Tom Tom Ramen

Most ramen in Israel is something you eat sitting down, in one of a handful of restaurants. Tom Tom Ramen took the opposite route: it has no dining room at all. It is a delivery operation built around one chef’s near-academic obsession with a single dish — and it has become, by the reckoning of more than a few Israeli food critics, some of the best ramen in the country.

The chef is Tom Shamir. He visited Japan for the first time in 2019, tasted tsukemen — the “dipping” style, where firm noodles are served separate from a concentrated broth — and, as he puts it, something in him changed. Ramen stopped being a meal and became the centre of his life. He started cooking it at home during one of the COVID lockdowns, treating each component as a problem to be solved, and built a following by word of mouth before he had anything resembling a business. Time Out, Calcalist, Globes, Ynet, Maariv and Channel 13 have all since written about him; Time Out has named his bowl among the best ramen in Tel Aviv.

The menu is deliberately narrow — only ramen, with a personal spin on the styles Shamir met in Japan. The flagship is a tsukemen tonkotsu gyokai: a thick pork-and-fish dipping broth with thin handmade noodles. Around it sit a creamy pork miso ramen, Ippudo-inspired bowls (pork, chicken, or a vegetarian version pitched at beginners), a chicken tori paitan tsukemen, and maze soba — “dry” ramen with no soup, where a heavy sauce coats the noodles, offered in pork, chicken and a vegan version he calls the Japanese bolognese. He also sells handmade extras: chili oil, cabbage kimchi, and uncooked thick ramen noodles by weight. A spicy kimchi tonkotsu that runs a Japan-meets-Korea seam — graded from “flame” to “extinction event” — appears as a recurring special.

The delivery model is the unusual part. Orders are placed in advance through the website (now at ramen.co.il) and close at 13:00 the day before. Deliveries usually run Tuesdays and Thursdays, arriving between 11:00 and 16:00, with occasional evening rounds. The food turns up cold with the broth frozen — about 98 percent finished — so you reheat the soup and barely warm the noodles and toppings. It keeps refrigerated for up to 48 hours, which means a Thursday order can become a Friday or Saturday meal. Coverage centres on Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan and Givatayim, but rotating pickup points and pop-ups push much further — recent runs have reached Haifa, Kiryat Tiv’on, Kibbutz Ginosar and Jerusalem, and Shamir has staged collaborative pop-ups at restaurants including Pliim and Okinawa.

For the Japanese community in Israel and for Israelis who came home from Japan missing a proper bowl, Tom Tom Ramen fills a specific gap: serious, single-minded ramen with no compromises, delivered to wherever you happen to be. Updates and new delivery dates go out through WhatsApp groups organised by area; follow @tomshamir for specials and pop-up announcements.