Right on the top floor of Kyoto station is a food court dedicated to the thinner of Japanese noodles - the ramen. Being a lover of all foods with noodles in them, I was quite looking forward to trying this, and ordering a ramen dish here is almost as fun as eating it.

All the restaurants here have glazed representations of the food they serve in the window, like a 3D menu of sorts. This is ideal for tourist who don’t speak a word of Japanese as you tell the waitress what you want by just pointing to it.

Ordering food here takes it one step further - all the dishes are numbered and before you even enter the restaurant, you tap in the number of the dish you want into an adjacent ticket machine. As you go through the door, the tickets you were issued to the waitress and five minutes later… lovely hot noodles!

The dishes themselves are tasty - you get plenty of fine ramen noodles in a fish-based soup broth, with whatever else you want in it including sliced roast pork, seafood, chicken etc… with a bowl of sticky rice and Japanese pickles. It sounds simple, but it tastes fantastic.