Nissin UK - The Ramen Masters Cup Noodle - Nissin x Shoryu Review

I picked up the Nissin x Shoryu Cup Noodle at the Japan Centre supermarket in London on Leicester Square.  Japan Centre bills themselves as a Japanese Food Hall since 1976 and I'd say they live up to the billing.  They are in the basement of the building with a ramen restaurant above and the fairly large store has many freshly made meals and imported food/snack items from Japan.

While Nissin EU has had a line of Cup Noodles available many many years, they recently started The Ramen Masters series of flavours.  The Nissin x Shoryu is the first one, and they have now added Takumi Special Miso Ramen from another famous European ramen restaurant.  Shoryu is well known UK ramen restaurant and they teamed up with Nissin to create a Hakata Tonkotsu flavour based on their signature Ganso ramen.  The Ramen Masters version has a pork and chicken broth, green onion, red ginger, kikurage mushrooms, and a plant-based meat topping.

Ramen Masters Nissin x Shoryu

The Ramen Master line is highlighted with a big red box with white print.  This pretty much pops against the black background with the dull gold, circular, Shoryu logo below it.  A bowl of ramen with the toppings included is shown below that.  The graphic design of the cup makes it look very classy and sophisticated.

The metal foil lid of the cup shows images of Shoryu and even Big Ben to let you know it's dealing with the UK. Very cool design with the image montage and there is even a tiny picture of the ramen.

Back of the cup.  Show nutritional information and preparation directions.  The cup is made of plastic with a thin cardboard exterior liner.

Ingredients in English, German, and French.  How cool is that!  In Canada it is English and French.

When you pull the lid back it reveals a whole lot of soup base powder and toppings.

I added boiling water to the fill line, closed the lid, and let the noodles rehydrate for 4 minutes.

The soup had a nice savory aroma of a good tonkotsu. The smell and taste of Tonkotsu is hard to describe as it isn't meaty or even necessarily salty or spicy.  A good tonkotsu broth is just rich, smooth, has a light creamy-ish texture, and is savoury.  It is quite good, not offensive to the taste buds in any way, but it isn't like most meat based broths.  The noodles were of a slightly thicker, regular size and might have had a firmer break and snap than the regular noodles from Japan when bitten into.

The soup powder had lots of mushrooms, smelled slightly buttery, with lots of garlic bits and green onions along with vegetable protein of some sort.   The taste was pretty good with a bit of a meaty undertone.  I thought there was a slightly thicker texture to the soup than your normal broth (which works for this) too.  There was lots of umami with a hint of garlic to it.  There were a lot of little bits of texture vegetable (soy?) protein and tree ear mushroom, and I think these might have thrown the flavour profile off a bit even if they added umami to it.  Still, it was a tasty cup of tonkotsu flavoured cup noodle. 

The noodles after mixing everything well and having a few fork-fulls.

Closeup of the ramen.

 

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