Ramen Dayo was the first dedicated ramen restaurant to open in Glasgow. Situated in Ashton Lane and Finnieston, the venues have become hotspots in the city’s food scene.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 I started ramen in 2016 after living in Japan for 12 years.
00:04 I lived in Tokyo from 2003 and I worked out, I ate probably on average about 3 bowls of
00:11 ramen a week which translated to probably over about 2000 bowls of ramen.
00:16 I moved back here in 2014 and spent a couple of years just working on recipes every single
00:21 weekend to the point that I thought I'd got the ramen really good.
00:25 I let my Japanese friends try it and they were all like "this is legit".
00:29 I let my Scottish friends try it, a lot of them were trying ramen for the first time
00:33 and they were like "oh my god what is this?"
00:36 And that was when I decided to open Ramundayo.
00:39 We opened in a traditional ramen yatai which is a food cart.
00:44 So I actually had the wheelbase made and sent over from Japan and then we built the yatai
00:50 from scratch and we opened in Gordon Street Lane in December of 2016.
00:55 I mean in Japan I think there's over 3000 ramen restaurants, maybe actually closer to
01:00 5000.
01:01 I think the first couple of times I had ramen it was not really at the best spot and I was
01:05 kind of underwhelmed but then my friend took me to this other spot, the Datantanmen which
01:10 is probably our biggest seller on the menu and it was just mind-blowing.
01:14 I think coming from Glasgow we're quite into curry here and kind of spicy food and when
01:19 I tried the Datantanmen I don't know it just kind of, it was so unctuous and rich and I'd
01:25 never really tasted anything like that before.
01:27 That kind of set me on a path to just try and try all the ramens.
01:31 And there's just such an abundance of ramen restaurants in Tokyo and luckily where I work
01:36 in Waseda, Waseda is kind of next door to Takadanobaba which is kind of where the centre
01:42 of the ramen scene in Tokyo.
01:44 You know if I was walking home from Waseda to my house I probably had to pass a good
01:48 couple of hundred ramen shops on the way home.
01:51 So there was a lot to choose from, a lot of different genres of ramen.
01:56 So ramen daio, daio means this is with an explanation mark.
02:02 In Japan they don't really use explanation marks, they put yo at the end of the sentence
02:07 to mean, so it's like this is ramen.
02:10 I wanted something with the word ramen in it and I just thought ramen daio, being the
02:15 first ramen restaurant in Glasgow, I thought this is ramen, ramen daio is a really fitting
02:21 name and it's kind of catchy.
02:23 Within the first week of coming back to Glasgow I said to one of my friends like so where's
02:27 the best place to get ramen and his answer was what is ramen?
02:31 I realised there weren't actually any ramen restaurants in Glasgow so I decided to try
02:35 and make my own ramen.
02:37 Not knowing that making ramen from scratch is kind of like a 50 hour process.
02:41 You have to make the pork broth which takes about anywhere between 12 and 24 hours.
02:47 You have to make the chashu, you have to make the ajitama eggs, you have to make the kikurage,
02:53 you have to make all the aroma oils, we use negi oil or mayu which is a burnt garlic oil.
02:59 You have to make the shoyu, there's the tare, so tare is kind of like the base flavour.
03:04 Actually to make a full bowl of ramen takes a long time.
03:07 So every weekend I was working night shift at the time, I'd finish work at 10am, go to
03:12 seawoo, buy all my bones and my ingredients, start work, put the broth on, go to sleep
03:18 and then wake up in the evening and basically just continue cooking the broth all through
03:23 the night and it wasn't until Sunday evening that I would actually be able to enjoy a bowl
03:28 of ramen.
03:29 And the first like 10 times I did this it was just like shockingly bad.
03:33 But I think just like I was asking my friends in Japan for tidbits of information, I was
03:38 on like Japanese blogs like painstakingly trying to translate everything, watching like
03:44 Japanese YouTube tutorials and just like every week it just kind of got incrementally a little
03:49 bit better.
03:50 And I think the first dish I worked on was the tonkotsu which is kind of our signature
03:54 dish.
03:55 After I thought I'd nailed our broth I then started to work on the tantanmen and then
04:00 after that was the tonkotsu miso and the tonkotsu miso black.
04:04 All four of those dishes are still kind of our big sellers on the menu.
04:07 We actually sourced a lot of like original, what are they called, they're kind of like
04:13 signs from like the 50s, 60s and 70s.
04:18 So like over here is an Orimin C sign, it's like the original one, it's actually kind
04:22 of like rusted.
04:24 And then over here we have like an Asahi beer sign, again it's like a tin sign.
04:31 And here you can see like the original Asahi logo which has since changed.
04:36 If you come over this side you can see like there's a lot more of these signs.
04:43 And like I love this aspect of it because it really does look like a yokocho, you know,
04:48 with the lanterns and the signs and the window.
04:52 If we go downstairs I can show you the, I tried to recreate an izakaya.
04:59 So in Japan because most people live in like tiny houses and like you know they have paper
05:06 thin walls, a lot of times like young people who are university students they don't actually
05:11 invite people to their house, they'll hang out with friends in what's called an izakaya.
05:16 So we tried to recreate an izakaya downstairs.
05:24 So yeah over here we have our izakaya and usually there'll be like a lot of corridors
05:30 and it'll all just have these little rooms.
05:33 If you go inside we tried to recreate a traditional Japanese room with the sunken floor.
05:41 So you actually sit with your legs under the table and the floor is sunken.
05:47 And then through here we've got a bigger room.
05:53 And over here we have just a little room.
05:56 But any Japanese people I've shown these rooms to they're just like "Oh my god this is exactly
06:01 like Japan!"
06:02 So I'm kind of proud of these rooms.
06:04 And it's also just a great place to hang out.
06:08 We recently invested in a bunch of games like Jenga, chess, Scrabble, poker.
06:16 So people can like hang out here, play games with their friends and just like chill.