My duck was just about edible, the truly awful squid was certainly not

I BROKE with the habit of never eating with chefs the other night i n Cork and spent a very pleasant evening with a very experienced wielder of pots and pans. Ramen was not our first choice (our first choice was closed for January) but we approached it with some degree of enthusiasm. If, we reasoned, it did a decent take on Asian street food, we would be very happy.

Ramen has taking Cork by storm, according to some, and having teething problems according to TripAdvisor, a forum which I approach with a great deal of scepticism.

To be fair to Ramen, they engage with their TripAdvisor detractors, and in a positive and friendly manner.

And I presume the online claim of a rude, gum-chewing waitress is either exaggerated or apocryphal.

Ramen is in a moderately-sized room, and was pretty busy on a Friday night. The big open kitchen was a flurry of activity with what appeared to be a lot of chefs, all in orange T-shirts, wielding woks.

For anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant kitchen, it would evokes visions of Dante’s inner circle of Hell. For others, it may just look exciting.

The restaurant itself appears to owe much to Neon in Dublin’s Camden Street but it avoids Neon’s rather cool, industrial chic look, in favour of something a little more conventional; Cork was ever thus.

The common factors are bench seating and a DIY ice cream machine; you get a cone per person and help yourself; we skipped this delight, it being a very cold, wintry night with a wind as sharp as a Sabatier knife.

While the food at Neon, on the one occasion I visited quite some time ago, was adequate rather than exciting, the grub at Ramen ranged from the edible to the downright unpleasant.

Now, I followed the suggestion of my chef companion who thought it would be a good idea – and eminently fair – to ask the chef to choose for us.

So, I have to assume that what we got is what Ramen does best. In which case, heaven help us.

For a shade over a tenner we got a ‘bento box’ containing two small skewers of chicken satays with a small dollop of sauce; two spring rolls with a sort of sweet chilli sauce; andan two prawns with what appeared to be the sweet chilli sauce’s first cousin.

Firstly, a bento box is a Japanese traditiontion and tthe correct details need not detain us here; tthey certainly didn’t stand in the way of Ramen borrowing the phrase. This was a measly starter platter, not a bento box. The chicken was dry, the marinade timid, the sauce gloopy and too sweet; the spring rolls were alright in a vaguely savoury and rather oily kind of way; the prawns were… small and few. For over a tenner? Please! And then the mains which come in those cartons which we in Ireland first saw on Friends: square and cardboard and not very big.

One of them contained a form of stir-fried duck. It did not take long to locate all of the meat. The rest, the overcooked vegetable element, was mushy, hard to identify and bathed in oceans of a dark, somewhat soy sauce-ish liquid with a touch of that flavour best described as ‘burnt’. No, I don’t know how they do that, but there you have it.

Having said that, and, as I say, this was a cold, windy night in a part of Cork city not heavily freighted with places to eat, this duck dish had the merit of being edible even if eating the thing is not the kind of activity I would elect to engage in for mere pleasure. The squid dish, on the other hand, was quite inedible.

Cut into rectangles which then rolled themselves up on cooking (that’s what squid does, nothing wrong with that) the squid swam in more dark liquid which may or may not have tasted, vaguely or otherwise, of soy sauce (or anything else for that matter). It was impossible to say, thanks to the overwhelming aroma of fish.

Now, fresh squid doesn’t smell of fish. And as virtually all squid used in Ireland is frozen, there is no excuse for it not being fresh.

Frozen food gets bad press. In fact, it’s the most natural form of preservation.

So how did this squid smell far from fresh? I have no idea and perhaps don’t want to.

But what really beats me is how anyone could have let this pungently unattractive dish leave the kitchen?

Especially when it was being offered as an ambassador for the restaurant?

The bill came to a little over €40, including two beers.