Most critics are won over, and the praise lands in the same two places. The first is the food itself: the noodles, the broth, the care taken over every dish, which reviewers find sensuous enough to revive the appetite. The second is the structure. Itami keeps leaving his noodle-shop story for comic and surreal vignettes, and the majority read these detours as the point rather than padding, with the scene of two lovers passing an egg yolk between their mouths singled out as the boldest of them.
The reservations are of degree, not kind. Variety finds the film a little too long, and The Guardian warns that the shifts from gangster film to romantic melodrama to cookery lesson may baffle viewers who came for only one of them. The Los Angeles Times, otherwise delighted, notes that Tampopo’s training amounts to an hour of men explaining things to a woman. Nobody dislikes it; the spread runs from warm to rapturous, and the two mixed scores are mild.