Posted Monday, November 15, 2004; 21:00 HKT
The secret recipe for the best ramen outside Japan started out as a hangover cure. Trying to turn a breakfast bowl of ramen into balm for a churning gut, high school student Kim Bok Hyun hit upon a combination of peppery spices that calmed his stomach and happened to taste great. In 1981, for a lark, he opened a shop in a gap between two buildings in downtown Seoul. Teum Sae (in Korean, the name means "a narrow space between walls") became a sudden hit, with patrons soon lining up around the block (one annoying customer who criticized his cooking later became his wife). Today, he runs a franchise chain of 100 shops and has a new line of instant ramen, but he and his sister still do the cooking in a shop a few blocks from the original site (the setting's just as cramped, though). "I prefer cooking ramen ... over business," confesses Kim. That's good news for anyone recovering from a tough night on the town.

With reporting by Noel Yang

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