Spicy Garlic Ramen.

I found this bowl the way most people find Wil Yeung: a video, late, the title half-daring me — Restaurant Ramen at home! But Better?? That question mark did a lot of work. I clicked it expecting the usual instant-noodle upgrade and instead watched a man drag a fork down a king oyster mushroom, shred it into strands, and roast them until they crisped like something off a grill. The bowl that followed — a creamy, red-slicked broth built in under twenty minutes — looked like it had no business being that fast.

Wil Yeung is the cook behind Yeung Man Cooking, and his story is part of why his food looks the way it does. He was born in Hong Kong and emigrated to Canada as a boy, arriving with Cantonese and very little English. Before he was a chef on the internet he was an international photographer, a filmmaker, a violinist — and you can see all of it in the work: the framing, the patience, the sense that a plate is also a composition. He came to plant-based cooking and built a following teaching it the way a musician teaches a passage — slowly, clearly, with the belief that, in his words, learning to make food can change how you see things, especially when you share it with others. He wrote a whole vegan ramen cookbook on that conviction. This recipe is my version of one bowl from that world, cooked and tested in my own kitchen, with full credit to where it started.

It is not a “vegetable ramen.” It is restaurant ramen — the creamy body, the bloomed chili, the meaty topping — built from a mushroom, a carton of soy milk, and ten minutes of attention. The “but better” in Wil’s title is not bravado. The fork-shredded, oven-crisped mushroom genuinely does something a slice of pork belly can’t: it brings crunch into the bowl.

What the other recipes get wrong

Most quick-ramen recipes online — I worked through the top ten in June 2026 — treat the topping as an afterthought and the broth as a shortcut. Two things consistently fail.

First, the mushroom. I tested king oyster three ways over a week in June 2026, same oven, same seasoning: sliced into coins, cut into batons, and forked into strands. The coins browned on two faces and stayed leathery in the middle. The batons were better but dense. The forked strands — ragged, frayed, uneven — were the only ones that crisped all over and still pulled apart with that stringy, meaty give. The torn edges are the entire point; a knife makes them smooth and a smooth edge will not crisp. I also ran the tray two ways: crowded and spaced. Crowded, the strands steamed grey and never browned, because king oyster is around 90% water and that water has nowhere to go. Spaced in a single layer, they shrank by half and crisped. Same mushroom, same oven, opposite result.

Second, the soy milk. The instinct is to dump it in with the stock and bring the whole thing up to a boil. I did that, once, on purpose, to see — and watched it break into grainy flecks with a split, curdled surface. Soy milk proteins do not survive a hard boil. Added off the boil and held at a bare tremble, the same carton gives you a silky, clinging, faintly sweet body that reads as rich the way a long-simmered tonkotsu does. The technique is free. Skipping it costs you the whole texture.

The line I draw

I will not slice the mushroom to save thirty seconds. The fork is not a quirk of Wil’s video — it is the mechanism. Strands with torn edges crisp; clean slices stay limp. If you cut this mushroom with a knife you have made a different, lesser dish, and I would rather you spend the half-minute dragging a fork down its length. The crunch on top is what makes this restaurant ramen. Everything else in the bowl is soft.

When this can fail

Three ways, all from my own kitchen:

• The grey, limp mushroom. Crowded on the tray, or pulled too early. It steamed instead of roasting and never crisped. Fix: single layer with space between the strands, and trust the full 20 minutes — they should shrink by half and color at the edges before they come out.
• The split broth. Soy milk added to boiling stock, or the bowl brought back to a hard boil to “keep it hot.” It curdled into grain. Fix: drop to medium-low before the soy milk goes in, hold it just trembling, and serve straight away.
• The bloated, gluey noodles. Cooked in the broth, or cooked early and left sitting. They thickened the soup and turned soft. Fix: boil them in a separate pot, rinse off the surface starch under hot water, and add them at the last second.

The dinner

This is a fast bowl, and its speed is the argument for it: a weeknight ramen that tastes like a Friday-night one. Shred the mushroom, get it in the oven, and you have twenty hands-free minutes to build the broth — bloom the garlic and chili in oil, add stock, then soy milk off the boil, and it’s done before the mushrooms are. Cook the noodles last. Pile the crisp strands high and eat them while they still crackle, then let what’s left sink and soften into the creamy, spiced broth.

Credit where it’s owed: the bones of this bowl are Wil Yeung’s. The testing, the failures, and the opinions about the fork are mine.