8 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BU (020 3405 7230). Small plates £4.90-£8.25, ramen £10.90-£14.50, desserts £3-£7.90, wines from £23
Life in our house throughout 2020 has not been all roast swan. Obviously, there’s been a bit of that. Just don’t tell the Queen, because she would be cross. Instead, we have, from time to time, been living like bloody students. Which is to say weekday lunchtimes have been dominated by the sound of a pan bubbling with three inches of water and the rustle and snip of the instant noodle packet.
Over the year I became obsessed with them. They are the lucky dip of the food world. If you want to be reductive, you can dismiss them all as the same thing: a cable-knit block of dried noodles with a couple of sachets of indeterminate “stuff”. But in a year short on distractions, I came to love the thrill of what those sachets might contain. Nothing as banal as the pouch of industrial-strength soy you’d get with a chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle. I’m not knocking Pot Noodle, and especially not chicken and mushroom, the vanilla ice-cream of the instant noodle world. That would be to sneer at my younger self, and I’m rather fond of him and his skanky, fetid ways.
But the Asian noodle brands, the likes of Nissin Demae Ramen and Ko-Lee and Shin Ramyun, with their brash graphic iconography, lend this ultimate convenience food an air of connoisseurship. Obviously, it can’t be dross because it’s from Korea or Japan or Taiwan, even if you do crush the noodles in the bag occasionally and dust them with the MSG-heavy seasoning pouch and then eat them dry, like crisps. Stop looking at me like that. It’s been a long year.
I like the ones with the little bags of tutti frutti-coloured dried fragments of veg which expand on contact with water. I like the pillows of seasoning oils and the weird, unnamed fats. There’s the hyper spicy mix with Shin Ramyun which makes sweat pool under my eyes and my scalp itch. Best of all, there’s the Mi Goreng noodles from Indomie which come with five, count them, five sachets, including two seasoning mixes, a dark paste of sweetened thickened soy and a flavouring oil. Mix them on a plate like oil paints, then roll the drained noodles through them. Six ingredients in all if you count the noodles. That’s proper, advanced cooking by anybody’s standards, and I won’t hear otherwise. In our house 2020 was the year of the noodle.
It made sense therefore that my brood should join me for this last review of the year at Heddon Yokocho, a new ramen place from the Japan Centre in the swanky pedestrianised loop of Heddon Street just off London’s Regent Street (yokocho means alleyway). The Japan Centre already has the Shoryu Ramen chain, with their well-mannered oatmeal and wood interiors, which are extremely reliable. This, however, feels like a deeper dive into the culture they represent.
Outside is an animated model of a giant ramen bowl, noodles being lifted up and down on floating chopsticks. Inside are Japanese lanterns, wooden screens, a beamed roof and walls of backlit and glowing signage of the sort you’d find gilding Akihabara, Tokyo’s Electric Town. It’s knowingly kooky and vivid. We have a booth, sweetly separated from the rest of the room by noren curtains. Our food slides on to the table on trays underneath them, before the cheery waiter pulls back the middle curtain and steps back to talk to us from a distance.
Before the main event there is familiar list of small plates. The chicken karaage is a riot of deep-fried crunch and shatter; of golden curled, boldy seasoned skin. The star, however, is the takoyaki, those octopus croquettes, under a snowfall of bonito flakes with a big slap of MSG from the Japanese mayo and a fruity brown takoyaki sauce. Too often these are stodgy; here they are light and crisp. Then there are the pork gyoza in the silkiest of skins, which arrive in a fearsomely hot skillet so they continue to crisp.
The nine ramen are date-stamped on the menu. As well as telling you the kind of broth, the thickness and curl or otherwise of the noodles and the toppings, it lists the year they were invented. The earliest is the hakodate shio from 1884: a salt-based chicken and pork broth, medium wavy noodles, spring onions, BBQ pork belly, soy-marinated boiled egg and so on. There’s the hakata tonkotsu from 1947 (thin and straight noodles) and the vegan miso (tofu, tenderstem broccoli and so on) apparently from right here in London and right now.
The problem with giving a satisfying account of these varied ramen is that they all amount to the same thing: broth, noodles and topping. What you need to know is that these are cheerfully stacked, very pleasingly engineered examples of the craft. The tantanmen ramen is the most distinct with its sesame paste-thickened chicken and pork broth, the rubble of ground pork and the shouty chilli oil kick. The tonkotsu broth, the product of simmering pork bones for longer than most people could be bothered with, has the lip-smacking, gelatine-rich savouriness the name demands.
There is a smokiness to thick-cut chunks of fatty pork belly, and the noodles have the requisite bite. (You can request extra noodles with the two tonkotsus, but not with any of the others.) The only niggle is over the inconsistency of the eggs. Two have a soft yolk which starts to run as you cut in; two do not. Some will regard this as a fatal flaw. I merely see it as mildly surprising.
For this, you will pay between £10.90 and £14.50 a bowl. That’s more expensive than at the ramen group Tonkotsu and cheaper than Ippudo. It’s on a par with Shoryu, but I think significantly better. We finish with a sweet and fragrant yuzu sorbet, and a few mochi, those sweet soft rice dough balls filled with ice-cream, which could have done with a few minutes longer out of the freezer before reaching us.
There’s also a pared-down and well-priced drinks list with plum wines, shochu and, of course, sake. A three-strong flight of 50ml measures costs a very good-value £8. We use them to toast each other here amid the neon glow of Heddon Yokocho. And with that say goodbye to what, inadvertently, became our year of the noodle.
News bites
Regis Crepy, the chef behind Suffolk restaurants Maison Bleu in Bury-St-Edmunds and the Great House at Lavenham, has a new online venture with his son Alex, called Amelie, named after his daughter. They’re selling kits for making flam-kuche, a square, ingredient-topped flat bread with its origins in 14th-century Alsace, which is on nodding terms with a pizza. Each kit contains four bases and toppings, with the likes of mozzarella, olives and pepperoni, for £18.95 (plus shipping) or goat’s cheese, caramelised onions, beetroot and pine nuts, for £19.95. For those in Cambridge they also operate out of the Grafton Centre (ameliestore.co.uk).
These are the last newsbites of 2020 so let’s end with signs of optimism. The chef Merlin Labron-Johnson, who opened his tiny farm-to-table restaurant Osip in Bruton, Somerset, a year ago, after making his name at Portland in London, has a new venture. He’s opening a wine bar called the Old Pharmacy, offering small plates, local cheeses and charcuterie alongside a diverse wine selection (osiprestaurant.com).
And finally, the famed Gleneagles Hotel at Auchterarder in Perthshire, is to open a sibling in Edinburgh in the autumn of 2021. Gleneagles Townhouse will take over the old Bank of Scotland headquarter on St Andrew Square. It will have 33 bedrooms, two bars and an all-day restaurant. For now, the mothership is closed until 1 February.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
