Barcelona Is Going Insane for Hiroki Yoshiyuki’s Ramen Noodles

Barcelona is famous for its world-renowned Catalan cuisine. Its buzzing restaurants are brimming with flavour-packed dishes, whether you're after midnight arroz negro, fluffy patatas bravas, awesome artisan burgers, or simply some humble bread rubbed with fragrant tomato, garlic, and olive oil, washed down by a few local beers. The city offers so many culinary gems that it's impossible for even the most discerning of gourmands to walk around the city without a raging food boner.

And the region of Catalunya is no stranger to noodles. Fideuà, a dish originally from Valencia, is similar to a paella but made with vermicelli noodles instead of rice and served with aioli. But before Hiroki Yoshiyuki came to Barcelona, there was nowhere in the city to sit down for a bowl of Japanese ramen.

In 2012, Hiroki opened Ramen-Ya Hiro in Barcelona's Eixample district, and the city is still going absolutely apeshit over it. Every day, there's a long queue of people waiting for seats, often with a few late-comers trying to blag their way in with the waiters, like underage ravers trying to flirt with unimpressed bouncers before being turned away. They come to Ramen-Ya willing to wait for 40 minutes to an hour—something you don't often see in this city.

The restaurant is small, homey, and buzzing, decorated with trinkets and knick-knacks, with swirls of steam rising up from the big vats of stock in the kitchen. Inside, you'll feel instantly transported to Japan.

After a mad lunch service, I sit down with Hiroki to talk about his journey to running a ramen restaurant. He has an infectious, warm laughter and kind eyes. There's a good vibe going among the team inside the little restaurant, with lots of poking fun at each other between attending to stock or forming filling for gyozas.

Ramen can be found everywhere in Hiroki's hometown of Hiroshima. "In Japan, since I was a little boy, I ate ramen very often—I've grown up with it. When I went out with my friends, we always had ramen. In Japan, there are ramen shops open until six in the morning. Young people go out clubbing and then eat ramen—the broth is really good for a hangover. Just eat it before you sleep and you'll be fine."

Despite Hiroki growing up surrounded by ramen, he learned the art of making the noodles in Australia. Wait, what?

Hiroki explains that most noodle shops in Hiroshima didn't actually make their noodles from scratch. They are fast food places in the truest sense, where the ramen cooks mostly just chuck read-made noodles into boiling water before serving them up with broth and toppings.

But Hiroki wanted to perfect the art of making ramen from scratch, so he came to Sydney on a working visa at a time when the city only had two or three ramen restaurants. He started working in one of them and got to learn the full process of making the noodles—and he loved it.

After Australia, Hiroki went back to work in Tokyo, where he took an unfulfilling job in an uninspiring office. "Too much for a country-boy," Hiroki says as he shakes his head. "I hated it, and I wanted to change my life."

In Tokyo, he often thought about his time in Australia and how much he had enjoyed being a ramen chef there. His dream about opening his own ramen restaurant grew stronger and more defined. "I had the idea in my brain clearly—a vision of the small local, just like this one," Hiroki tells me, gesturing around the small restaurant.

"I decided on Barcelona because I imagined that Barcelona would be good, that people would be open minded. I liked the idea of Spanish culture and food, and the Mediterranean. And sun is very important for me," he says. "So I moved here, and started to learn Spanish."

In Barcelona, he started working at a Japanese restaurant called Tempura-Ha, which served sushi and tempura. It was in the kitchen there that Hiroki started perfecting his ramen. On Sundays, when the restaurant was closed, he could let his culinary freak flag fly and experiment with flavours, try different ramen recipes, and play with new textures. Tempura-Ha didn't have a machine to make noodles, so Hiroki bought a small Italian pasta machine and started with that.

After working at Tempura-Ya for three years, he finally settled on his recipe and opened Ramen-Ya Hiro in 2012. As soon as it opened, Japanese tourists and expats quickly became die-hard fans, happy to finally be able to slurp on properly made ramen again. "There were always people queuing, right from the beginning." Hiroki says. "It was full of Japanese people, and they talked to their friends and brought them here. then those friends brought more people. Now people wait outside every day."

I ask him if his restaurant's popularity ever gets exhausting. "Yeah, it's tiring," Hiroki says with a laugh. "But when I get tired, I just remember when I was working in Tokyo in an office for three years, sometimes for 15 hours a day, without a lunch break, without resting, with a telephone glued to my ear, eating at the desk… then taking that train, standing up. It was horrible. I always try to remember that when this is tiring, because this is much better!"

As for what makes his ramen so great, Hiroki is coy about the details. "It's a secret,"he says when I ask about his noodles. Well, touché. But why are people so obsessed with it? "Because of the broth,"he says. And how is that made? "It's a secret!"

Hiroki finally shares that the pork broth is made from pork and pork bones, which he cooks for 15 hours to extract their flavour. It gets very concentrated, and is free of chemicals, making for a natural and invigorating taste. Ramen-Ya Hiro specialises in three main soups to keep the quality superb and the service speedy. You choose between a pork and soy, miso, or seafood broth, served with a huge helping of perfectly elastic noodles and the toppings of your choice. The sliced pork is super-succulent and hugely popular.

In the winter, many come for the wonderful warmth of Hiroki's ramen, but plenty of people still queue up at other times of year. "I make a summer ramen, too,"Hiroki says. "It's fresher. With lime, vinegar, and yuzu."

As the guys are taking a break and preparing for the night service, I bid farewell to the ramen gang and thank Hiroki for his time. And VICE? Hiroki hasn't heard of it.

"Is it part of the Discovery Channel?" he asks. I say no, it's a media company with lots of different channels, one of them being MUNCHIES. "Is it based in Barcelona?" I tell him no, that the editor I'm working with for this story is in New York.

"New York? Someone in New York wants to hear about my ramen?" For a moment, Hiroki looks confused, and then he smiles.