The Phenomenon of the Ramen Burger

Imagine having a dish on a restaurant menu that is so laborious to put together that it is never offered for lunch or dinner! But that’s the Ramen Burger for you. It is made of ramen noodles, appropriately shaped, to take the place of a bun. The trick is that on one hand, it cannot afford to slip and slide all over your plate; on the other it cannot be compressed so tightly together that it loses its appeal as a burger bun made of noodles.

So fiendishly difficult is the whole task that it has never caught on in Delhi. The only two places that serve it are Fork You Too and Guppy by ai. The former uses a regular bun and slips in a bit of ramen between the bun and the patty, leaving Guppy by ai to present the Full Monty. Four variants Guppy offers: pulled pork belly, tenderloin, chicken and mushrooms. The pulled pork version is served with two crisply-fried bacon rashers and all are accompanied by an addictive tonkatsu sauce and a tart mayo dip. On the minus side, you cannot take a bite of the entire burger, so you are forced to eat it a few layers at a time, and hence, enjoy it more fully.

There are a couple of problems that the restaurant has nimbly side-stepped. The kitchen is too tiny to allow one extra chef who is in-charge of preparing just burgers, so Guppy offers them between 5 and 8 pm when the kitchen does nothing else.

An international favourite has remained the preserve of one restaurant because of the time it takes to prepare it!