Keizo Shimamoto’s ramen burger made the news before he sold a single one. In 2013, Shimamoto had become fixated on burgers with fried pucks of ramen for buns, which he encountered while studying ramen in Tokyo. After tinkering with the dish, he announced on his popular ramen review site Go Ramen (which he styles Go Ramen!) that he’d briefly bring it to Smorgasburg, New York’s then two-year-old food festival. It blew up online, earning Shimamoto an invite to appear on Good Morning America. By the time he made it to Smorgasburg later that day, the ramen burger was primed to become an icon.
“In my mind, I was just going to do this one-time event — that’s it,” he says.
He was wrong. Even though Shimamoto didn’t have the right grills or the proper setup, and it was raining that first day, the burger was a hit. It was a sight to behold with layers of scallions and arugula, and its secret shoyu glaze, packed between Sun Noodle ramen. Over 200 people lined up for just 150 burgers.
The next time he showed up at Smorgasburg, he sold 360 burgers in three hours, leading to a residency for the whole summer. From there, it just kept going. In 2014, Shimamoto leveraged the burger’s success into a New York City ramen shop, Ramen Co. By 2015, he was selling 1,200 to 1,500 burgers at each Smorgasburg appearance. In 2016 — the same year Red Robin launched its own rendition on the burger — Shimamoto opened Ramen Shack, where he served the ramen burger and much more.
“I wasn’t creating it to have it go viral. The ramen burger is kind of a mash up of me.”
“I wasn’t creating it to have it go viral,” Shimamoto says. He just wanted to put his own spin on a concept he enjoyed. The ramen burgers he ate in Japan were usually made with pork, but having grown up eating In-N-Out in Los Angeles, Shimamoto saw burgers as synonymous with beef. As a Japanese American, he adds, “The ramen burger is kind of a mash up of me.” The first time he nailed the sauce, he recalls, he jumped with joy in his living room.
When the ramen burger hit Smorgasburg that first rainy Saturday, he couldn’t have predicted the lines, let alone the rise of social media or the very idea of viral hype food. Instagram was still mostly a venue for collating and sharing experiences rather than the marketing and promotion tool it is today. The dining public was somewhat easier to entice. In that context, the ramen burger’s impact was surprising.
It brought about “this sheeple effect,” says Smorgasburg co-founder Eric Demby. “Trying it and obtaining it [became] the goal.”
Following the KFC Double Down (launched in 2010), internet sensations like the Turbaconducken, and the rise of the Cronut (released in May 2013), the food world was on the cusp of a major overhaul. Right when social media was starting to turn dining experiences into social currency, the ramen burger’s novelty created a fervor.
Whether he planned to or not, Shimamoto helped usher in a pessimistic new age of food, one in which producers developed formulas to guarantee social media success. The ramen burger became the poster child for a flood of mashups that had gone and would continue to go mainstream: the sushi burrito, the sushi pizza, the sushi burger, the spaghetti doughnut, the scallion pancake burrito, the Yorkshire burrito, birria ramen, birria pizza, and so on. Judging by what makes it to my feed today, these techniques still work. We might see fewer ramen burgers now, but we’re still living in the ramen burger’s world.
Before 2013, the rising stars at Smorgasburg were operations like Salvatore Bklyn ricotta, Mast Brothers chocolate, and Mighty Quinn’s barbecue. “A lot of vendors that came through were taking off,” Demby says.
The festival was about vendors getting creative with food that you couldn’t get anywhere else. In that sense, the ramen burger fit right in. Prior to its appearance, Smorgasburg didn’t have a burger vendor, Demby recalls; burgers were too commonplace. “And then the ramen burger came along and we were like, There’s our burger,” Demby says. “It’s not a burger burger.”
But Shimamoto’s work also represented a break. Most other vendors traded in the sincere-seeming foods of the artisanal, hipster moment. This was the era of “farm-to-table” dining and back-to-the-land authenticity, which, at times, could be precious to the point of parody. “There was this focus on how you made it,” Demby says. While Shimamoto invested the same sort of time and attention into his product, the ramen burger’s quality and flavor were almost beside the point for many consumers.
Mike Chau, one of the city’s original food Instagrammers, sees the ramen burger as a turning point; the burger’s success led to an “escalation” of people not only waiting in lines but also “getting food for the sake of posting about it,” he says. Instagram, which had launched in 2010 and hit its first 100 million users in 2013, was beginning a period of rapid growth. (Chau distinctly remembers the ramen burger’s first weekend, but with his wife days just away from giving birth, “the line was so long that we just gave up,” he says. If you live in NYC, you probably recognize that kid: Chau runs the popular account @foodbabyny.)
