Instant Noodles & Beyond Review:
So Much More Than a Cute Cookbook
by Robin Ha
Publisher: William Morrow
Publication Date: August 25, 2026
This book was gifted by William Morrow. All opinions are my own.
I knew I was going to like Instant Noodles & Beyond pretty much as soon as I opened it. Robin Ha’s comic cookbook is adorable and clever, full of colorful illustrations and the kind of pages you want to flip through before you ever make anything, but what surprised me was how seriously helpful it is too.
There is a lot here beyond the 93 ways to dress up a packet of instant noodles promised on the cover. Ha gets into the history of ramen and ramyeon, how instant noodles came about and how they fit into everyday life. There is a pantry guide, side dishes, a kimchi recipe, brand recommendations and all kinds of little bits of information tucked throughout the book.
It ended up being much more useful than I expected, especially once I started noticing how much work the illustrations were doing. The drawings walk you through each recipe so clearly that the comic format becomes part of the instruction itself.
Recipes are broken down into small visual steps so you can see exactly where you are in the process and what comes next. I spend plenty of time in the kitchen and have worked my way around a cookbook or two, so following these recipes was really a piece of cake, but looking at the pages, I also think they would be incredibly easy to use even if you were not particularly confident in the kitchen. You can almost cook your way through some of them just by following the pictures.
One of my favorite details is that Ha includes specific instant-noodle recommendations right on the recipe page, and that made the whole thing feel much more foodie-appreciable to me. She is not treating every packet of noodles like they are exactly the same. Different recipes call for different styles and brands, and of course I decided I needed to hunt down the recommended ones.
That became part of the fun too. I ended up finding an Asian market near me that I had never been to before, so apparently I can make even instant ramen into an adventure.
But Do the Recipes Actually Work?
Once we decided to really test the book, the whole thing turned into a family affair. We have a pretty food-forward house, so instead of making one recipe and calling it good, everyone got involved.
We ended up cooking five recipes from the book: Green Curry, Pad See Ew, Masala, Kimchi Jjigae and Kung Pao, using five different instant-noodle brands along the way.
[ADD LSL LINK ONCE LIVE: Link to the full five-recipe cooking feature on Life She Loves here.]
They are still instant noodles, and I don’t think Ha is trying to convince anyone otherwise. A packet of Indomie is not suddenly going to become wide rice noodles, and her Kimchi Jjigae is not pretending to replace the version you have been making for years. What impressed me was how well she understands the flavors she is working with and how much of the character of those dishes she manages to carry into an instant-noodle version.
The Pad See Ew was the clear winner for us. Nobody was going to mistake it for traditional Pad See Ew, but the flavors were so recognizable that it stopped feeling like “ramen inspired by Pad See Ew” and started feeling like its own very convincing little version of it. We swapped the seitan for fried tofu because that is what my family prefers, and it worked beautifully.
The Masala gave me the biggest now wait a minute moment because I was honestly surprised by how much that flavor profile came through.
Kimchi Jjigae was a little different for us because we were probably the hardest audience possible. We eat jjigae regularly, have eaten versions in Korea with ramen noodles added, and are ridiculously particular about how we like it. Ha’s version was still good, it was just farther from our personal idea of jjigae than some of the other recipes were from theirs.
That experience actually made me appreciate the book more. The recipes were not all doing exactly the same thing. Some felt familiar, some surprised me, and some immediately made me want to see what else she could do with a packet of noodles.
Who Is This Book For?
If you already love instant noodles or you are the kind of cook who likes playing around with ingredients and flavors, there is a lot here to keep you busy. College students could have an absolute field day with it, and if you are someone who walks into an Asian market, sees an entire aisle of instant noodles and thinks, I want all of these but what am I supposed to do with them? Robin Ha has plenty of ideas.
We already had most of the pantry staples she recommends in our house, which made the recipes especially easy to dive into. That is probably exactly how this book will get used here going forward, not necessarily when I am planning dinner for everyone, but when I am on my own, want something scrumptious, and there is a packet of noodles sitting in the pantry waiting for me.
I am absolutely making that Pad See Ew again.
Final Thoughts
I thought Instant Noodles & Beyond was going to be adorable and clever, and it is. What I did not expect was how useful it would be too.
Robin Ha gives you the recipes, but she also gives you history, pantry knowledge, brand recommendations, cultural context and enough guidance that cooking from the book feels easy rather than intimidating. She takes instant noodles seriously without making the whole thing feel serious, which may be what I liked best about it.
This was just fun. Cooking from it turned into a family affair, tracking down the right packets of ramyeon sent me somewhere new, and after making five recipes, I am already thinking about which one I want to try next.
So no, I am definitely not finished with this book yet.
Want to see what happened with all five recipes? I broke down the full cooking experiment over in our Food section.
