Glasgow Food Stories: Meet the man behind Ramen Dayo, Paul Beveridge
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.
Transcript
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.