Review of Tampopo / タンポポ, directed by Juzo Itami

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

About a year ago (at the time of typing this) I quit my job as a professional film critic to explore what was out there in the world when it came to publishing about the movies and books I wanted to see, not just what was popular in the moment. Digital media and working within it can be fun and all, but it can be grinding when you’re just chasing after all the latest trends and clicks for SEO.

I started this blog four years ago, during the pandemic, but never really took it seriously beyond the occasional post here and there about what I was up to. In 2023 I began to realize the impact this blog was having on me, and other people were reaching out about reading it, so I expanded. Once I quit my job, I decided to focus on the blog more while job hunting, as I do make a few pennies here and there from the display ads on the screen.

Anyways, when I was unemployed for an unexpected stretch of time late 2024 and into 2025, I did a financial audit of my life and realized I could take some time off. It might’ve screwed me over a little because by the time I began job hunting the world was free falling onto an economic crisis, but at the time I thought it was a great idea and focused on my blog and writing pursuits.

That said, I acquired a Criterion subscription briefly, for about three months, and cancelled it when I was running out of fun money for a random subscription I wasn’t getting a ton of use out of. But because I cancelled it, I knew I wanted to watch Tampopo, which ended up being one of the last movies I wanted to see on there. It was also something I’d been meaning to watch for a long while, but never got around to until now.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to keep going on and on in the introduction, especially when I know it’s not the main event on a blog post.

With the help of some regular guys who stop in, a woman finds her ramen shop turning around business-wise.

This is a movie that takes place across several vignettes. Some, like the man and his girlfriend using food as a bizarre form of erotica, or the businessmen trying to learn how to eat Western food, are not relevant as much to the main plot as one would think. Others connect in unexpected ways, but all revolve around food and the ritual of eating it. We see snippets of these moments throughout the movie, which are fun, but not entirely significant to the main storyline.

Anyways, the main plot in the movie is about a woman who owns a ramen shop that’s not doing too well. When two truck drivers stop in for some ramen one night, they watch as a young boy is beaten up. Turns out this kid is the son of the ramen shop’s owner, and when the drivers watch another customer harass her, they can’t help but to intervene.

They try and stop that customer from continuing to harass her, but when things get physical, they find themselves outnumbered by this man and his buddies. Goro, the older driver of the two, is knocked out and wakes up in the owner’s (Tampopo’s) home, where she makes them breakfast before her kid has to go to school.

She asks them what they think about her ramen, and they tell her that they think it doesn’t have a ton of personality to stand out on its own as a dish. She takes their advice to heart and requests them to be her teachers in the art of ramen making, and they decide to try and help her revive her business and become somewhere worth remembering. First, they do competitor research, and Tampopo struggles to fix the basic aspect of ramen: the broth.

Goro decides to visit an old man in a homeless camp, who turns out to be the master of making ramen broths. He is their first recruit; the second is a guy who starts choking in a restaurant and they save. The guy turns out to have connections, and his driver knows the art of noodles. From there, and the competitor research, Tampopo starts building up the master ramen.

The next step is to change the name of the restaurant to Tampopo. However, troubles brews when the customer from before returns and asks Goro to fight again. They go at each other, but it ends in a draw. He offers his contracting skills to build up the shop’s interior design, and he also offers some advice to Tampopo about her ramen. After adding that last bit of magic to her ramen, the five men come together to try the ramen once again.

Everyone finishes their bowls, meaning Tampopo has finally created the perfect ramen. With their job finished here, the men begin leaving as new customers enter to eat the ramen, with the fate of the shop from this point out up to interpretation.

Overall Thoughts

I think this is such a great movie to watch. It’s got that bizarre element of Japanese creativity with those snippets/vignettes I mentioned are scattered throughout the movie. From two people kissing and passing an oyster between each other to the lovers and their food erotica, they’re certainly memorable.

The main storyline is a classic success one and about the people you meet along the way of getting through a journey, and I wasn’t mad at it despite some of its more prominent cliches. I find that this movie is quirky and charming at the end of the day, and I think I would return to it again.

There’s a reason why it’s beloved by so many, so if you want to watch a solid movie on a Friday night and have access to this one, I suggest picking it up and giving it a chance! I genuinely enjoyed it a lot.

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