An order for a bowl of ramen noodles is filled, right, at Ippudo NY, a Japanese ramen noodle brasserie, in the East Village neighborhood of New York City.

AP / Frank Franklin II

NEW YORK — Nearly four decades after the first instant ramen noodle factory opened in the United States, Japan’s beloved comfort food finally is making inroads — even achieving cult status — in a nation where burgers and pizza still rule.

Once considered just a bargain meal for cash-starved college students, ramen noodles suddenly are commanding as much as $15 or more a bowl in sleek New York noodle shops.

“We are living in a ramen moment,” says Alan Richman, GQ magazine food critic who wrote his first ramen review after dining at Ippudo NY. In March, the restaurant became the first branch outside Japan of a highly regarded noodle shop chain.

“It’s been discovered by people like me who were ignorant,” Richman says. “It’s the food of the moment.”

Ippudo NY landed in New York’s East Village, where celebrated Korean-American chef David Chang already was drawing hordes of customers to his stylish Momofuku Noodle Bar, which opened in 2004.

Shortly after Chang’s debut, Ramen Setagaya, another popular Japanese ramen chain, opened here, winning New York magazine’s “best ramen” award this year.

The essence of ramen is a rich broth, often made from pork bones, and thin, slightly chewy noodles, garnished with such toppings as sliced pork, hard-boiled eggs, seaweed, scallions, fish cake, mushrooms, even corn kernels.

The dish originated in China; the very name comes from the Chinese words for hand-pulled wheat-flour noodles.

“Like most things, the Japanese imported the idea from another culture and have taken it to the extreme,” says Chang.

Last year, 738 million pounds of ramen (or 4 billion individual packets) were devoured in the United States, a 4-percent increase over 2006, according to Nissin Food Products Co. of Japan.

And worldwide, the demand for instant noodles is huge — Nissin has sales of more than $3.2 billion annually. China consumes the most, followed by Indonesia and Japan, according to the World Instant Noodles Association.

But it’s the ramen restaurants, or ramenya, that are most revered in Japan, which boasts 80,000 of them. There’s also a famous ramen museum near Tokyo, as well as a Japanese television program where ramen chiefs compete — Ippudo’s founder, Shigemi Kawahara, has won three times.

Americans may have gotten their first inkling of Japan’s obsession with ramen in 1987, when the Japanese film Tampopo was released in the U.S. and became a cult hit. The so-called noodle Western tells the story of a truck driver who rides into town and helps a young widowed noodle-shop owner perfect the art of making a bowl of ramen.

Ken Sasahara, president of Nissin Foods (USA) Co., which opened its first factory in California in the early 1970s, credits instant noodles with helping spark the wave of ramen bars that have sprung up across the country. The arrival of Ippudo has raised the stakes, he says, and could trigger intense ramen battles similar to ones found in Tokyo.

Rickmond Wong, a Web designer and self-proclaimed ramen expert who writes about his favorite topic at rameniac.com, has closely monitored the gradual emergence of high-quality, authentic ramen shops in the Los Angeles area.

He says it’s tied to the growing economic clout of Asian nations and American enthusiasm for all things Japanese, including animation, video games, cartoons and food.

“These days people are interested [(in Japanese pop culture)] in a much more sophisticated manner than in the past, when aspects of a foreign culture were typically exoticized and viewed through a post-colonialist lens — ‘Oh, look at what strange things these people eat,’ ” he says. “It’s high time for ramen to take its place in the pantheon of a multicultural American diet.”