The noodle maker on Dunbar Street

Eight hundred metres from the counter, above a tyre place, there is a room with two mixers, an extruder and a temperature problem in summer. Everything we serve in a bowl comes out of it.

Three noodles, not thirty

We buy exactly three: a 1.6mm thin straight, a 1.9mm wavy medium, and a 2.2mm wavy thick. That is not a house style, it is a supply reality. Each new specification means a change of die, a purge run that gets thrown away, and a minimum order we cannot sell through before it stales. Three is what fits.

The thin straight is 34% hydration and cut at twenty seconds. The wavy medium is 38% and wants ninety. The thick is 40% and takes two full minutes, which is why the miso bowl is the slowest thing on the pass and why we stopped putting it on during the 1am rush.

The thing we stopped asking for

For two years we asked about a whole wheat noodle. It would have been good with the shio. Every time the answer was a version of the same thing: the extruder would need stripping and rebuilding between runs, it would cost half a day, and for our volume it does not make sense for either of us.

Alkalinity, briefly

Ramen noodles are wheat, water, salt and kansui — alkaline mineral water, which is what makes them yellow, springy and faintly sulphurous in a way that reads as “ramen” before you have tasted anything. Too little and you have pasta in soup. Too much and the noodle goes soapy and slightly bitter, and no broth will hide it.

Ours sit at a level that is, by the maker’s own description, “a bit lower than everyone else asks for”. That was a decision made in a car park in 2016 over two sample bags, and we have never revisited it.

Delivery is at four

Every day except Monday, in unmarked crates, through the back door, by one of the two people who made them. Six hours ahead of service. Noodles made yesterday are noticeably worse and noodles made Friday for Sunday are a different product entirely, which is the real reason we shut on Mondays.