Isaac Brock: Top Ramen

Your Last Meal with Rachel Belle

Rachel Belle

Music Interviews, Arts, Food, Comedy Interviews, Tv & Film, Film Interviews, Comedy, Music, Science, History

4.4 • 709 Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Modest Mouse’s lead singer, guitarist and songwriter has one of the longest, and most disjointed, last meals in Your Last Meal history, but each dish draws from a lifetime of experiences and memories.

A lover of culinary highs and lows, Isaac wants both traditional Japanese ramen and Top Ramen for his last meal, something he ate a lot of in his younger years. We’ll learn the history of instant noodles with Andrea Wang, author of the children’s book Magic Ramen: The Story of Momofuku Ando.

Isaac tells host Rachel Belle about the bar he used to own in Portland, Oregon (and why he made a rule to never drink there!); what sorts of hijinks he’s been roped into doing on an upcoming Modest Mouse cruise; and his quest to figure out a mysterious dish his parents made him for breakfast when he was a kid.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Alaska Airlines has teamed up with Hawaiian Airlines to create new nonstop international flights.
0:05.6	Go to Alaskaair.com or Hawaiian Airlines.com and I'll tell you more details later in the show.
0:19.6	I'm Rachel Bell and this is your last meal.
0:23.3	The show where celebrities share stories about the foods they love most,
0:26.2	and we dig into the history, culture, or science of those meals with experts from around the world.
0:32.1	Today on the program, Isaac Brock, lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter of Modus Mouse.
0:51.9	Modest Mouse is on tour right now, and I'll give you a bunch more details in the closing credits.
0:55.5	Isaac's Last Meal is a long list of seemingly disconnected dishes that you'd probably never see served together on a single table.
1:03.9	But each one of those dishes has meaning and draws from his experiences and memories.
1:09.2	One of those foods is Top Ramen, so we will learn the origin story of instant noodles later in the show.
1:16.3	But before we jump into my interview with Isaac, I want to give you a heads up.
1:21.4	There will be a fair amount of swearing.
1:25.2	I usually bleep out the bad words, but like I said, there are a lot of them,
1:29.7	and I was afraid I would completely wear out my bleep-O-Matic-3-000. So please enjoy this uncensored
1:35.9	interview with a real-life Pacific Northwest rock star and his liberal use of the fantastic, fabulous,
1:43.3	fanciful F word.
1:59.8	You ready to go?
2:01.2	I think so, yeah.
2:02.9	Okay.
2:03.6	You had a bar for a while in Portland called Poison's Rainbow, unless it's Poisson's Rainbow.
2:09.3	It wasn't.
2:10.3	It wasn't.
	...

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