The Witch Cat Kawai restaurant in Douliu City in southern Taiwan has an outlandish ramen bowl on its menu. With a crocodile leg crawling out of a thick broth, the “Godzilla Ramen” is a gnarly competitor to the most bizarre food offerings of Taiwan, such as the cake popsicles made with pig blood and pizzas topped with turkey testicles.
Cooked with 40 spices and topped with crocodile leg, the Godzilla Ramen was priced at US $48 per bowl.
In June 2023, the Witch Cat Kawai restaurant introduced the odd ramen dish online on their Facebook page by sharing pictures and videos of influencers trying out the delicacy. Initially, the eatery called it the “Thick Witch Crocodile Ramen.†However, after the dish went viral, it was dubbed “Godzilla Ramen,” after the fictional monster in the Japanese movie of the same name.
The cooking process is quite elaborate for a dish as simple as ramen. The cleaned crocodile leg, preferably the front leg, is rubbed with alcohol, ginger, green onion, and garlic. It is then either steamed or braised in the broth for two hours.
The broth itself is packed with flavor, containing over 40 spices, along with quail eggs, pork, baby corn, black wood ear mushroom, and dried bamboo shoots. To spice things up, fish sauce is also on the ingredient list.
It takes approximately three hours to cook the dish. Also, procuring the star ingredient, the crocodile leg, is difficult. The restaurant gets it from a farm in Taitung, which provides only two portions per day. Given the labor and time involved in cooking and the scarcity of the meat, a bowl of Godzilla Ramen was priced at US $48 at launch.
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The Godzilla Ramen is inspired by the Isopod Ramen, a fish and chicken broth topped with a 14-legged giant isopod.
The Isopod ramen, featuring a 14-leg deep sea crustacean, invented by The Ramen Boy restaurant in Taipei, Taiwan. Image credit: the_ramen_boy/instagram
The restaurant describes the cooking process of their special ramen as, “The witch uses more than forty kinds of natural spices and fresh ingredients to cook, and then injects the idea of love into the soup, mixes all elements and energy, and finally boils all kinds of expressions of love that belong to you.â€
The sentimental description of the food isn’t encouraging enough for people to try out the dish. In the initial days of its launch, most people were happy to take pictures but reluctant to taste it. It was the blogger community who dared to eat the Godzilla Ramen.
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The people who tasted the crocodile leg likened the steamed version to chicken with a bit of spring and stretch, while the braised version tasted like pork feet.
The Godzilla Ramen is inspired by another visually intriguing dish, the Isopod Ramen, invented by a restaurant named The Ramen Boy in Taipei, Taiwan. The limited edition ramen bowl was topped with a 14-leg isopod sourced from the deep ocean surrounding Dongsha islands.
