Dinner at Yamamori Japanese Restaurant

The Church of Saint Teresa right smack in the shopping district was a surprising find for me. It was like an oasis of peace in the middle of all this place of consumerism. However, I did not forget why I ended up here in the first place, I was looking for dinner. I was hoping I would be able to get the early bird prices, I suppose a lot of people here take their dinners a little later so restaurants here try to encourage them to arrive earlier. I passed by a Japanese restaurant earlier in the day but it was closed. It seemed to be quite a well known place so I though I would give Yamamori Japanese Restaurant a try.

The cold weather in Ireland, makes a steaming bowl of soup perfect to warm me up. It has been months since I had a bowl of good Japanese ramen, I thought this might be the place to satisfy my craving. I hesitated when I saw the 16 euro price for a bowl of tonkotsu ramen, but I thought that since I was already here, I might as well try it. The restaurant was actually quite nice and they surprisingly even had Japanese staff. Eventually my ramen arrived, it looked decent enough and I quickly took a slurp. It was unlike any ramen broth I have ever tasted and I have had a lot of them. I may not be an expert in ramen, but I know when something is good. I know this wasn’t. It didn’t really taste like tonkotsu ramen at all. The noodles even tasted funny, giving me a bit undercooked taste. The texture of the noodles was awful as well, it was as if it was really undercooked, chewy and you can almost taste the flour. The tamago or the egg was nothing special. Ideally, the yolk would be a bit runny but this was not the case. The pork itself as nothing special either, it was soft alright, but the whole dish was already ruined by the broth and the noodles. I don’t know if this was the standard of tonkotsu ramen here in Dublin but this was without a doubt the worst I’ve ever had, not to mention the most expensive one.

One of the Japanese staff asked me how my meal was, and I told them my honest feedback. She was a quite shocked, disappointed and apologetic and told me that I should have told them sooner. I can’t imagine what they can do to fix it. Maybe, replace it with a different dish? As a consolation, she gave me a discount. I think she didn’t charge me for the tea. I asked her if she’s ever had those tonkotsu ramen and she said she has it practically every day and they were very good. Maybe if you eat it everyday you start thinking that it is actually good. Anyway, it would take me a lot of convincing to go back there. I was thinking if it was just a fluke so I confirmed this with a friend who has been there as well and he probably knows a thing or two about ramen and he confirmed that it wasn’t very good. There you go, that was a very disappointing and not to mention expensive meal. I could only imagine how they could have screwed it so bad. Perhaps the more authentic ingredients were a bit harder to come by, so they had to make do with what they had available locally. Perhaps they never specialized in ramen in the first place. In the end, it was disappointing for me. At least it was hot. My advice is that if you know your ramen, then probably stay away from Yamamori Japanese Restaurant or just stay away from the ramen and just order something else.

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