Sumo Bar Happy, Waterloo Street

Sumo Bar Happy is by the people behind Tanuki Raw and a bunch of other places that I've never visited. What intrigued me about this outpost was its setup as a casual ramen and sake bar - doing beef based ramen and no less.

Beef based ramen are quite the rarity here if you didn't already know. Apart from the one off beef bone broth bowl from Tampopo ages ago and the gyutan negishio bowl from Sandaime Bunji, they're about as oftenly seen as the nine tailed fox.

There's beef gyoza on the menu. Crispy skin and a shade of beet root red which they have described as capsicum wrappers stuffed with US Prime short rib mince. I could tell that it wasn't pork but I'm not getting a definite beefiness. Pretty looking gyozas though.

We ordered sashimi. These guys aren't exactly the specialist for that and from the nature of this particular shop, I wouldn't expect any real focus be put into sashimi as part of their menu. It's not bad if one were to overlook the small slices and poor knife work though. 

What I liked was their Kinsanji Miso with barley that was served on the sticks of cucumbers. Those were really nice and sweet.

That's a pretty mini loco moco don which featured their house made Nagano pork luncheon meat with a small slab of pan fried foie gras and a fried quail's egg. Pretty small, pretty cholesterol laden, pretty heart clogging and pretty good. That luncheon meat was a lot meatier in texture than the regular canned variety. Probably more akin to a meat loaf. It's actually kinda nice. I liked those sweet marinated mushrooms they put in the donburi too.

Impressive looking was the bone in short rib ramen. The rib that came with the bowl was pretty huge. The meat was chopstick tender. So tender that it fell off the bone on the way to the table.

No real need for the fork and knife which the staff thought might come in handy since one could simply pick the meat off the rib with a chopstick. I thought it was quite good.

The noodles were those thin variety that I liked. But they were not exactly harigane after we were done with the rib to work on them. I'm pretty sure this has got to be one of the heaviest bowl of noodles I've had.