With its ability to draw customers primarily interested in posting online, the ramen burger quickly began to outshine its neighbors. “A lot of people came to Smorgasburg for the ramen burger and then they discovered the rest of Smorgasburg,” Demby says. Other vendors took notice. It became obvious that it was crucial to stand out from the competition, both in person and online. “People all started to look for their shot to make something like [the ramen burger],” Chau says. A few years later, the raindrop cake debuted at the festival.
The ramen burger changed Smorgasburg — and Smorgasburg changed food culture. As eating increasingly became an activity and an aesthetic promoted through social media, people began to chase culinary spectacle over substance outside of food festivals. Virality became a new way of engaging with food in nearly all contexts. Ruby Tandoh writes in her forthcoming book All Consuming that the rise of Instagram “allowed you to bypass thinking altogether and just look.”
The ramen burger’s formula for a viral food still holds true. Writer and pastry chef Tanya Bush recently theorized in i-D that the first step toward virality is manipulation (you give a familiar food a tantalizing new appearance) and the second hybridization (you mash it up with another food that people already know). Nail those two steps, as the ramen burger did, and you increase the likelihood of a dish that people will make an effort to seek out.
It may be cynical to paint purveyors as shrewd manipulators of the attention economy and diners as disloyal clout-chasers. But it’s the game.
No one is really fooled anymore. Viral food trends don’t seem as organic now, according to Allyson Reedy, author of The Phone Eats First Cookbook, a compilation of “social media’s best recipes” published earlier this year. Unlike 2013, when foods like the ramen burger could make the news basically unintentionally, viral food is now more clearly “a manipulation,” Reedy says. “It’s more strategic and intentional.”
Perhaps that’s why the ramen burger became so polarizing. Before the dish was even a year old, it was already drawing ire along with imitators. By 2025, Taste Atlas, the publication whose food rankings are calibrated for social media engagement, put the ramen burger at No. 7 on its list of the “worst rated foods in the world,” right between jellied eels and blood pancakes. It still routinely makes the rounds on Reddit’s r/stupidfood forum. Some consumers decided the ramen burger was the moment internet food culture jumped the shark (even while its contemporary, the Cronut, skated by on Western esteem for French pastry culture).
Shimamoto himself has been let down by social media-famous food. In the early days of Instagram, “even if [food] was [made] for the ‘gram, people were still putting their heart into the flavors,” he says. Now, “it’s really hard to judge” what he sees on social media, Shimamoto says.
“If you can get remembered for something, you’ll have customers for a long time.”
Shimamoto’s cooking was always about more than virality. While the novelty of the ramen burger was the bun made of noodles, the “heart and soul” was its shoyu glaze, he explains. “That juice from the meat and the sauce, and then that texture from the noodles, is really what makes it.” While the burger might have gotten people in the door at Shimamoto’s restaurants, he hoped to flex his broader culinary skills on bowls of ramen too — something on which he was an expert, as his blog proved. In Serious Eats, Sho Spaeth once described Ramen Shack as “the most exciting place to eat ramen in the United States,” though the ramen burger’s success “always risked occluding [Shimamoto’s] true skill as a ramen-making savant with seemingly perfect taste-memory.”
In 2019, Shimamoto closed the New York City location of Ramen Shack. In 2022, he closed the Ramen Shack location in Orange County, California, as well, citing staffing changes and personal health issues. While he says that he never grew to resent the ramen burger, the business around it could be “overwhelming at times, with everyone trying to get a piece of the pie.”
Smorgasburg’s approach to choosing vendors has also crystallized over the past decade-plus. Food that works at Smorgasburg has to be good, Demby says, but it also has what he calls a “moment of theater.” “You’ve got to get known for something,” he says. “If you can get remembered for something, you’ll have customers for a long time.”
The ramen burger has much more competition now, but interest in it has remained relatively steady since 2017 (though vastly decreased from its 2013 to 2016 heyday). “I didn’t close my shops because I thought that the ramen burger was no longer sellable,” Shimamoto says. Whenever he posts the ramen burger on Instagram now, commenters tend to reminisce about the good old days.
And whenever his kids or friends request one, he’ll make the ramen burger — just on a smaller scale now. “To this day, it’s still great,” he says.
