How Men-Eiji Trains Its Team to Walk Tourists Through the Broth

Sitting at the counter of a Sapporo ramen shop, a first-time visitor often faces a bowl of opaque, layered liquid that refuses to behave like any soup they have eaten before. The broth swims with collagen, fish essence, and pork fat, and the colour shifts from bone-white at the rim to a deep amber where the tare settles at the bottom. For locals, this complexity is just Tuesday. For a tourist who flew in from Sydney and is reading the menu in fuzzy translation, it can feel intimidating.

Men-Eiji has spent years turning that moment into a teachable one. The team does not assume the customer already understands gyokai-tonkotsu, the seafood-and-pork hybrid that defines the flagship Hiragishi BASE location. Instead, they treat every bowl as a short conversation, and the staff have been drilled on how to lead that conversation so it feels relaxed, accurate, and welcoming. It is the kind of front-of-house discipline more often associated with Melbourne's serious coffee bars than with a Hokkaido noodle counter, but it works.

The approach matters because Men-Eiji sits comfortably in the top tier of regional ramen recognition. The brand holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and founder Jun Furukawa's career has carried the broth through international pop-ups and high-profile collaborations that have shaped how travellers around the world now think about Sapporo ramen. Tourists arrive with expectations they have read about, and the staff are the ones who decide whether those expectations get explained well enough to stick.

What follows is a look at how the training actually runs on the ground, how the team handles different types of visitors, and why Australians in particular tend to leave the counter with a much fuller sense of what they just ate. The methods are not secret, but they are unusually deliberate for a ramen shop of this scale.

Building a Shared Vocabulary Around Umami

Every staff member at Men-Eiji goes through a tasting rotation before they are allowed to talk to diners about the broth. They taste the gyokai-tonkotsu at Hiragishi BASE in the morning, then again at lunch and dinner, across multiple batches. The point is not to memorise flavour notes but to calibrate what the broth actually tastes like on any given shift, since weather, supplier, and simmer length all move the profile slightly.

Once that baseline is set, the team learns a shared language they can deploy quickly. Instead of saying "it is umami," which to most Australians reads as a vague Instagram word, they are trained to say things like "it has a mineral edge from the niboshi," or "the pork bone simmer gives it that milky-bacon finish." The goal is to translate the broth into words a non-Japanese diner can latch onto without dumbing the broth down.

The vocabulary drills also lean on analogy. Staff are taught to compare the body of the broth to something a Western palate already knows, a slow-cooked beef consommé for depth, or even the layered mouthfeel of a flat white for creaminess, since many arrive from Brisbane or Brisbane already comfortable with that drink's texture. The trick is that the analogy is only ever a stepping stone, never the destination.

Reading the Counter Before the First Sip

A key part of Men-Eiji's staff training is what trainers refer to as the first-six-seconds rule. In those seconds, the team is trained to read how a tourist approaches the bowl, whether they pick up the spoon lifting it like a Western soup spoon, or whether they tilt the bowl as a Japanese diner would. The grip, the hesitation, the way they glance at neighbouring bowls: all of it feeds into how the staff member opens the explanation.

If the visitor looks uncertain, the team has been trained to step in early with a short, friendly script. Something along the lines of "this one is a seafood-and-pork broth, so the flavour is deeper than what you might know from a pork-only ramen. Try the broth first before the noodles, that is how we eat it here." The script is short on purpose, since Australians tend to react well to conversational directness and poorly to long lectures.

If the visitor looks like a ramen obsessive, the team takes a different route. They skip the basics and jump into specifics: which batch, which tare ratio, what the simmering temperature looks like in the pot that day. The training emphasises that the same bowl of soup gets two completely different explanations depending on who is sitting in front of it.

How Cultural Backgrounds Quiet the Tourist

Australians who travel through Japan tend to be unusually food-curious, but they also come with a few habits that the Men-Eiji team is trained to spot. Many are comfortable with long, slow meals and short, sharp service; they are used to a flat white arriving in three minutes at a Melbourne laneway cafe, and they bring that same brisk expectation to a Hokkaido counter. The team has learned not to mistake that briskness for impatience.

There are also accents and idioms to listen for. A "yeah nah yeah" from a Melburnian tells the staff that the diner is open but unsure, and the team is taught to keep the explanation gentle and descriptive. A confident "no worries, go for it" usually signals that the visitor is happy to experiment, so the staff widens the explanation into flavour pairings and topping suggestions.

The team is also trained to recognise the reverse: visitors from regional towns or from places with smaller Japanese food scenes, who may never have eaten ramen that was not a packaged instant noodle. For them, the explanation may need to start with what tonkotsu actually is, and the staff are coached not to make that beginner's explanation feel patronising. Tone matters more than vocabulary.

The Two-Broth Universe Across the Two Counters

Men-Eiji runs two distinct Sapporo locations, and the staff are trained to know both broths well enough to explain them on the fly. Hiragishi BASE centres on the rich gyokai-tonkotsu that has become the brand's signature, while Duck Ramen EIJI down the street trades on a lighter, duck-forward shoyu that pulls in a different audience of regulars and curious visitors. Knowing the difference is not optional for the front-of-house team.

