The waiter sets the bowl down in front of me and takes note of the fact that I'm expressing true, unadulterated glee -- I have the look on my face that a 5-year-old boy does when he first sees a lion at the zoo.

"Tonkotsu ramen, extra pork, extra egg?"

Ebeneezer Scrooge, eat your heart out. I'm ashamed of how quickly and greedily I grab my bowl and slide it over to my little eating space, beginning to dump toppings and seasonings in before the bowl has even stopped moving. Taste it first? Please. This isn't my first rodeo.

Whenever I tell people that ramen is my favorite food, they are shocked. I'm a foodie. If we go to Olive Garden, I will whine the whole time about how we could have gotten much better food for the same price. The word "ramen" means one thing to most college students -- this:

You can cook it in three minutes (fewer, if you're in a hurry and don't mind inconsistent texture). Salt dominates its flavor profile, with perhaps a hint of whatever "meat" flavoring and other bizarre and uncanny food-like elements they've dehydrated and crushed into the flavor packet. The noodles aren't exactly al dente, and they don't taste like a whole lot. It costs mere cents. It's so cheap to the point where the buyer has to wonder what arcane varieties black magic Nissin and Maruchan work to make their food so affordable. It gets the job, done, though, if you're hungry. God bless Momofuku Ando: he created the perfect food for capitalist efficiency.

I first had instant ramen at a friend's house sometime in elementary or middle school, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. I started eating at home, adding ingredients to spice it up and make it more interesting. I hit the internet looking for better ideas, and I made a discovery that changed my life forever: far off in 12-year-old Ben's anime and video game mecca of Japan, people ate noodle soups that tasted good. And they looked a little more like this:

It's possible that I had tried a more substantial bowl of ramen here at home, but any of those were overshadowed by the moment I really lost my ramen virginity. In 11th grade, I had the fortune of going on a class trip to Japan. On a day when some friends and I had a couple of free hours in Harajuku, one of Tokyo's most famous fashion and shopping districts, I made a suggestion:

"I don't care about clothes. I'm going to look for lunch. Who's coming?"

Harajuku has a lot of places to grab a quick snack, ranging from french-inspired creperies to curry houses, but I had only one thing on my mind: trying real ramen for the first time. It took some searching, but I stumbled upon a colorful shop run by enthusiastic gentlemen who were more than happy to hand us a reasonably foreigner-friendly menu and let us take our time trying to figure out what was in each dish. It took a few minutes, but we ended up fairly confident that we'd made the right decision. It was hard not to be impressed by the noodle guys hand-stretching noodles in front of us, or by the robotic precision with which the kitchen staff assembled the bowls of piping hot soup, noodles, and other miscellaneous ingredients. I was excited but cautious: it's only ramen. How good can it be?

It was perfect -- a whole meal in a bowl. It hurt to breathe, laugh and, most importantly, get up and move. I didn't let my distended stomach's soreness influence my opinion of the dish. It was comfort food at its best. It was hearty, packed full of hunger-bustingumami flavors and sending me into the sort of food coma that most Americans know only from a big burger or a good helping of barbecue.

The tonkatsu broth was like drinking seasoned bacon fat. The noodles were firm and chewy. The barbecued pork melted in my mouth. The toppings added a variety of flavors and textures that instant noodles can't even begin to approach. I was blown away. I almost wept. And, honestly, I would place this meal on my top-ten list of most important life events.

I became a noodle fiend. I know I've made only a small amount of headway in my journey to becoming a noodle connoisseur, but to my less food-oriented friends and family members, I'm the king. Pad thai, dan dan noodles, pho, udon, soba, shirataki-- if I've seen it on a menu, I've probably ordered it and tried to recreate it in my dad's kitchen. Authentic ramen cooks in geologic time compared to your Cup Noodle -- 12 hours is a good start for the soup stock alone. My parents shook their heads at me when I begged them to cart me across town to buy pigs' feet and neck bones (how many other 17-year-olds get excited about pigs' feet?), but I grabbed them with a smile on my face, took them home, threw them into a giant stock pot, and started a good book.

The noodles need to be high quality, too and cooked properly. I'm not such a stickler that I insist that my ramen be made from certain flours and Japanese kansui mineral water, but if the noodle doesn't have any bite to it, it's not worth chewing on. Noodles are like flirting: if there's no hint of resistance, they're no fun. Toppings are my favorite part of a bowl of ramen because I always like to see what, and how much of it, a chef puts in each dish. For plain tonkotsu (pork bone ramen), I like it simple: pork, egg (the yolk must be soft), green onions, and some selection of mushrooms or bamboo shoots for texture. More complicated soups can stand toppings with more complicated flavors: corn, garlic, leeks and a pat of butter would make miso ramen shine.

I spend a lot of time thinking about noodles.

Though I've now eaten ramen all over America and Japan, none of my noodle memories contain the same transcendent bliss as that first bowl. I went back to Japan through a Rice program in 2013 and, like a sea turtle returning to its birthplace to lay eggs hopped on the train and ate at Harajuku's Kyushu Jangara Ramen again. It was just as good as I remembered.