Design For Function: Building a Ramen Kitchen

Shiba Ramen's space measures just around 385 square feet.  Today, it's an empty square framed by metal studs.  But over the next few months it will transform into a functioning restaurant kitchen.  And not just any kitchen, a ramen kitchen.  Our business is all about producing a large volume of a single core product, in several variations and with just a few select sides.  Our kitchen setup needs to ensure we can do that.  

And pretty much that alone.  There's no space to spare for equipment--ranges, freezers, etc.--that we don't absolutely need.  The health department requires us to have 7(!) sinks, so it's a tight fit back there.  And the space has to flow, with the ramen being assembled mechanically, moving from back to front, ending in the hands of the customer.  Other tasks need to be performed--cleaning dishes, preparing sides--without getting in the way of the ramen.  

So this spring, with the aid of a professional kitchen designer, we set out to build our Ideal Ramen Kitchen.  Having never designed a restaurant kitchen before (or any kitchen, for that matter), we just started off with the good old Internet, trying to figure out the kinds of equipment we would need, then making a list and ballparking the costs.  Hiroko found some Japanese language sources that had schematics for small ramen restaurants, which gave us a rough cut at an equipment list.  Then we headed to some online restaurant equipment vendors to get a better look at the individual pieces.

We Can't Forget About You!  Draught beer is an essential part of the ramen experience, and must be in our kitchen.  

Professional Help, Please!

But this is the kind of thing where you definitely want to get some professional input if you haven't done it before.  We did that in two ways.  First, Hiroko went to ramen school where she spent nine days in a ramen kitchen, learning from a guy who designs these kinds of kitchens for a living.  This is the level of information we had when we then connected with our kitchen designer; confidence in the equipment we'd need to make ramen and how the ramen pieces needed to fit together, but pretty clueless about how to make sure the kitchen has all things necessary and proper to make it up-to-code in Alameda County and in conformance with industry best practices.

And this is where the kitchen designer added tremendous value for us.  He was able to translate our need-to-haves and want-to-haves into a workable whole, filled with all the eye-openingly granular detail that goes into a restaurant kitchen.  He knows the health codes that must be followed, and had lots of ideas about how we could achieve the level of functionality and convenience we wanted for our kitchen.  It didn't hurt that the designer we worked with, Michael Scheiman at Myers Restaurant Supply (a one-time chef), had just finished designing a kitchen for another local ramen shop.

17-Seat Ramen Restaurant.  Floor plan for the entirety of a small typical Japanese ramen shop.　Link here: http://r-mugendou.com/syohin/tyubo/if/ramen.html

Here's how the process worked.  When we sat down with Michael the first time, we talked through the whole kitchen.  The point was to convey what specific functions we need our kitchen to perform: we need to make various kinds of ramen with a range of prep requirements, fried chicken (naturally), gyoza, rice.  We need to have beer on tap (naturally) and a water dispenser.  We need to have enough refrigeration of the right kinds, prep surfaces, stockpot ranges, noodle cooker capacity, the right heating elements, etc.  And it all needs to be set up to facilitate smooth ramen assembly.

Michael and his team then went and put our kitchen on paper, with everything laid out to scale based on specific pieces of equipment, all set out in an accompanying list.  All the code necessities, sinks and drains and shelving, electrical boxes, employee lockers, were filled in.  Over the next few weeks, we thought pretty intensively about the details in the draft, and had a back-and-forth with Michael to make miscellaneous changes; shrinking the number of ranges and the size of the griddle, adding and relocating prep space and heating wells for the broths, changing the location of the water dispenser, that sort of thing.  

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A First Cut.  This is the preliminary layout assembled by our kitchen designer.

Vetting and Refining the Design

Once the preliminary design was in place, we had a big team conference call with the kitchen designers, the architect, the space designer, and the landlord's people.  Everyone took turns asking questions about things pertinent to their respective zones of interest, and Michael's team made changes to the rendering in real time through a screen share.  We also happened to be in Japan the week we were finalizing the design, so we showed the preliminary rendering to the ramen school people and got some advice about the fine details.  I recall walking around Tokyo and emailing with Michael about making sure we had appropriate freezer storage for ice cream, after we'd decided late in the process to serve monaka, a Japanese-style ice cream dessert.  He wanted to know the fat content of the ice cream we expected to use (we had no idea), so you can see just how detailed these issues become.

