When Rob Scheffler first visited Boise, one February weekend in 2015, he fell in love. “It was Walnut Creek and Tahoe and San Luis Obispo and Minneapolis all in one, with its rolling foothills and ski slopes and college-town exuberance and Midwest niceness.” It wasn’t until after he moved here from the San Francisco Bay Area that Scheffler discovered he’d also be able to eat well. Very, very well—thanks to restaurants like Red Feather Lounge, The Owyhee Tavern(pictured), and State & Lemp (which has since closed, but its James Beard-nominated chef is getting ready to open a new restaurant, Kin). It’s also thanks to locals like Dave Yasuda. He isn’t a chef or a restaurateur, but he is part of what’s bringing Boise’s food scene to a simmer: a passionate, involved audience. Yasuda, who works in marketing for American Wagyu-beef distributor Snake River Farms, recently jumped in to fill a culinary gap in town. “There’s a really nice bánh mì shop here, and a lot of places serve a good bowl of pho, but there’s no place for ramen.” So he and a few friends borrowed a brewery’s tasting room to make it happen as a pop-up. Thirty dollars got you octopus salad, marinated pork loin, and noodles flown in from California, plus a green-tea saison and a ginger Berliner Weisse. “We did two seatings, 112 people,” says Yasuda. “If there’s a ramen person out there who wants to open a ramen place, there’s a demand in Boise!” Noted. Good restaurants with reasonably priced menus, a decent housing market, and tons of growth makes this Idaho city one of the West's most affordable places to live.