Shoryu Ramen
Japanese 35 Great Queen St, WC2B 5AA ££
Established in 2012, Shoryu promises to bring its customers authentic tonkotsu ramen from Hakata, Japan. It now has 14 establishments, 11 of which are spread around London. Shoryu’s Covent Garden branch is conveniently situated two doors down from my office, so I decided it would make a good lunch one day and ordered ahead for collection.
I went for the ‘Shoryu Ganso Tonkotsu’, a rich 12-hour pork broth ramen, which comes topped with char siu barbecue pork belly, nitamago egg, kikurage mushrooms, spring onion, sesame, ginger, nori seaweed and fried shallots. Placing the order at 12:15 for a 13:00 collection, I was expecting it to be ready when I arrived, but instead I was greeted by a seriously stressed waitress who kept telling me I was in the way and that my food would be here shortly. A single order came down and sat on the side, 3 different staff checked the label and decided to leave it just there – couldn’t be mine then, I figured.
Another 10 or so minutes passed before the original stressed out waitress came back, before she checked the unidentified ramen a second time, gasped and said “Oh I’m so sorry this one is yours”. I begrudgingly took my take out ramen back to the office, where I undid it to find a cold portion of noodles, egg, pork, mushrooms and shallots in a separate container on top of a now also cold broth. By this point I was too hungry to care so took it upstairs and bunged it in the microwave… not really what you expect for £11.90. The taste itself was alright, but nothing special, what's more the ‘crispy’ shallots weren’t crispy at all and tasted kind of stale.
After such a poor experience the first time around, I decided to give Shoryu another go, once I heard that the ‘Green Curry Ramen’ (£12.90) was where it was at. Mum came and met me for lunch one day, and I figured that two doors down was a convenient choice given I only had an hour. We went to the front of the queue as we had booked a table, and were seated around 5 minutes later (still kind of not what you expect when you’ve booked ahead). Once seated, we had to call over the waitress to put in our order, and then remind her two more times for the tap water, as well as having to ask when our food would arrive after 45 minutes had passed and it suddenly dawned on me that I had a whole bowl of Ramen to demolish in 15 minutes. To order, we got some of the Hakata Tetsunabe Gyoza (6 for £7.00) and both ended up going for the Green Curry Ramen (£12.90), comprised of: hot green curry, chicken karaage, menma, nitamago, red chilli, lime.
Oh. My. God. The Gyoza was gorgeous: you could tell they were homemade and fresh and they tasted very similar to the ones I had made in my Gyoza making workshop (which since doing has made me appreciate the sheer LENGTH of time it takes to make these delicious dumplings). The Ramen was also ridiculously tasty, and the Karaage Chicken on top some of the best fried chicken I think I’ve ever had. The broth itself was incredibly rich and bursting with flavour, being just the right side of spicy (with optional 4 bits of chilli which you could easily avoid if you needed to). I was getting full by the time I was halfway down but simply had to finish it, so decided I would just have to make a sacrifice and be uncomfortable for the rest of the afternoon.
The sheer quality and tastiness of the food was almost quite annoying, given the frankly quite bad service and the negative first experience. However, credit where credit it due, and I think I will most likely return for a second dose of Green Curry Ramen Heaven.
OVERALL RATING: ****
https://www.shoryuramen.com/
