Steven Pursely Studied in Japan to Make the Most Tender, Bouncy, Delectably Slurpable Ramen Noodles

I didn’t think it was possible to eat four bowls of ramen in one sitting, but as I surveyed the counter in front of me, strewn with splashes of broth and puddles of vinegar, I had clearly proven myself wrong. It’s easy to push past your limits at Menya Rui, chef Steven Pursley’s 24-seat altar to ramen, where nearly every component is made from scratch, including the noodles.

The tsukemen was one of the best I’ve ever had: cold, thick noodles with almost as much bounce as a trampoline, served with a bowl of concentrated scallop-infused broth for dipping that bursts with gentle, sweet, oceanic flavor. I followed that with a comforting bowl of chicken shoyu that featured a tare, or seasoning sauce, made with three kinds of soy sauce and lots of dried seafood for an extra umami punch. The thin but elastic noodles slithered around tender pork shoulder chashu and slices of menma (lacto-fermented bamboo shoots). Next was the tantanmen, in a fatty broth enriched with sesame paste and laced with chile oil, followed finally by the aburasoba, a super-savory brothless option, where the noodles are coated in both scallop oil and shoyu tare. Each bowl was thoughtful and balanced; clearly no element was an afterthought.

Pursley is extremely laid-back in nature but has a quiet intensity when he latches onto something. That intensity has driven his restaurant career, which he came to unexpectedly: He wanted to be a lawyer, majoring in political science as an undergrad. He took one day of classes at engineering school before deciding to move to Okinawa, Japan, where his mother is from and where he’d spent part of his childhood, to study ramen instead. In college, he’d worked in restaurant kitchens and had always loved it — even if it was frying off frozen chicken wings and breaded mushrooms — and in Okinawa, Pursley’s uncle, a delivery driver, helped connect him to the local ramen scene.

Pursley embarked on a three-year journey, working in ramen shops and learning how to make everything from shoyu-style ramen with a delicate chicken broth to heavier and porkier tonkotsu-style broth, where the bones are boiled for over 10 hours and then simmered with plenty of seafood, like smoked tuna and sardines. The shops Pursley worked at in Okinawa were mostly mom-and-pop operations with 20 to 30 seats that might sell 100 bowls of ramen on a good day. Eventually, Pursley landed a gig working in a shop on the mainland called Shuhei in the city of Matsuyama, where they sold 300 to 400 bowls a day. There, he fell in love with tsukemen, the dipping style of ramen: “I don’t ever get tired of that one,” he says.

Though he didn’t have a clear game plan, Pursley knew that he wanted to open a ramen shop of his own. He decided to head back to his hometown of St. Louis, where he worked a front-of-house job by day and tinkered around with making ramen at night. He did pop-ups out of the 900-square-foot apartment he shared with his sister. Pursley made everything from scratch: the broth, the tare, and even the noodles, which he cranked out by hand with the help of a KitchenAid pasta attachment. “We were cooking on just the stove at home. But it was cool — it was kind of like a party,” Pursley says. “People would bring their own drinks. It was a little vibe.”

Pursley started working in the kitchen again, this time at Indo, owned by 2020 F&W Best New Chef Nick Bognar, and hosted his ramen pop-ups at the restaurant and other locations in town: fun in theory but logistically a huge nightmare. “Popping up with ramen sucks — everything’s liquid!” he says with a laugh. “I was making the broth at home and chilling it in my bathtub. Then I’d put it in my Lincoln Town Car and drive it across town before driving 40 minutes to pick up the noodles I’d made at my parents’ house.” In 2022, he opened his brick-and-mortar restaurant, Menya Rui, where he serves six varieties of ramen in three different styles, with 10-minute ticket times per bowl on an average night. It’s no surprise that there is a steady line that snakes out the front door of the restaurant — a line that exists even in the middle of chilly St. Louis winters — and down the sidewalk of the quiet strip mall Menya Rui is located in.

The noodles are the star of the show at Pursley’s restaurant. Though Menya Rui has limited square footage, there is a separate room dedicated to noodle making, with a machine imported from Japan. Pursley currently makes two kinds of noodles: a thinner version for the shoyu style and a thicker, chewier noodle for the tsukemen and mazemen. Each week, he makes between 600 and 700 portions of noodles by hand — something that is incredibly rare for ramen shops, especially in the U.S., which generally buy their noodles from large suppliers. “The more I ate ramen, the more the noodle became important to me,” Pursley says. “I also knew making the noodles would be a competitive advantage.”

Pursley’s ramen shop may be small, but his dreams for the future are not: “I joke around and say we could be the Panda Express of ramen. If I’m shooting for the stars, then that’s what I’m thinking.” In the more immediate future, he’d love to open a second location, with the same type of service, focused on a different style of ramen. It’s all part of his mission to embed ramen even more widely into the American culinary landscape. “I’m really grateful to have this opportunity to really try to push ramen forward. I want ramen to be an everyday choice in America,” says Pursley. “Most importantly, I want it to be good ramen.”