“They turned my grief into a product,” Ren says flatly. She refuses to sell her own paste. Instead, she teaches workshops in refugee camps and indigenous communities: How to ferment what grows outside your door.
There is a smell that has begun to waft out of the trendy noodle shops of Berlin, the night markets of Taipei, and the pop-up supper clubs of Brooklyn. It is not the porky richness of tonkotsu nor the fiery sting of Sichuan peppercorn. It is the sharp, piney, almost medicinal scent of a forest after rain. It is the scent of juniper. juniper ren noodle
By Anya Sharma
“I wasn’t trying to make noodles,” she told me over a video call, her kitchen now a sterile lab in Kyoto. “I was trying to make a medicine for my own dead tongue.” “They turned my grief into a product,” Ren says flatly
And in an age of doom-scrolling and delivery apps, maybe that’s the only kind of comfort worth having. Before I left, I asked Hideo why he left the auto industry to make a noodle that most people find “difficult.” There is a smell that has begun to
Critics call her elitist. “A lukewarm noodle bowl for rich people who hate pleasure,” wrote one food blogger. Others argue the dish is fundamentally broken—that noodles are meant to be hot, that juniper belongs in gin, not dinner.