Yah Yah Ya ramen – downtown

Grayson and I have been to the Yah Yah Ya ramen Richmond location before and enjoyed what they had to offer so we decided to go check out the downtown location. The downtown Yah Yah Ya ramen location was more spacious than the Richmond one and it had hand painted murals that covered each of the walls.

Originally we weren’t going to go downtown but I’m so glad we did because this location had a completely different feel than the Richmond location. Not only was it more spacious but it was better lit and colourful.

Whenever we go to a ramen shop, we always choose something from their seasonal menu and then one from their regular menu. Last time they offered a kimchi soupless ramen on special since we went in the summer. This visit, the special seemed to be the Tsukemen and Tan tan men. Grayson’ isn’t a fan of spicy food so we opted to get the Tsukemen.

Tsukemen

★★★★

Tsukemen is different from soupless and regular ramen in that the ramen comes soupless but you get a bowl of dipping soup on the side. The ramen is served warm or cold depending on what you prefer. We decided to get ours served warm because it was a cold day.

The dipping soup is similar to tonkotsu broth but a little richer in flavour so that when you get a flavourful slurp of noodles each time. We found it difficult to separate the noodles in the bowl since they were stuck together so we added a few spoonfuls of the dipping soup to help. The chashu slices had a balance between fattiness and lean meat. It didn’t have much flavor to it but it was soft and tender.

Arubasoba

★★★

To go with our Tsukemen, we got the Aburasoba. This is similar to the mazesoba we got last time but came with chashu instead of ground meat. We found that this one didn’t have as much flavour as the mazesoba and we would prefer the mazesoba in comparison. There was not a lot of sauce to mix the noodles in and the little sauce there was had a strong sesame oil flavour. In the end we had to add some of the dipping soup from the tsukemen in it to add some more flavour.

Onigiri

★★

Since the two bowls of ramen weren’t filling enough, we decided to add the onigiri as an add-on again. The onigiri didn’t have much flavour so we ended up putting the dipping soup on it too. Do you notice a trend here that the dipping soup kept coming in to solve all the flavourless issues? I don’t know why we ordered the onigiri again since last time I distinctly remember we weren’t a huge fan of them but it did fill us up at the end of our meal.

Quick bites

1. Good ramen variety with option to change to thin or spinach ramen
2. Soupless noodles hit and miss
3. No-go on the onigiri