1st Floor of Shuang Shuang, 64 Shaftesbury Ave, London, W1D 6LU www.yamagoya.co.uk
Nick does noodles at the six month pop up of Yamagoya in London.
Down below in Shuang Shuang the robot march of dishes on conveyor belts is running full steam, up here on the first floor the belts are still but there is certainly plenty of steam from stock pots.
This is the start of a six-month pop up from Yamagoya, a food outlet founded by Masatoshi Ogata in 1969 in Fukuoka City. Amongst other dishes they’ve brought over their’Yamagoya’ ramen and the’Tobanjan’, a fiery tobanjan spiced broth known to locals as’the fire of food’, to the heart of London on Shaftesbury Avenue.
The Japanese version is lighter, more delicate, slightly smaller and slightly more fried. It’s just as delicious though and each one is gone in two bites after we dunk them first in a mix of rice vinegar and soy with additions of garlic and ginger.
We also get into some Chicken Karaage, popularly known as Japanese KFC. If KFC was this tasty though I’d be sitting on the top deck of a bus, grunting into a mobile phone and chucking bones on the floor like everyone else. But of course Karaage is in a different league.
But we’re here to slurp. I choose the Tobanjan and bask in awed approval from the waitress.’It’s very hot,’ she says with the tone of someone announcing a death in the family. I wave off her concerns with insouciance, hot is my middle name.
She asks if I want the noodles hard, soft or medium. I’m not sure, so I choose medium. Apparently hard is the pro choice as it stops the noodles going too soft towards the end of the meal as they are still cooking in the broth even as you tuck in.
I don’t know what the secret pork bone broth recipe is, of course, but it does have less fat than other ramens in London. This suits me fine as I was never that obsessed with fat in my stock. It is very, very spicy hot indeed and I am driven to use up all the napkins to control my nasal reaction.
Very tasty though and the pork chashu is delightful and I happily splash away, spooning up crispy spring onion, tender bamboo shoots and slippery wood ear mushroom with one hand and shoving tangles of noodles in with the other.
We’d drunk nothing but Shochikubai Goki Sake with the dishes, a not too strong sake that came in a decent measure for the price. Very good with all the dishes.
On the way out Mr Kameda smiled again, we told him how good his food was and his smile broadened wider. Nicest noodles we’d had for a long time actually.