Mr Ramen San — Gastrology

Mr Ramen San is a Japanese noodle house centrally located in the Mid City Arcade on Bourke Street. As the name suggests, the focal point of this café is ramen – Japanese wheat noodles.

The quality of the ramen offered by Mr Ramen San is some of the best Melbourne has to offer with the noodles made in-house daily. The broth is cooked for 10 hours in pork bones (chefs stir continuously for 4-5 hours a day to achieve a beautiful consistency) for full flavour.

Charsu Ramen

The menu features reasonably priced and amply sized bowls of delicious soup noodles (with extra noodles free of charge), making this ramen-centric establishment a suitable haunt for economical lunch seekers.

Mr Ramen San allows you to customise your own ramen. You begin by selecting a broth - soy, miso or tonkotsu (pork bone) – before proceeding to select your topping - eg. chashu (roast pork), beef and minced chicken.

Vegetarian Charsu Ramen

On our visit, we were particularly impressed by the vegetarian Charsu Ramen. The slender noodle strands were firmly cooked, and were pleasantly garnished with nori, boiled egg, bamboo shoots and spring onion. The accompanying Vegetarian “Charsu” possessed a delicious bite and went superbly with the vegetarian “tonkotsu” broth. The broth is the most vital component of any bowl of ramen as it provides flavour to the noodles. Mr Ramen San’s broth was delicious. A thick, cloudy and somewhat creamy concoction of decadently rich flavours. It was hard to believe that this was a vegetarian dish.

Teriyaki Charsu Spicy Tonkotsu Ramen

Another highlight was the Teriyaki Charsu Spicy Tonkotsu Ramen. Boasting unadulterated pork flavours (the end product of intensely boiled pork bones and more notably, pork fat), the thick, gleaming layer of liquid pork fat that forms on the surface of the broth was the key to an authentic and robust tonkotsu broth. As the strands of noodles were pulled through the surface, they were coated with the unctuous perfectly spicy liquid which provided the noodles with indulgent flavours.