Cricket Ramen at ANTCICADA: Eating Bugs in Tokyo?

From grilled wagyu beef and omakase “chef’s choice” sushi to course after course of perfectly fried tempura, Tokyo has a plethora of gorgeous food options. 

So it might seem strange as to why someone would want to eat insects in Tokyo, of all things, when there’s so much else to eat. But just as you’ll find the absolute pinnacle of each of the above cuisines in Tokyo, so too is the humble insect elevated to their best possible form. 

Those looking for a bowlful of bugs in Tokyo have no shortage of options either. There are several restaurants that make entomophagy — the scientific term for eating insects — their main focus. 

When it first opened, Rice and Circus in Takadanobaba made waves with outrageous dishes like fried giant water bugs and scorpions, alongside other equally outlandish offerings like camel and alligator meat. 

Meanwhile, the most enduring image of the cafe Take-Noko in Asakusa is its tagame cider, a soda with a giant water bug floating on the surface, looking like it’s ready to spring back to life at any moment.

More recently, Shibuya’s Eat for E is one of the newer faces on the scene. Conceptualized by Toba Shusaku of the Michelin-starred sio, the restaurant features a relatively normal menu of items like gapao rice and salad bowls — each one designed specifically to incorporate insect-derived proteins without actually letting visitors see the insect, lowering the barrier to entry simply by reducing the “ick” factor. 

But Bakurocho restaurant ANTCICADA sets itself apart by integrating insects into one of Japan’s most beloved foods: ramen. 

Billing itself as the first restaurant to sell “cricket ramen” in Japan, ANTCICADA is the brainchild of Shinohara Yuta, a chef who calls himself a chikyu shonen, or literally “earth boy”.

At just 30, Chef Shinohara has already had quite the career. After graduating from Keio University, he trained in both the Michelin-starred kaiseki multi-course restaurant Yotsuya Uemura and the ramen shop Ramen Nagi, famed all throughout Tokyo for its dried fish-based stock. 

So if he was already on the path to success in a conventional culinary career, why insects? Hailing from the city of Hachioji in west Tokyo, Chef Shinohara spent a lot of time surrounded by nature as a child. Drawn in particular to the charms of insects, he found himself perplexed as to why they were so negatively viewed by the general public. 

As an extension of this love for bugs, he then started to eat them. It was eating a caterpillar one day that was a turning point, though: he describes the taste of it as identical to sakura-mochi. The caterpillar had spent its days feasting on cherry leaves, he reasoned later, and as such the taste of what it had eaten had transferred itself to his taste buds. He felt as though he was tasting the whole caterpillar’s life up until that moment.

It also led to a profound sense of contentment that he was part of this vast cycle of consumption; living things consume, and in turn, are consumed by other living things. 

It wouldn’t be until much later, when he was 19, that he decided to make insect cuisine into something resembling a career. But he clearly pinpoints that moment as the moment that first planted the seed of entomophagy in his mind. 

Fast forward to today, and ANTCICADA is a roaring success, with Chef Shinohara sharing control of the helm with his friend and head chef Yamamoto Kazuki. 

Those looking to try it out should note that the cricket ramen is only sold on Sundays. All other days of the week, the restaurant offers a tasting course menu, featuring insects, organic vegetables and other all-natural ingredients in a multi-course meal intended to showcase all the different ways in which these ingredients can be combined and prepared. 

However, this menu tends to be a little bit pricey, particularly for those who are just looking to sate their curiosity about trying insects for the first time. So it makes sense to wait for Sunday to roll around, if you’re on a budget, or if cricket ramen is the only thing that you’re after. 

You’ve got to get there early, though; ANTCICADA’s made quite a reputation for itself among ramen enthusiasts, entomophagists and everything in between. As such, even though I got there 20 minutes before opening time, there was a short line of to-be diners waiting outside. 

A handful of five or so people is nothing compared to some other famous ramen shops like Iruca Tokyo Roppongi or Ramen Break Beats, where the queue can go around the block on a particularly busy day, but that didn’t stop me from being surprised. A queue to eat insects? Stranger things have happened, though, so I dutifully joined the line. 

From the outside, ANTCICADA is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sort of place. The facade is completely unassuming, unmarked save for a single stylized “A” that is the restaurant’s logo. But just follow your nose; the ventilation system blasts the rich aroma of bubbling ramen broth out onto the street, giving those in line a taste (or smell, rather) of what was to come. 

