay closer to home for noodle soups.

First up is Saigon Bistro, an inviting Vietnamese shop that recently opened in the old Fractured Prune spot on P Street NW off Dupont Circle.  According to the restaurant's Web site, it is owned by "Luna Howard, a native Washingtonian and entrepreneur, and her relatives, who recently emigrated to the U.S. after running an exquisite Vietnamese gourmet restaurant in their native homeland." Aside from the usual Vietnamese options, Saigon is serving up not only pho but also hu tieu and mi soups.

Next on the horizon appears to be Pho 14, a Vietnamese noodle shop on Park Road NW in Columbia Heights. But now comes the word, via the Washington Business Journal, that London-based Wagamama will open one of its pan-Asian noodle shops in the former Olsson's Books & Records location on Seventh Street NW in Penn Quarter. Wagamama is aiming for a 2010 opening.

Don't know about you, but I'm ready to start slurpin'.