Best Ramen in Manchester

Manchester has never exactly provided a shortage of excuses to seek comfort. Grey skies, sudden downpours and those pavements that splash up your leg, miserable days in Manchester have become part of life here. Which may go some way towards explaining the city’s love affair with ramen.

Across Manchester, bowls of ramen are turning up in all sorts of places. Tiny counters, bustling dining rooms, cosy ramen bars and all sorts of unexpected places in between. In fact, the city has become so obsessed about the stuff, that nobody seems remotely bothered by the fact its almost impossible to eat without wearing half of the broth down your front.

Fortunately for us, that means there are plenty to choose from.

These are some of our favourites.

Shoryu

Anybody who has spent enough time awell give usround Piccadilly Gardens will know that finding somewhere to eat can occasionally feel like a gamble.

Thankfully, Shoryu removes a lot of that uncertainty.

The Japanese ramen bar has been serving Hakata-style tonkotsu in Manchester for years, earning a reputation as one of the city’s most dependable ramen recommendations.

Not every meal needs to surprise you. Sometimes you just want something you know is going to be good.

All that’s left to say is Irasshaimase! You’ll be hearing that, and the bang of the drum, plenty of times during your visit.

New Wave Ramen

You can tell a lot about a restaurant just by the music it plays. So when New Wave had the ingenious idea of combining excellent ramen and excellent taste in records, I don’t think anyone quite realised how well the two would get along.

When some of the tastiest noodles in the region meet a soundtrack curated by some of Manchester’s most talented DJs, you’ve got a pretty serious venue on your hands.

An entire room has been dedicated to making noodles from scratch, which is exactly the sort of obsession we’d like to see when we’re about to get served up the highlight of our week. Halfway through the bowl, dedicating an entire room to noodles start to feel remarkably reasonable.

If we were talking about any other venue, that’s where we’d stop. But New Wave Ramen isn’t any other venue.

All that noodle obsession gets paired with a moody izakaya atmosphere, carefully selected records and weekend DJ sets that make it just as easy to stay for another drink as it is to order another bowl.

The noodle room may be Tokyo, but the soundtrack is pure Manchester.

Maki & Ramen

Trying to organise dinner with a group chat should count as emotional labour.

Someone wants ramen. Someone wants sushi. Someone claims they’re easy, then rejects every suggestion put forward. Maki & Ramen is built for that exact indecisive chaos.

Founded by Teddy Lee after training in Tokyo, the restaurant brings ramen, sushi and Japanese comfort food together under one roof. The menu has enough range to keep everyone happy, but still feels properly rooted in what it does best.

The ramen earns its place here, but the real strength is flexibility.

A useful booking when nobody can agree, and the group chat plans are in serious danger of collapsing.

RAMENSHOP

Calling your restaurant Ramenshop is a fairly confident move. The clue is very much in the name, which means people tend to arrive with certain expectations.

That’s a whole lot of pressure to put on a bowl of noodles.

While some restaurants spend years trying to convince you they’re different, Ramenshop takes a much more direct approach. Rich tonkotsu broths, spicy bowls, crispy fried chicken and sides capable of derailing even the most disciplined order. There’s enough variety to keep things interesting without disappearing into a menu the size of a small novel. In fact, the whole thing fits comfortably onto an A5 sheet of paper.

And that A5 menu tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Every dish feels like its survived the most ruthless selection process. No panic inclusions. No token additions. No desperate attempt to cater to every possible craving.

It turns out confidence is considerably easier to pull off when you’re right. In fairness, if we were serving ramen like that, we’d probably put it in the name too.

Suki Suki

Some dinners start with ramen and end with cocktails. Suki Suki understands that journey very well.

Sat by the Great Northern, it has bowls of ramen alongside bao, salt and pepper dishes, craft beer and enough Pan-Asian plates to make the table slowly lose discipline.

You can keep things simple if you want. A bowl of noodles, maybe a drink, perfectly respectable. But then somebody orders bao, another drink appears, and suddenly the evening has developed a bit more ambition.

That’s the fun of it. Suki Suki works best when dinner is allowed to become plans.

Hello Oriental

Manchester’s relationship with Asian food has changed massively over the last decade. Hello Oriental feels like a perfect example as to why.

Spread across three floors, the Circle Square venue is brimming with sensational ramen, dim sum, roast meats, bao buns, desserts and just about every other Asian comfort food you could think of. Wherever your eyes land first, you’re usually onto a winner. The challenge comes when you spot six other things on neighbouring tables that suddenly look equally as tempting as your choice.

The ramen more than deserves its place on this list, but half the fun is everything happening around it. Every table seems to be trying something different, which makes it very difficult not to start planning your next visit before you’ve finished the first one.

Come hungry, and let your curiosity do the rest of the work.

Taisho

Most restaurants introduce themselves politely. Taisho kicked the door off its hinges.

As the newest opening on this list, it would have been perfectly understandable if the Chinatown newcomer had taken a little time to find its feet. Instead, it arrived with bright-green bowls of ramen, beer bombs, potato salad served in ice cream cones and the sort of blinding swagger that suggests blending into the background was never really part of the plan.

The colourful bowls are what first catch your attention. Fair enough, really. It’s not every day a bowl of ramen turns up looking like that. The clever bit is that Taisho has far more going for it than the colour.

While most ramen spots treat tsukemen as a supporting act, Taisho has built much of its identity around the Tokyo speciality. Thick chilled noodles are served separately before being plunged into intensely rich dipping broths, creating something completely different to the ramen most Mancunians will be used to.

Because making an entrance is one thing. Making sure people return afterwards is considerably harder.