Ichiro Ramen, Cambridge

The old adage that if you build a better mousetrap then the world will beat a path to your door conspicuously fails to apply to restaurants. A good location, a well-known name and good presentation do enough to get people through the doors that the actual quality of the food is barely relevant, while the best food in the world is going to be wasted if you aren't actually getting people to the tables to eat it.

Ichiro Ramen, the Japanese / Malaysian restaurant that used to be on King's Street and is now on Homerton Street is a case in point. Homerton Street is the odd little cul-de-sac on the opposite side of Hills Road from the leisure park, and the fact that I have to explain this should probably set alarm bells ringing. It's the home of the Chinese buffet that you can see advertised from the train as you come into Cambridge, and until recently it had a Sichuan restaurant, too. Ichiro Ramen seems to have taken over the premises (and, confusingly, the illuminated sign) of the latter. Even in its King's Street incarnation, Ichiro was easy to miss, but here it might as well be on Mars as far as passing trade goes. There are probably undercover CIA operatives in Cambridge whose presence is better publicized, and sadly this seems to be reflected in an almost empty restaurant.

What makes this most upsetting is the fact that the food at Ichiro is so damned good.

I'd been once before, and been generally impressed by the vegetable tempura, yaki gyoza, katsu curry and laksa, but this last visit we hit the jackpot. Visiting with a friend for a bite to eat before a gig, we started off with takoyaki and roti canai respectively. The roti canai was excellent - two buttery, flaky, paratha-like flatbreads served with a single chicken thigh in a deliciously spicy curry sauce - but the takoyaki were astonishing. I'd not tried these before, but they turn out to be deep fried batter balls, stuffed with minced octopus and topped with Japanese mayonnaise and one of those mysterious Japanese brown sauces. The result is beguilingly complicated in its mix of subtle and unfamiliar flavors but straightforwardly satisfying in its oily crunch.

For main courses, we'd both gone for the sort of big-bowl soups that form the backbone of the menu. My friend went for fish laksa, which he seemed more than happy with, while I went for the seafood kimchi udon. It's perhaps characteristic of what you're getting at Ichiro that where a lot of restaurants treat "seafood" as meaning a few prawns and maybe a bit of squid if you're lucky, my bowl of noodle soup came topped with octopus, prawns, mussels, seaweed and a whole salmon steak, as well as the eponymous kimchi.

As we neared the end of the mammoth bowls of soup, the chef - possibly feeling the want of anything else to do in an empty restaurant - emerged from the kitchen to offer us a delicate little apple salad, spiked with with slithers of chilli and pork crackling. Like everything else we ate, it was excellent.

The bill came £40 for two including service, for two courses plus the ubiquitous green tea.

So to conclude: Ichiro Ramen is good. Very good. Get there as soon as you can, because you might not have the chance for very long...