Previous SlideNext Slide

Ramen is like rock ‘n’ roll, Fujio Tamura tells me. There’s the same freedom to innovate, the celebration of influence, and the cultural forces that take creators on tasty tangents.

Tamura, the owner of Misoya Sake Bar, didn’t go on to say that rock and ramen are both big on noodles, but I am happy to make that connection. I’ll also say I prefer slurpable soup noodles to indulgent guitar solo noodling.

I keep thinking about the noodles at Misoya Sake Bar: they’re fat and springy, made to Tamura’s exacting specifications, and super satisfying when slurped from a hot bowl of ramen.

The soup begins as a rich chicken bone base, simmered for eight hours with vegetables, garlic and ginger, then reduced to concentrate the flavours to a creamy, sustaining richness.

In classic style, the ramen is served with sweet, soft pork belly slices and an oozy egg. If you have the Misoya Special, there’s miso in it, too, adding funky depth and culinary colour.

The vegan option is built on miso as well, but it’s amplified with vegetable potage: the flavours aren’t as intense as the meat version but you’d only notice that if you were comparing.

As always with ramen, there’s a story behind it. Fujio Tamura became enamoured of the soup in his native Hokkaido, a renowned ramen hub. Even before he moved to Australia in 1999 to work as a tour guide, Tamura cherished a dream of one day opening a ramen shop.

In 2012, he quit travel for hospitality and worked at Kokoro, a since-closed city ramen shop where he started plotting his own soup enterprise. Kokoro specialised in pork-based tonkotsu ramen but it became tricky to source enough pork bones to make their stock. Tamura switched to chicken, a somewhat subtler art because poultry is milder than pig.

After a stint back home at ramen school, he got a pretty good read on it and in 2015, he launched Misoya, a sweet and simple shop on Sydney Road with 20 seats in the front and two dozen in the rear garden.

It’s not just soup. As the name suggests, sake is a focus, perhaps best tackled via the five-cup tasting set ($24) that comes with a cheat sheet of flavour notes.

The snacks are excellent. There’s crunch in the yuzu-marinated fried chicken and izakaya-style school prawns. The fryer also gets busy with the sushiten tempura-battered sushi roll and the sizzled tofu dengaku, drizzled with miso glaze.

Misoya is a low-key place with a team that keeps the room rolling without taking things too seriously.

The ramen is made with appropriate dedication, though, and there’s pay-off in every spoonful. It’s a fact that winter goes better with ramen: here’s your proof.