Make no mistake, though it may be a cricket-based broth, the smell is unmistakably ramen through and through. 

At 11 am on the dot, a staff member opened the door, and we were ushered inside for what would become one of the most unique meals of my entire life so far. 

If not for the massive U-shaped counter in the center of it, and the obvious mouth-watering smell of ramen broth that hangs heavy in the air, ANTCICADA could easily be an entomological museum. 

It’s not for the faint of heart, admittedly. Tanks of crickets line the walls. Various animal skulls and taxidermied specimens occupy shelves, next to plaques and trophies that represent ANTCICADA’s and Chef Shinohara’s various awards. 

But this is just another way of Chef Shinohara normalizing being around insects — one of ANTCICADA’s aims is to destigmatize the way we currently view insects, after all. 

The feeling of crickets all around — chirping, rustling, hopping — is slightly unnerving, but at the same time it gives the restaurant an energy quite unlike any other. The space feels very much alive, pulsing with energy the same way a forest or jungle would.

Hilariously, the music playing isn’t the latest J-pop hits, or even the sounds of a tranquil forest, but a selection of some of the most famous video game soundtracks of the past 30 years or so. (Chef Shinohara makes no secret of his love of games — his online handle is earthboy64, out of love for the 64-bit era of gaming.) 

Watching fellow guests slurp down long strands of ramen to the swelling orchestra of the Legend of Zelda’s title theme was weirdly incongruous and yet, somehow, extremely appropriate.

After taking your seats, you’ll be presented with the menu. Unsurprisingly, a comprehensive English one is available; after Japan reopened its borders post COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurant saw a massive surge in curious visitors from overseas. 

The most popular and most prominent dish on the menu is, obviously, the cricket ramen. There’s a whole leaflet alongside the menu dedicated to the details of every single ingredient that goes into this labor of love. 

The leaflet proudly proclaims that there it takes 170 crickets to make a single cup of ramen broth. All crickets are domestically farmed in collaboration with sustainable energy company Taiyo Green Energy to reduce environmental impact to the barest minimum.

It then goes on to detail the various ingredients, from the cricket-based soy sauce, to the cricket-flavored oil, to the ramen noodles specially made by Shinjuku Daruma Seimen to best bring out the crickets’ umami.

Naturally, I had to order a bowl, alongside an assortment of insects cooked tsukudani-style (simmered in soy sauce and mirin). This actually isn’t one of Chef Shinohara’s inventions; inago no tsukudani, or grasshopper tsukudani, has actually been traditionally eaten in mountainous regions of Nagano, Gunma and Fukushima Prefecture as a source of protein. 

Chef Shinohara takes it slightly further by making not just grasshoppers into tsukudani, but also his beloved crickets (korogi), silkworm (kaiko), bee larvae (hachinoko) and stonefly larvae (zazamushi). I decided to try one of each. After all, I figured — if one of them was bad, I could at least fall back on any of the four others. 

The cricket ramen came shortly, and it was beautifully presented. Visually, it looks extremely similar to shoyu ramen, with its deep brown shade. However, there was one major difference: a single fried cricket placed atop a small raft of chopped komatsuna mustard spinach — hilariously out of place next to the expected sights of sliced chashu pork and the bright pink spiral of a slice of narutomaki fishcake. 

To be completely honest, the flavor of insects defies simple description. I’ve heard it variously described as “nutty” or “earthy”, and I think I understand why those adjectives are used, but at the same time I don’t think either of those are really adequate to describe how insects taste. 

For more exotic foods, you can typically describe them with a close analog; crocodile meat tastes like chicken, but is texturally similar to fish. Whale resembles a firmer tuna; horse is like a gamier beef crossed with venison. 

Insects though? Words almost completely fail me. Bugs genuinely are a flavor entirely all their own. It doesn’t even taste like shellfish, which is what I had actually expected them to taste like, based on their crustacean-like appearances. 

But it was a solid bowl of ramen, absolutely capable of holding its own against the likes of Tsuta or Jiro. The leaflet wasn’t lying; the broth was absolutely loaded with umami. Those looking for the fatty richness of tonkotsu ramen will be disappointed, as will those looking for the lightness of a salt-based shio broth, but shoyu soy sauce ramen aficionados should definitely give ANTCICADA’s signature a shot. 

It was almost startling; there was a salty umami that is to be expected with a soy sauce-based broth, but at the same time, the strong aroma of cricket foregrounded the entire thing.The noodles were also thick and springy, with a good amount of bite.

