SOUP DL — Restaurant in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown

I am a massive Ramen fan, having eaten Ramens all over the world from Tokyo and Hong Kong to LA and London and therefore feel that I can offer a somewhat experienced perspective on the food at Soup.

Dublin is quickly having an ever growing Ramen scene and I was therefore excited to try one of the newest additions to Dublin Ramen - Soup. Unfortunately, like the other establishments in Dublin, Soup has failed to hit the mark when it comes to Ramen.

I appreciate that there are many positive reviews for Soup, however I feel that this is due more to the fact that people in Dublin are yet to experience actual Ramen and thus have nothing to compare it against.

The Positives:

Excellent staff who are super friendly.

Cute venue with nice mood lighting and quintessential Japanese turquoise pastel colours on the walls.

The venue does call itself Soup and if you go expecting just a soup, but not a Ramen, then its not terrible - hence the 2 stars

The Negatives

As many reviews have stated before, this is simply not Ramen. The broth is not thick, creamy, deep in flavour. It is in fact an almost clear broth with very little flavour and most certainly no underlying pork flavour ( I had the Pork Tonkotsu). To create the creamy texture one gets in a typical Ramen Pork Broth, the bones need to be boiled on a roiling boil for at least 12 hours - what you get at Soup is a very weak bone broth.

Again, like previous reviews, the soup is further burdened by the overly vinegary mushrooms. I appreciate that in normal Ramen broths there are pickled gingers to help cut through the meaty, deep flavours and offer palette relief - however in this case as its only a thin soup, you are left with essentially a vinegar soup

The defining cornerstone of any good Ramen bar is that they make their noodles in house from scratch - these were poor quality instant noodles and therefore of course no option to have them harder or softer was presented.

The meat was tough and chewy.

The price - €15 for a fake Ramen is just madness. This price point in competing with some of the best Ramen bars in the world! If this was €7 to €8 and they improved the vinegar sensation, then I would consider going back when I just want some soup - but at this price it...

Disclaimer: I'm big fan of proper ramens and visit japan every year, also spent a couple years living in Asia. It took me some time to write this review, didn't want to leave bad review for the local place. In a summary: food served in "SOUP Ramen" is NOT Ramen. I had the worst tonkotsu in my life here. That wasn't tonkotsu, not even close. It was also the most expensive ramen I ever had.

Pros: Hip atmosphere, nice design. Very nice & friendly staff (added an extra star for that, ramen was 1 star). I really didn't want to post a negaticve review. But I think customers (and chef) should be aware and my review won't mess up rating anyways.

Neutral: Some charsu (pork) in my ramen was OK (but some was burnt). Egg was OK too.

Cons: Simply not a ramen, stock is tastless. Tonkotsu is stock from pork throttles boiled overnight. It is super thick. I completely understand that it isn't probably for everyone. There are some broths not as thick - miso, soy, chicken, salt you name it. It is very misleading, it's like selling random cheap lager and mark it craft imperial stout. Noodles were more like tesco "udon" noodles (which isn't really udon). It supposed to be a homemade fresh noodles. Rocket in ramen???? Super expensive, especially considering quality.

It seems like a very popular place and I'm sure 5* reviews are honest here, but probably those people never tried ramen before. The place has a really nice atmosphere. It is probably OK if you just call it "noodle soup" so people don't have wrong expectations. I was super happy that I'll have a ramen place next to my house and was terribly disappointed with...

Arrived in around 6pm Sat, tried to order Pork ramen but due to a busy day they had none left so we both ordered chicken ramen and a plate of fried chicken.

Fried chicken was lovely. We waited a long time for any food to arrive.

Ramen was served without any egg. We thought, as an essential part of the dish they just forgot! So when we eventually got the staffs attention we queried this. They said that because of how busy they were during the day they had no eggs left but they had given us charred cauliflower instead.

I can’t eat cauliflower, so it was just a matter of eating around it and trying not to be too put off by the flakes of char which didn’t go with the flavours at all. We both only got two tiny pieces of chicken and an abundance of instant noodles. We seemed to be missing any of the usual ingredients so nicely presented in other diners photographs.

The smooth lemonade was delicious, i ordered a second one when our food arrived and waited, in total around 25 minutes for those second drinks to come. Long after we finished eating.

No one asked us how are food was, which was a shame.

It could have just been a bad day but it was surprising any restaurant, particularly one that specialises in a specific dish, would stand over the food...