Kumako Ramen on Jackson Street in Japantown has built a reputation as San Jose's most consistent tonkotsu bowl: cloudy pork-bone broth, housemade noodles and a soy-marinated egg.
Tonkotsu ramen, the pork-bone broth style from Fukuoka, arrived in the United States through Japanese-American communities on the West Coast in the 1980s. San Jose's Japantown, one of the oldest surviving Japanese-American communities in the country, adopted ramen as its everyday lunch format, with counters on Jackson Street that served tech workers and local residents alike. The tonkotsu style, with its rich, collagen-thick broth and straighter noodles, became the dominant Japantown style and set the flavour expectation for South Bay ramen.
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