Bia Rebel, 409 Ormeau Road, Belfast BT7 3GP (02895 435 964). Ramen £6-£8. Sides £4-£6.

Be aware. If you ask chef Brian Donnelly of Bia Rebel to explain how he makes his food, he will tell you. He will go into quite extraordinary detail. There will be hand gestures and a lot of enthusiasm. If you’re a little short on time, perhaps it’s best just to order and keep the questions to a minimum. Otherwise, do ask, because it’s a hell of a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, that end being the engrossing bowl of ramen he will serve you.

This is the thing: we are used to lengthy, sweaty-palmed stories around complex dishes, but for the most part they come greased with excess and largesse and huge price tags. The great Pierre Koffmann’s recipe for braised pig’s trotter, boned and stuffed with a chicken mousseline and morels, then glazed with a veal and madeira jus, takes pages of a cookery book, and days to prepare (not forgetting years of training to perfect; it requires surgical skill to bone out a trotter). We therefore accept that we will have to sell the most attractive of our limbs to pay for it.

But an £8 bowl of ramen? That surely doesn’t deserve prose poems? Well why the hell not? The result may seem humble, but getting it right certainly isn’t. Donnelly grew up in Northern Ireland, but learned his trade at Gordon Ramsay’s Aubergine and Le Gavroche with Michel Roux Jnr, before crossing back over the Irish Sea to be head chef of Thornton’s in Dublin. He has run massive brigades. He can do things with knives and knows one end of a sauce from another.

Now, with his business partner Jenny Holland, he brings all of that to the task of running a small ramen shop on the Ormeau Road in Belfast. It has a few seats at a counter, a long communal table down the middle of the room for a few more, and a vibrant mural on the wall demanding you #slurpmynoodles. The setting may be different, but the culinary intensity is just the same.

Last autumn, Bia Rebel – bia is Irish for food – won the best cheap eats gong in the Observer Food Monthly awards, voted for by the readers. Being in the city for a day or two, it seemed only fair that I drag a few friends along to try it out. Happily, I can confirm our readers have impeccable taste. Does Bia Rebel serve the very best bowl of ramen you will ever eat in the United Kingdom? No, not quite. I’d put that served by Tonkotsu, Shoryu and Nanban (the latter run by my friend Tim Anderson) above it. But then that’s extremely tough competition.

In any case, I don’t believe it is trying to compete, and its offering also happens to be a lot cheaper than those others. As Jenny Holland said when they won the OFM award last year, “We’re not trying to be Japanese. We’re an Irish restaurant. It just so happens this wonderful, perfect dish we’re making is considered Japanese. Provided you adhere to basic building blocks you can make it what you want.”

Which is what they do. They make their own wheat noodles. Their meaty broth has 26 ingredients and takes 40 hours to make. Donnelly starts with a sofrito, the finest dice of vegetables cooked down until they have given all they have to give to a dish, which apparently takes hours. A chicken broth is made with chicken wings, also cooked for hours. It is blended with dashi broth. They add a 606 egg, so called because it is cooked in a water bath for six minutes and six seconds. You sense that Donnelly loves that detail. He then smokes it over Oolong tea. Not Lapsang souchong or Darjeeling. Oolong. It is a very good egg, the smoky yolk perfectly fixed in that place between runny and set.

There are around 10 permutations on the basic theme. The Belfast Shoyu ramen contains thick slices of chashu-roasted pork, a beautiful reddy bronze, here made with shoulder rather than the classic belly. “We use shoulder because the balance of fat to meat suits the Northern Irish palate,” Donnelly says. What matters most, of course, is the broth, which is swimming pool deep and savoury, without leaving you fearing you’ll be chugging water through a restless night’s sleep. The noodles have a fair bite. (According to Tim Anderson, ramen wheat noodles must be made with kansui alkaline water. I’ll confess I didn’t check the pH level of the noodles. This is remiss of me.)

Rebel spicy pork ramen is a vibrant Hades-red, courtesy of deep slicks of chilli oil, and comes heaped with piles of ground pork, flavoured with more chillies. Most of them work like this: the name of the dish tells you what you’re going to get. The meat in a Celtic spicy beef ramen has indeed been introduced to a lot of fresh chilli; the hoisin BBQ pulled pork ramen has pulled shoulder spun through with hoisin. It is both sweet and salty. All of them come stacked with nori and spring onions, sweetcorn and fresh chilli or garlic. On a frigid winter’s night in Belfast their various ramens feel less like a bowl of dinner than a guttering fireside in front of which to warm yourself.

The only item which made me furrow my brow is the achingly named Ramenara Ramen, which they say is their take on a carbonara, involving bacon and parmesan cheese. Mind you, Anderson once made a full English breakfast ramen, so let’s not get too precious.

To start, there are various silky-skinned gyoza – duck and hoisin, chicken and chilli, or veg – which they buy in, alongside edamame beans to be pulled meditatively between teeth, seaweed salad or potato salad. There are chicken wings, which they’ve run out of the night we are there, and heaving plates of well-stacked fried rice. It is not licensed, but we had made a run past the off-licence first. Bia Rebel owns a corkscrew.

For the most part, what you get, apart from a satisfyingly full belly, is the sense of what is too often referred to spuriously as a passion project. This is the real thing. Apparently, their contract of employment includes one instruction: “Don’t be a dick.” This is a sentiment we can all get behind. Nice people. Good food. Great price. Six words which tell you all you need to know. But then you’d have had nothing to read on a Sunday morning.

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Shoryu is a growing chain of ramen shops – there are nine in London, plus others in Manchester and Oxford – but they keep standards up, and offer a broader menu than most. Alongside more than half a dozen tonkotsu ramen, named for the 12-hour pork broth full of sticky gelatine, there’s a bunch of other choices, plus a list of sides, including buns filled with everything from chicken karaage to pumpkin croquettes.

All change in Rock, Cornwall, where chef Nathan Outlaw has stepped away from the Mariner’s pub and been replaced by one of the other big culinary names in those parts, Paul Ainsworth of No 6 and his partner Emma. The move comes as Outlaw prepares to launch a seafood restaurant at the Goring Hotel in London.

Kenny Tutt, winner of last year’s amateur MasterChef, has left his job as a bank manager and is to open his first restaurant in his home town of Worthing. It will, he says, draw inspiration from “the local area and surrounding Sussex countryside”.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1