Dashi is delightful

After the SFWA Reads Southeast event last night, a group of us headed over to downtown Durham's Dashi restaurant for dinner.  Dashi is a two-story establishment that features a ramen restaurant on the bottom floor and an izakaya (basically, a sort of Japanese pub) on the second story.  The night was cool, and I've been wanting to try their ramen, so we stuck to the ground floor.

I'm happy to report that the entire experience was delightful.  I'd read about long waits, but we were late enough that we were able to get a couple of tables right away.  Everyone on staff was smiling and helpful and incredibly pleasant.

The true stars, though, were, as they should be, the ramen bowls.  We sampled a few different broths, and most of us also customized our bowls with some of the available add-ons.  If you go there, I particularly recommend the local pork meatballs, which were simply delicious.  With a range of broths to choose from and 14 different items you can add, you could eat there a great many times and still come nowhere near to experiencing all the available variations.

My only complaint is that the add-ons arrived a bit cooler than the rest of the bowl.  It was easy enough to fix that problem by stirring them into the broth and waiting a minute or two, but the chefs should have done that for us.

I consider that a small thing, however, in the face of how delicious the bowls were.

The dessert menu proved to be a small selection of ice creams from Parlour, which frequent readers (and ice cream fans) will know is the best (by far) local ice cream shop.  None of these flavors were available at the Parlour store, so we shared them all among our group.

I definitely recommend Dashi and look forward to going back.