Why you should experience Ten to Sen in Tokyo, Japan.
Ten to Sen is an inventive ramen shop where Shimokitazawa's experimental character, Hokkaido culinary influence, independent counterculture and appetite for genre-crossing food converge around spice ramen descended from Sapporo soup curry.
Set along Shimokitazawa Ichibangai near Kamakura-dori and just steps from Kitazawa Hachiman Shrine, the compact shop translates the neighborhood's creative independence into bowls crowded with vegetables, noodles and vividly aromatic broth. Fried burdock, wood ear mushrooms, broccoli, baby corn, red onion and cashews create successive layers of crunch, softness and earthiness while the noodles carry the broth's accumulating spice. Vegetable spice ramen supplies the payoff through a plant-based interpretation that retains the colorful abundance and aromatic intensity associated with the original concept. The result is a Shimokitazawa ramen shop where Hokkaido soup-curry culture crosses into Tokyo's noodle tradition.
What you should know about Ten to Sen.
Ten to Sen is best known for opening on July 18, 2017 as the spice-ramen project of Rojiura Curry SAMURAI., the Sapporo-born soup-curry group created by Masashi Kawabata and operated through Soul Flower. The parent cuisine supplied an unusually complex starting point, with SAMURAI.'s soup-curry method combining pork bones, whole chicken, niboshi, bonito, kombu and substantial vegetables before Ten to Sen redirected that culinary lineage toward ramen and a dedicated spice composition. The name expresses Kawabata's idea of treating individual encounters through food as separate “points” that eventually connect into a “line,” turning the restaurant's character into an extension of the philosophy behind its creation. Ten to Sen transferred from its original Kitazawa 2-chome premises to Kitazawa 3-chome and reopened on August 28, 2022, while the concept subsequently traveled back across the Hokkaido connection through pop-ups and internationally through a Perth branch in Australia.
The spice broth establishes the physical architecture through a creamy base charged with ten spices, producing warmth and aromatic complexity without reducing the bowl to conventional curry ramen. Vegetables change that intensity bite by bite as fried roots contribute crispness, mushrooms bring elasticity and lightly battered produce absorbs the spiced liquid while retaining its own texture. The vegan bowl pushes the same style into cashews, watermelon radish, baby corn and other plant ingredients, creating a garden-like composition whose abundance mirrors the vegetable emphasis of Hokkaido soup curry. Ten to Sen uses spice as connective tissue rather than garnish, allowing broth, noodles and individually textured vegetables to function as a coherent reinterpretation of the cuisine from which the restaurant emerged.
How to fold Ten to Sen into your trip.
Ten to Sen works as the culinary payoff for a Shimokitazawa route connecting experimental theater, independent music and the neighborhood shrine culture that survived beneath decades of creative reinvention.
Begin at The Suzunari, opened by Kazuo Honda in 1981 from a converted apartment building, where its compact stage became central to Shimokitazawa's small-theater movement and helped establish the district as a proving ground for independent companies. Continue to Shelter, the basement live house opened in 1991, where tightly packed audiences and generations of Japanese rock acts carried Shimokitazawa's music culture into a venue whose intimacy became inseparable from the neighborhood's independent identity. Conclude at Kitazawa Hachiman Shrine, founded in the fifteenth century and associated with the Setagaya Kitazawa area for centuries, where its wooded precinct and annual festival preserve a much older communal layer above the surrounding theaters, record shops and bars. The progression moves from Honda's theatrical ecosystem through Shimokitazawa's basement music culture into Kitazawa Hachiman Shrine's deeper neighborhood memory, framing Ten to Sen's Hokkaido-born culinary experimentation within a district repeatedly defined by independent forms of expression.
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