The cricket aftertaste lingers for a long time, which is where I started to understand the “nutty” comparison. It’s still not adequate to describe the taste, but it’s only in the aftertaste that the nutty notes start to become more apparent.

Next was the tsukudani. Tsukudani is best eaten with rice, if you ask me, so I only wish I’d had a steaming hot bowl with which to have them — but eating the tsukudani alone allowed me to better appreciate the individual differences between each one. 

Unsurprisingly, the best of the lot was the classic grasshopper, which was texturally the most interesting — they definitely got it right the first time in Nagano. This was followed by the crickets, and then the rest of the other three. 

It might be strange to say, but the experience with the tsukudani definitely confirmed for me that I definitely prefer a little more crunch in my bugs. Other diners might be otherwise inclined; it might be easier to ignore the fact that you’re eating bugs when there isn’t as much resistance when biting down.  

The whole time I’d been nursing a tea of silkworm droppings, which was surprisingly pleasant — silkworms eat only mulberry leaves, and their digestive process is supposed to neutralize mulberry leaves’ natural astringency, which I could definitely attest to. 

But my success had emboldened me, so I decided to wash all of these down with an additional digestif of shochu infused with the essence of giant hornets. 

Still, even though I’d happily chewed my way through bee larvae and crickets alike, and considered myself well on the way to experiencing a paradigm shift about incorporating bugs into my diet, there was still something a little bit eerie about seeing the container of shochu with dozens upon dozens of massive hornets settled at the bottom. 

It was good though. If I’m being honest, the shochu was so strong to begin with, it was difficult to know for sure if the hornets had any tangible effect on its taste. A Vice article mentions that it tastes “ashy,” like charcoal; SoraNews24’s reporter, on the other hand, unflatteringly bestows upon it the stench of rotting flesh. My experience definitely skewed towards the former. 

To finish, I dug into a trio of different ice-creams, all of them flavored with silkworm droppings. While I enjoyed them immensely as tea, silkworm droppings added a strange grittiness to the ice-cream that I wasn’t quite sure I appreciated quite as much. 

The flavor, though; I mentioned earlier that nuttiness wasn’t quite the exact flavor that I thought adequately described the taste of insects. But when paired with the burnt caramel ice-cream, the silkworm droppings really enhanced the smoky flavor. Similarly, the cloudy sake’s flavor profile was given a lot of depth by the presence of the silkworm droppings.

All in all, a positive experience for my first time with bugs. Strangely enough, if you asked me to pick my favorite dish of the day, I would say that the best thing was actually the smallest thing on the menu: the single cricket atop the ramen. 

It was small, probably about an inch long at most, but it was fried to perfection and wonderfully crunchy. It reminded me of a much more satisfying middle ground between a full-sized deep-fried prawn and sakura-ebi shrimp. 

I’m a sucker for crunchy textures, and the cricket was amazing in that regard. With larger grasshoppers, I’ve heard that the wings and legs are inedible, and that they have to be removed before consumption. But keeping the whole cricket intact not only gave it more surface area to collect seasoning, but also gave it much more textural depth.

I couldn’t help but think that they would make for really good drinking snacks. Light and small, with the perfect amount of crunch, I would have devoured a whole bowl of them.

Would I go back for the course menu? Honestly, yes. The ramen felt like reaching the tip of the iceberg; the various tsukudani and hornet shochu made it feel like I’d sunk a single pickaxe into the surface. There’s a lot more to be found in the wide world of entomophagy, and Chef Shinohara and his staff have a lot more to show. 

Now, if they made those fried ones a regular menu item, ANTCICADA can expect to see a lot more of me outside their door.

Strictly speaking, no. However, for pescetarians or vegetarians who do so for environmental sustainability, you might want to consider including insects in your diet as an alternative source of protein: rearing insects is much better for the environment than chicken, pork or beef, due to decreased land and water use and lowered greenhouse gas emissions. 

It’s generally not a good idea to eat insects if you have a shellfish allergy. Many of the allergenic proteins present in crustaceans like lobsters, crabs and shrimp are also present in insects. If you have a history of allergic reactions to shellfish, it’s probably best to consult a doctor before trying insects.

Antcicada is located in Tokyo's Nihonbashi area, just a couple of streets away from the famous Kanda River. If you're feeling brave, follow these directions to Antcicada.