Since 2016 6 Kettle Lane, Northbridge
We only ever wanted to be somewhere to sit at midnight.
Not a destination, not a concept, and emphatically not a group. One counter, one kitchen, a window up the road, and a card that has not grown in four years. What follows is everything we would tell you if you sat at stool four and asked.
Broth is the whole argument
Everything else in a bowl of ramen can be bought. Noodles can be bought — ours are, from people who do it better than we would. Tare can be bought. Chashu can be bought. Broth is the only part that cannot leave the building, and it is the only part that is genuinely ours.
Which is why the pots decide everything here: the hours, the closing time, the size of the card, and the fact that we shut on Mondays. We are not running a restaurant with three pots in it. We are running three pots, with a room attached.
Tonkotsu
19 hoursPork femur and trotter at a rolling boil, skimmed four times, one scorched onion. Goes on at eleven in the morning and is ready when we open.
Chicken
11 hoursWhole birds and backs held at a shiver, never a boil. Clear enough to read print through, and the moment it boils we are selling something else.
Kombu
18 hours, coldRausu kombu steeped cold overnight, then shiitake and roasted barley at 60°C. Nothing in this pot is ever heated past that.
Nothing on this card needs a paragraph before you can order it. If it did, we would have got something wrong in the kitchen and tried to fix it on the menu.
Nine years, four decisions
- 2016
A tyre shop with a kitchen behind it
Two of us, a five-year lease on a lane nobody walked down, and a counter built from a single piece of reclaimed iroko that we still have not managed to mark badly enough to replace.
- 2019
We stopped doing lunch
Three years of opening at noon taught us that our broth is at its best eleven hours after it goes on, which is six in the evening, not midday. So we gave up half the day and got a better bowl.
- 2021
The third pot
The vegan shio went on the card properly, with its own pot, its own ladle and its own noodle basket. It took two years to make it good enough that it was not an apology.
- 2023
The window at Dunbar
Six standing places, one broth a night, chalked on the shutter. It exists because the market asked and because a second full kitchen would have ended us.
What we refuse to do
And what we will →No substitutions after 11pm
One cook, three pots, and a queue on the pavement. Before eleven we will happily rebuild a bowl for you.
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.
The counter is walk-in
All fourteen stools are held for whoever turns up. Only the two booths take bookings.
Twenty minutes when there is a queue
Eat, talk, go. Nobody has ever been asked to leave, but everybody knows the number.
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.
If it is lit, there is broth.
Who is behind the pass
Four people, two of whom have been here since the lease was signed
There is no head chef, because at a fourteen-seat counter the title would be a joke. Two of us opened the place, two joined in 2019 and 2022, and all four cook every station including the one nobody wants, which is peeling eggs.
Nobody works more than four nights. That rule costs us money and it is the reason the bowl at half past two is the same bowl as the one at seven.
Come and sit at the counter.
Fourteen stools, first come. Two booths, bookable. Barley tea either way, and nobody has ever been asked to leave.