Kitchen Reno Madness: Cup Noodle Rankings

I've lost my kitchen and I might be losing my mind

I’m back, baby. Things have been a little crazy here at the ranch for the last couple weeks. As of last last Wednesday, our multi-month kitchen (and living room, but mostly kitchen) renovation began. The days leading up were filled with packing, giving away/donating stuff we no longer needed, junk removal, and a general sense of dread (for me). Liz has taken our cat and moved into her parent’s condo while they’re away in Mexico, and I remain here, trapped upstairs with our two rabbits, with only a coffee maker and kettle in our bathroom.

Really opens the place up, don’t you think?

With no kitchen so to speak of, I’ll obviously be doing a lot of takeout and restaurant dining. But I can be frugal, too. And since I live down the street from the city’s best Asian grocery store (sorry T&T, but I feel how I feel), I thought it would be prudent to stock up on cup noodles for cheap & easy breakfasts.

While I won’t bore you with the history and lineage of cup noodles (which I find fascinating but I get it if you don’t) you can click this link here for a basic overview. But you know what I’m talking about. Cup noodles/cup ramen. You peel back the lid, tear open the seasoning packet(s), pour in the boiling water, cover, wait, stir, slurp.

Once, there was a sink here

I’m well on my way to becoming a connisseur of all noodles in cups, so here’s my week one rankings:

Oolongmen Chicken Flavour - Nongshim

Rating 2.5/5 cups

This is the baseline cup noodles. It tastes exactly how you’d expect. 1 sesasoning packet and 3 minutes cook time gets you chicken noodle soup with some vaguely Eastern spice and umami notes. I doubt I’ll encounter any worse cups than this, but it’s easy to find better ones.

Oolongmen Beef Flavour - Nongshim

Rating 3/5 cups

An easy and simple improvement over the chicken. 1 sesasoning packet and 3 minutes cook time again for a beefy, more robust and comforting broth. Blows the chicken out of the water, especially if the water comes from your bathroom sink.

Shin Spicy Noodles - Nongshim

Rating 3.5/5 cups

No, this post isn’t sponsored by Nongshim (although it could be - reach out to me, Nongshim!) it just so happened that they make all the cups I grabbed. Another beef cup here, but this time with some spice. As usual, 1 sesasoning packet and 3 minutes cook time yielded a beefy broth with gentle heat that made my lips tingle as I slurped, but wasn’t unpleasant in the least.

Shin Black Noodles with Beef Bone Broth - Nongshim

Rating 4.5/5 cups

Now we’re talking. This here is the Cadillac of cup noodles. Not one, but two seasoning packets and an absolutely baroque cook time of 4 minutes results in a beefy, fatty, rich and creamy broth, heady with flavour, spice, and just a touch of heat. How decadent, how sublime. Truly, the thinking man’s cup noodles.

Cup Noodles in Sink - Zach Resnick, 2025

So far, Shin Black is the obvious winner for me. But that doesn’t mean my cup noodle odyssey is over. I won’t have my kitchen back until sometime in June (maybe) so there’s more seasoning packets to be ripped, more kettles to be boiled, and many more cups to be noodled over.

Readers, do you have a go-to brand of cup noodles you’d like me to review? Is this even interesting to you? Am I losing my mind? Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll see you all next week with (hopefully) a more normal post.