A dying woman gets out of bed to cook one last meal for her family, and her husband makes them eat it. A gangster passes an egg yolk back and forth with his lover, mouth to mouth, until it breaks. Little of it has anything to do with the plot, and all of it is the point.

TAMPOPO (1985) follows two truck drivers, Goro and his younger partner Gun, who stop at a failing roadside ramen shop and decide to help its widowed owner, Tampopo, turn it into something worth eating. Tsutomu Yamazaki plays Goro with the weary authority of a gunslinger, and the whole film plays like a Western crossed with a cooking show as he recruits a ragtag crew of noodle experts to train her.

Jūzō Itami wrote and directed it, interrupting the central story at will with vignettes about food, hunger, sex, and death. The most famous belong to Koji Yakusho as the white-suited gangster, who opens the film in a movie theater, talking straight to the camera. His scenes with his lover and an egg yolk became some of the film’s most quoted moments.

Japan’s first ramen western remains unlike anything else, a film that treats a bowl of noodles as a subject worthy of reverence, comedy, and tears.