When a guest asks why the duck broth tastes cleaner, the staff are taught to walk them through the simmering window, the fat cap, and the way duck bones behave differently under heat than pork. A useful part of the training is to let them taste a small cup of broth neat, before any tare or seasoning has been added, so they can read the base flavour on its own.

A practical resource for visitors who want to read ahead is the guide to the best ramen bowls for first timers at men eiji, which lays out the recommended starting point for each broth. Staff will often direct guests to it on a tablet during slower shifts, since it gives the diner agency over how deep they want to go.

Tools the Team Practises With

Men-Eiji's staff training leans heavily on repetition, but it is not just tasting the broth over and over. The team runs weekly role-play sessions where a senior staff member plays a difficult customer and the trainee has to walk them through the bowl. The senior might pretend to be a tourist who speaks only English, or who claims to dislike fish, or who insists they want "the most authentic" thing on the menu. Each scenario tests a different muscle.

The team is also trained on visual cues. They learn to point out the foam on top of the gyokai-tonkotsu, which signals aeration and a fresh pour, and to explain why that foam should be scooped into the first sip rather than blown off. They also learn to read the tare ring at the bottom of the bowl, which tells the diner how much soy has been layered into the broth. Both details are tiny, but they are the ones tourists remember most.

A separate drill focuses on tone. Staff are coached to drop their voice half a register when explaining the broth, since a quieter explanation feels more intimate and less like a sales pitch. Australian visitors in particular respond well to this softer delivery, because it mirrors the way a thoughtful barista at a Melbourne specialty cafe walks a customer through a single-origin pour-over without lecturing them. The parallel is not accidental.

The Pop-Up Circuit as a Training Ground

One of the more unusual parts of Men-Eiji's training is the international pop-up rotation. Jun Furukawa has taken the brand on the road several times, and selected staff travel with him to cities including Sydney, Singapore, and London. The pop-ups are not just marketing; they double as field schools. Staff who have served gyokai-tonkotsu in a Surry Hills warehouse know how it lands with diners who have never tasted real Japanese ramen, and they bring that experience back to the Sapporo counters.

The pop-up setting also forces the team to explain the broth without the safety net of a Japanese audience nodding along. In Sydney especially, the staff are grilled by diners who already know the city's ramen scene well, including comparisons to high-end Sydney operators. The training value of those conversations is enormous: the staff return to Hokkaido with a sharper sense of how the broth reads to outsiders, and they refine their explanations accordingly.

When visitors at Duck Ramen EIJI ask about the toppings and what separates them from competitors, staff point curious diners to a deeper piece on what makes duck ramen eiji's toppings unique among sapporo ramen shops, which gives the kitchen side of the story while the staff handles the broth side in person.

How the Approach Compares to Other Sapporo Shops

Not every Sapporo ramen counter invests this much in staff training, and the difference shows in how tourists experience the city. The bigger chains tend to run on speed and muscle memory, the long-running neighbourhood shops tend to rely on regulars who already know the drill, and the new wave of specialty counters sits closer to Men-Eiji's model but rarely with the same level of pop-up seasoning. The contrast is most visible in the explanation itself: how much of it is offered, when, and in what tone.

The team at Men-Eiji has been deliberately drilled to take the middle path between the quick-service chain model and the silent-craft approach of some old-school shops. They speak enough to make a tourist feel guided, but not so much that the diner feels rushed or lectured. It is a calibrated rhythm that takes weeks of role-play to settle in, and it shares a kinship with the kind of front-of-house refinement practised at serious hospitality houses like Souk Restaurant, where staff are taught to slow the experience down rather than rush it.

Element	Hiragishi BASE	Duck Ramen EIJI	Typical Sapporo Shop
Broth focus	Gyokai-tonkotsu, seafood-led	Duck shoyu, lighter body	Tonkotsu, pork-only
Default opener to tourists	Short, two-sentence intro	Aroma-led, lets broth speak first	Often no opener
Tasting drills	Heavy, weekly rotation	Daily, tare-focused	On-the-job, less formal
Pop-up trained staff	Several on each shift	At least one per shift	Rare
Bib Gourmand recognition	Yes	Yes (shared)	Not common
English-language menu clarity	High	High	Variable
Visual broth cues taught	Foam and colour	Fat cap and tare ring	Often skipped

The differences are real. The Hiragishi BASE counter leans on a structured, repeatable introduction, while Duck Ramen EIJI lets the duck broth's aroma do more of the talking. A typical Sapporo shop will still serve a great bowl, but the staff usually have less time and fewer drills behind the explanation.

If you are planning a trip through Hokkaido and want to taste the broth in the way the team intends it to be tasted, book a counter seat rather than a table, and arrive with time to ask at least one question. The staff have been trained for exactly that moment, and they will walk you through the bowl in a way that makes the whole meal make sense. Step up to the counter, ask which simmer the broth is from that day, how the tare ratio has shifted, and what the team recommends as a first topping if you are new to gyokai-tonkotsu. Take the explanation home with you, and the next bowl of ramen you eat, whether in Tokyo or back in Surry Hills, will taste a little different.