The review of the Japanese restaurant Ramen Ya-Hiro located in Barcelona. To experience different tastes during a holiday in Spain, without spending a fortune, here is a tip to take on the fly to eat excellent ramen.
Ramen - noodle soup - is their national dish, the soupy craving for the nighttime snack, a part of the national culinary culture for the Japanese. Barcelona has always been without a genuine reference in Japanese cuisine, but with the opening of Ramen Ya-Hiro everything changed. Their homemade noodles, gyoza and onigiris, are attracting Barcelona people hungry for authentic Japanese cuisine.
Ya-Hiro seems to have come out of a corner of Tokyo: rustic cuisine at reasonable prices. Since its opening in September 2012, it has experienced no respite, transforming itself into a noodle temple so famous that it always has a long queue of customers waiting to get a table.
The young man chef HiroStrong from his training in his homeland and Australia, he landed in Barcelona 5 years ago starting to work in the Tempura Ya, where every Sunday after his shift, he perfected the elaboration of his idea of Ramen until he found the formula to propose in his restaurant .
They say his Ramen is so good that looks like the one in Tokyo, and indeed, one can often see Japanese among restaurant tables; a good sign on the authenticity of the cuisine. All ingredients are handmade by Hiro's own.
Il menu is very simple and basically there are three types of Ramen: the first with a base of soy sauce broth, sweeter and lighter; the second with a miso broth - fermented soy - denser and spicier and third for fish lovers, it has a shrimp sauce base. In addition to the great ramen soups there is a good proposal of edame, gyoza, yakisoba, onigiri.
The restaurant is small and unpretentious, can accommodate about thirty people between tables and bar counter. Knowing the reputation of the restaurant, we arrived around eight (the opening is at eight thirty in the evening) and the queue had already formed for a while, but luckily we were able to enter with the first shift.
Honestly I would have liked to try everything but given the really generous portions, the decision fell on a meatballs appetizer with soy sauce and a miso Ramen. The dessert consists of a selection of Mochi (a traditional dessert consisting of glutinous rice, chopped and pounded to obtain a soft and sticky dough, filled with yogurt which is then molded into a rounded shape). For warm summer evenings, there is also a good choice of fruit sorbets.
The covered consists only of the wooden chopsticks and the small porcelain spoon for the soup. The service is efficient and fast but given the number of waiters the staff leaves no time to chat and tends to kindly present the bill with the arrival of the sweets.
Dinner accompanied by a beer and water cost us 44 € for three people.
At midnight when the restaurant closes its doors to customers, chef Hiro is dedicated to the preparation of pasta and pork, a fundamental ingredient for the excellent ramen soup, which needs ten hours to reach the right cooking point in order to melt delicately in contact with the palate.
For lovers of oriental cuisine and for those who have been able to taste the specialties of Japanese street food, this is the ideal place to relive these Asian atmospheres in the heart of the Catalan capital.
