Neighborhood Ramen is closing and moving to Japan. Here’s how they make their beloved noodles.

Inside Neighborhood Ramen, all may be quiet, but just a three-minute walk away, Jesse Pryor and Lindsay Steigerwald are busy at work every Thursday in their workshop, transforming over 100 pounds of dough into the noodles that have made their ramen shop in Queen Village a Philly staple.

The two owners pop over to the workshop on South Fourth Street around 9 a.m., coffees from Green Line Cafe or Ox in hand. They blast their go-to track, ”Praise The Lord (Da Shine)” by A$AP Rocky and Durdenhauer featuring Skepta, and get to work on the noodles they’ve perfected over five years.

The couple recently announced their decision to move Neighborhood Ramen to Japan. The pair will close the doors of their restaurant at the end of June to open a six-seat ramen shop with an 11-seat reservation-only dining room called ESO Ramen Workshop for about a year, until they open a restaurant in Tokyo.

» READ MORE: Where to find great ramen in Philly

“We realized that it is a doable thing and very possible — it’s going to be challenging, but it’s challenging to run a restaurant here [in Philly], too,” Pryor said.

ESO will open on South Fourth Street, in the space where they currently process their noodles, in September and will feature one to two Japanese style-ramen bowls (think niboshi or dried fish ramen) for counter seating, and gyokai tsukemen, a dipping-style pork and fish dish, available through reservation-only dinners in the dining room behind the noren curtain.

“This six-seat shop that we have at ESO will be our test run for Japan — just running a little shop with me and Jesse,” Steigerwald said.

Steigerwald and Pryor’s culinary footprint began with dinners at Pryor’s apartment, which evolved to pop-ups and eventually, the BYOB brick-and-mortar on South Third Street in 2019.

The two take research trips to Japan once or twice a year, where they slurp many bowls of ramen and spend time with local chefs. Since 2018, the couple has ventured out to see chef Hiroshi Nukui of Menya Nukaji in the Shibuya region of Tokyo, building a relationship with Nukui and later in May 2023 collaborating on a pop-up at the ramen shop.

Pryor has dreamed of moving to Japan “as soon as he kind of fell in love with ramen,” Steigerwald said. Serving bowls over the years with limited ingredients in the U.S., Pryor’s desire to be in a city with better ingredients grew with each trip overseas.

“Jesse has been studying ramen for about seven years,” Steigerwald said. “The first time he went to Tokyo in 2018, he dreamed of one day having a shop there, but it seemed like a pipe dream. After running Neighborhood Ramen in Philly for four-plus years [and] when we did the pop-up in May last year, we felt that it was no longer just a pipe dream.”

The Inquirer had an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the workshop behind the noren curtain at the upcoming ESO, revealing how some of the finest ramen noodles in Philadelphia are made.

It all begins with the kansui, or alkaline water. Steigerwald mixes salt, sodium carbonate, potassium carbonate, and water, adjusting the ratios based on the desired texture for the noodles. She then pops it in the fridge to dissolve the salts.

Meanwhile, Pryor measures out noodle, pastry, and tapioca flours from giant buckets. Turning to the hefty Japanese noodle-making machine, Pryor pours the flour blend into the built-in mixer for six minutes of dry mixing before adding the chilled kansui in parts for even hydration.

As the machine continues to hum in the background, their work playlist switches through plant and culinary podcasts like Delicious City Philly, hits by English rapper Skepta, and audio of Japanese conversations for language comprehension practice. Working in sync, the couple handles the crumbly dough, known as soboro, breaking up the large clumps that emerge from the mixer into a tray. Rollers press the soboro dough into a long sheet that rolls onto a big rolling pin. The rolled dough gets split into half on a second rolling pin and feeds into the machine combining the two layers of dough — this process, called sheeting, goes through two rounds for a thick roll of four-layer dough.

“Hydration is really big [in this process],” Steigerwald said. The huge roll of dough rests for about an hour, allowing it to fully hydrate and the gluten to form. After, the dough is thinned.

Once the cutting equipment snaps into the machine, Pryor gets comfortable on a stool in front, weighing out each batch of thin-cut noodles and packing them into neat little bunches.

At the end of the day, Steigerwald and Pryor dust off their flour-covered clothes and leave the workshop with about 120 pounds of noodles — an average 360 ramen bowls in the Neighborhood Ramen kitchen. (The two also make an additional amount for Cambodian hot spot Mawn in Bella Vista, and roughly two more batches on Saturdays and Sundays.)

“It’s really nice to have a partner that you’re on the same page with — you both have the same work ethic,” Steigerwald said. “You can pick each other up when one’s not feeling 100% and bring each other back to why we’re here and why we’re doing this.”

» READ MORE: Owner of Tokyo’s viral Philly cheesesteak joint dishes on what he loves most about the city

And it’s the same grit and grind they plan to take to Japan.

“I would say the things that we will take with us from Philadelphia are more philosophical,” Pryor said.

Rather than cheesesteak ramen bowls, it’s working hard and pushing through the challenges that’s “very Philadelphia to me.”

“Philly has definitely made us tough,” Steigerwald said. “I think that is what gives me confidence that we can do this anywhere in the world, as long as we have that hardworking spirit.”

Steigerwald and Pryor aren’t looking to do anything crazy, but “rather putting our heads down, being humble, and working our [butts] off,” she added.

“[We’re] showing that even though we’re foreigners, we can have the same dedication to the craft and putting out quality ramen in the same league as the chefs we admire,” she said. “It’s not necessarily about competing but being inspired by other shops and contributing to the ramen scene as a whole.”