Sally McKenna reviews a thoroughly modern restaurant
Ramen – Asian Street Food arrived as a fully formed modern package on the Cork food scene, with its snapchats, hashtags, and instagrams, its open kitchen, carton cuisine and ice-cream vending machine. You can order on line, or on foot, and they call you by name when it’s ready. Your food is offered on a covetable steel tray, in a carton with a wafer cone. If you choose to sit in, you can slide the food into a white bowl, and use the black plastic cutlery or chopsticks that sit on the counter with the chilli oil and soy sauce.
We called in after the launch in the Irish Immigrant Support Centre. It was 9pm and the place was hopping with takeaway orders as well as customers populating the long communal centre table as well as the counter seating at the edge of the room. We ordered two noodle dishes and a curry: Singapore Noodle, Malaysian Mamak and Penang Curry. Each bowl cost around a tenner, and PJ also ordered a coke, which we don’t seem to have been charged for (sorry lads, only noticing this now).
The design of the room is funky, and understated without being timid. It has the minimalist exposed panels, but it’s still quite clubby with the restaurant motif cut decoratively into the wooden seats. The cartons are deceptively large, portions are generous. The food may have been transported from its original Asian origin to Cork, and some of the detail lost in translation, but each of our dishes was singular and different in flavour and texture. There was a lightness that came from real vegetables, good quality raw ingredients – including the rice and noodles themselves, and a lack of the usual taste-killers in this type of food – canned briny beansprouts or MSG.
We ate all of the enormous portions, because the food was sharp and fresh. PJ, our son then demonstrated a life spent closely observing the exact portion control of an icecream machine, and how to balance an enormous bouffant of vanilla elegantly on a cone, unlike the perilous blobs dolled out by his parents.
Ramen is fun, and a great addition to Cork.
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