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The line of customers in front of Ramen del Barrio’s new location stretched down the block and around the corner on the restaurant’s first day of business, a hot Saturday in late July. Wait times in the queue were between ninety minutes and two hours. One woman in line fainted from heat exhaustion. She was rushed into the restaurant by strangers, sat down at a table, and given water. Owner-chef Christopher Krinsky insisted on feeding her immediately. As he spoke with the woman, Krinsky learned she had been a longtime customer at the previous location, a stall inside Asian grocer Hana World Market, which closed in December 2025. “She decided to come back the next day and stand in line all over again,” Krinsky tells me. “Hopefully with an umbrella.” That first day, Krinsky and his team of cooks and front-of-house staff served 486 bowls of ramen.
More than a month later, the line at Ramen del Barrio remains for both lunch and dinner, although it’s a bit shorter now—the wait is fifteen to thirty minutes, as I experienced on my visits in August. Meanwhile, the number of bowls served is increasing: Some days, nearly six hundred orders of ramen are sold. (The kitchen’s capacity is currently 690 bowls.) That’s up from the maximum of 240 portions that Krinsky and his team could serve at the original counter, which earned a Bib Gourmand from Michelin and got a semifinalist nod for Best New Restaurant in the 2024 James Beard Awards.
Everything at the new Ramen del Barrio is bigger. (Well, everything except the size of the ramen bowls—they’re still twelve fluid ounces.) The old shop’s kitchen measured 500 square feet. Now Krinsky and his cooks work in a kitchen three times that size, within a 2,600-square-foot interior. His staff has grown from 9 to 22. With the increase in scale, I am happy to report the food hasn’t suffered. It’s improved so much that I returned after one visit to eat there twice in one day.
The signature carnitas tonkotsu—braised and shredded pork in a cloudy, lard-spiked broth with a loose collection of crunchy tortilla strips resting against the edge of the bowl—is a pungent cauldron that is good even when the outside temperature sails past the century mark. Request a side of habanero mayu to mix into the ramen. The chile-infused paste consists of garlic cooked in oil until blackened, and it adds spice and a savory depth. The chilaquiles ramen buoys classic elements of the Mexican breakfast dish, including the finishing squiggles of crema, with the same carnitas that are featured in the tonkotsu. But the chilaquiles ramen features thicker noodles that are chewier and not as slurpable as the silkier standard.
In the pozole tonkotsu, small white, iridescent pearls of hominy lean against a drift of carnitas in a broth permeated with either green or red salsa. The latter option is a favorite of Ramen del Barrio regular Mr. Jeff, as the staff calls him. He is greeted with the same phrase every customer is upon ordering, “irasshaimase” (a Japanese expression of welcoming), but he gets it personalized with his nickname as a playful tease and gratitude for his return. The reaction from other patrons is always the same. “Everyone kind of drops silent and just looks at him,” Krinsky says. “We’re like, ‘He’s Mr. Jeff,’ and everyone’s like, ‘Who the f— is Mr. Jeff?’ ” To his pozole tonkotsu rojo, Mr. Jeff adds half an avocado and a creamy soft-boiled egg that’s been soaked for four days in soy, mirin, and sake. The result is pure, fatty comfort.
Lighter bites are prevalent as well. One of my favorites is the bluefin tostada, with folded fans of dark pink tuna that caress the edge of the crisped corn tortilla. The taco menu has changed some from the one at the original location. The lengua taco, which I once called the best cow tongue I’d had anywhere, has been replaced with a tripa taco: firm, rich beef intestine glazed with a sweet piloncillo tare sauce and then swiped with black beans, splashed with salsa roja, and finished with dapples of chicharron flakes standing in for the similar-looking Japanese seasoning of furikake.
The exterior of Ramen del Barrio’s new storefront. Photograph by José R. Ralat 
Tacos at Ramen del Barrio. Photograph by José R. Ralat
Krinsky has added a full beverage program in this new location. Cooks toast rice and cinnamon and soak them overnight for the horchata. Its peppy freshness contrasts nicely with the full-bodied soups. A list of sakes is featured on the drinks menu, with two available for mixing with the aguas frescas (including the agua de jamaica, made from hibiscus), alongside whiskey, tequila, and mezcal cocktails.
During each of my visits, the place was packed. It was an incredible sight to witness the rebirth of Ramen del Barrio, a restaurant I’ve loved from nearly the beginning. I initially had my doubts. I visited the space while it was still under construction mere weeks before the opening. It seemed too big. I was wrong. Krinsky, however, seems to have had few doubts. He was just happy to have a break when the first location closed. He told me he suffered a bout of impostor syndrome during Ramen del Barrio’s initial run.
“The seven-month break we had finally allowed me to settle into it and take a look back and say, ‘I do deserve this. We deserve this. We’ve earned this as a team,’ ” Krinsky says. “I was really hungry to get back into it,” he continues, adding that the new space offers opportunities for further study and testing of Japanese-Mexican fusion. He’s currently considering adding an omakase service.
His time away also allowed him to experiment during pop-ups across Austin and to return home to Mexico. He visited his parents in Cancún and went to Oaxaca, where he encountered several salsas made with dried shrimp. That camarón seco is now a funky element in the spicy mayo on the bluefin tuna tostada. “It’s got to be stinky, man,” Krinsky says.
As proud as he is of the food—and he should be damn proud—Krinsky is prouder of his team. The group’s bond and sense of ownership over the work has only increased with the number of employees.
For all his talent and understanding of the complexities of Japanese and Mexican food, Krinsky knows that Ramen del Barrio is a group effort. “The way I measure my success is the way I see my people interact with each other and themselves,” he says. There are myriad chefs who could step into Ramen del Barrio and maintain the restaurant but few who could give his team the same amount of humility and respect.
His employees have agency. They know what must be done. There is no yelling in the kitchen, but there is room for mistakes. “My mistakes are for them to learn from,” Krinsky says. “Their mistakes are for me to learn from.” But it’s nearly impossible for a customer to make a mistake at Ramen del Barrio—you can’t go wrong with anything you order.
Ramen del Barrio
2007 Kramer Lane, Austin
Phone: 512-720-1469
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 11–3, 4–10
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