Lantern Broth

6pm till late · 3am Fridays and Saturdays

Three broths, fourteen stools, and a shutter that comes down when the pots run dry.

Lantern Broth is a counter, not a restaurant. You sit shoulder to shoulder facing the pass, the barley tea is free, and the last bowl goes out thirty minutes before close — or the moment the third pot is scraped, whichever happens first.

See tonight’s cardWhy we do it this way

Tonight’s
three broths

Book one
of two booths

Nineteen hours · skimmed four times · one scorched onion

Made slowly, sold late

The whole story →

  • Three pots, always

    Pork for nineteen hours, chicken for eleven, kombu steeped cold overnight. Never a fourth.

  • One noodle maker

    Eight hundred metres away, above a tyre place. Delivered at four, six hours before you eat them.

  • Fourteen stools

    All of them held for whoever turns up. Only the two booths at the back take a booking.

  • Nothing to explain

    No truffle oil, no cheese, no bowl that needs a paragraph before you can order it.

The counter

Last bowl goes out thirty minutes before close, or the moment the third pot is scraped — whichever comes first.

  • Since 2016
  • 14 at the counter, 2 booths of four

A warm room at a cold hour. Slow broth, hand-cut scallion, and the particular quiet of a counter at half past two in the morning.

Top of the card tonight

Ramen

Nineteen-Hour Tonkotsu

The bowl the bar was opened to sell. Pork bone broth pushed for nineteen hours, thin straight noodles, and nothing on top that has to be explained.

$19.00

Ramen · After 11pm only

Closing-Time Tantan

Sesame, chilli oil and minced pork, sold only after eleven. It exists because the cooks wanted something to eat at the end of a shift and other people kept asking for it.

$21.00Spice level 4 of 5 — Properly hot.

Ramen

Black Garlic Mayu

The tonkotsu, darkened. Garlic burnt in sesame oil until it is genuinely black, then blitzed and swirled in at the pass.

$21.00Spice level 1 of 5 — A whisper.

We close when the pots do

There is no reheating, no second batch and no back-up. We have shut at twenty to ten on a Friday and we will do it again. If the lantern above the door is off, the broth is gone — check it from the top of the lane before you walk down.

Find the counter

Kettle Lane

The week, in order

  • MondayClosed — broth day
  • Tue – Thu6pm – 1am
  • Fri – Sat6pm – 3am
  • Sunday6pm – midnight

6 Kettle Lane, Northbridge

Five things we hold to

  1. No substitutions after 11pm

    One cook, three pots, and a queue on the pavement. Before eleven we will happily rebuild a bowl for you.

  2. No fusion, no novelty

    No truffle oil, no cheese pull, no birria. If it would not have made sense in 1994, it does not go in the bowl.

  3. The counter is walk-in

    All fourteen stools are held for whoever turns up. Only the two booths take bookings.

  4. Twenty minutes when there is a queue

    Eat, talk, go. Nobody has ever been asked to leave, but everybody knows the number.

  5. We close when the pots do

    Broth is finite. We have shut at 9:40pm on a Friday and will do it again without apology.

Fourteen stools. No bookings. Come early, or come very late.

The counter is first-come and always will be. The two booths at the back take a reservation, and after midnight the queue on Kettle Lane is usually shorter than it looks from the corner.

Reserve a boothRead the card first

How the counter works

  1. Turn up. If all fourteen are full, leave a name with whoever is nearest the door.
  2. Order at the pass. Bowls land in about four minutes, faster if it is quiet.
  3. Eat while it is hot. Twenty minutes is the number when there is a queue outside.
  4. Pay at the end, at the till by the shutter. Barley tea is not on the bill.

The shio, cold-steeped eighteen hours and never boiled.

From the journal

Nineteen hours, and why not twenty

We ran the same tonkotsu pot to sixteen, nineteen and twenty-two hours for a month and tasted all three side by side. One of them was obviously right, and it was not the longest.