Preliminary (Top) and Final (Bottom).  You can see what changed from the preliminary design.  Among other things, we reduced the number of gas ranges from 6 to 2, shrunk the size of the griddle and rice cooker, and reoriented the process flow by moving the two stockpot ranges off to the side and out of the live prep area.  Bottom center is where the ramen action happens.  The soup and noodles are assembled on the prep surface in between the noodle cooker (22) and the broth-containing heating wells (11).  The partially assembled bowl is passed over a short "pony wall." to a finishing station across from the bar/point of sale.

When the details were in place, we submitted the design to the landlord for approval.  After a little back and forth, the landlord approved it.  Michael's team then went ahead and put together a serious package of drawings and specs, with extensive detail about necessary plumbing, electrical hookups and load requirements, and so on.  This was handed over to the architect, along with the "Space Design Drawings" put together in parallel by our designer, and provided the basis for the construction drawings that are now getting reviewed by regulators and bidding contractors.   

So, suffice it to say, the kitchen designer was pretty essential for us.  We were fortunate to work with somebody who clearly understood his business and who was on the same page with us.  This gave us confidence that our job was going to be done the right way, and the details were going to be taken care of.  We learned a ton and will be a lot better at speaking the language and understanding the parameters of kitchen the next time we do this.  

Now we just have to buy our equipment, build our kitchen, and start making ramen!

Next time at Ramen Chemistry, we're on to space design.  

Brick and Mortar: Constructing a Restaurant Space

This week we submitted Shiba Ramen's architectural plans to the City of Emeryville and the County of Alameda, capping several months of hard work by us, our landlord, and the (surprisingly) large team of designers, architects, and engineers we had to assemble to get this job done.  It was a steep learning curve and a fantastic hands-on education in how physical spaces get designed and built.  

In the next series of posts, I'll explain the whole process.  I'll tell you what all of these consultants do, and what goes into putting a basic restaurant kitchen together.  How we made sure we got the right equipment and the right layout for a ramen assembly line.  And how we strove not only to make it look great, but to set the tone for the look and feel we want Shiba Ramen to have.  All while working within a tight set of landlord guidelines and an even tighter health and building code.  

This time, I'll explain how we restaurant-technical no-nothings dove into the project and navigated the unfamiliar waters of putting together a design team.

Coming Soon!  Status of our space, May 2015.

Racing in Slow Motion

As soon as Shiba Ramen closed the deal on a lease at the Public Market in Emeryville, CA, the race was on to design our space.  It's a race because with a commercial lease, there's usually a grace period before rent obligations kick in.  You want to be open for business when that deadline hits, because otherwise you're bleeding scarce operating capital until you do open.  At the same time, you can't get too much of a head start, because you might end up investing a lot of time and money into a space only to watch the lease deal fall through.  And not only do you have to get the design done, you have to get your plans approved by the city planning department and county health department before you can start building.  So it's a race, but one that's drawn out painstakingly over a period of months.

What I truly did not expect when we started was how many stakeholders would be involved in the project.   It was not just a matter of hiring an architect or a designer.  We had hire four different people doing four different things, just to design the space!  Then, because we're part of a larger project with holistic and pre-established design and construction objectives, our landlords and their building and design team are very much part of the process.  After the design is done and approved internally, everything goes to two different government agencies (city building and county health departments), at the same time that bids are taken for general contractors to do the buildout work.  That's where things stand this week.  

Emeryville Public Market.  Shiba Ramen, Kiosk 10.

Surviving the Unknown

A central theme of Ramen Chemistry is to explain how we restaurant neophytes make it through big projects that are outside of our comfort zone.  These kinds of things can easily overwhelm, so for me it's essential to figure out where to go for information and when I've got enough information to make an educated decision.  Things move fast and there are a lot of decisions to make, and it's critical to avoid getting bogged down agonizing about everything that comes up.  

So everything is just a question of coming to grips with what has to be done, who has to be hired to do it, and what's reasonable to pay for it.  All while being comfortable as the least knowledgeable person in the room (at least at first), and being confident that you're not totally fucking things up!  You're the client, the ultimate decision maker, and the lead advocate for the project, so you have to get engaged and adapt to the project as it unfolds.  You've got to make sure everyone is coordinated and on time with deliverables.

For a project like this where expensive and technical personal services are involved, I try to find knowledgeable people and ask a lot of questions.  I started off with our logo designer, Misa Grannis, who is a soon-to-be-licensed architect.  Even though she hadn't done much restaurant work, I assumed she knows the basics about doing building projects, and has a network of resources at her disposal to help figure things out.  

Again, the questions are what has to be done, who does it, and how much does it cost?  I ask those same questions to everybody I meet along the way to see where opinions differ and where they overlap; doing so really helps to gauge the boundary expectations for the project.  And I always try to get personal recommendations (for architects, contractors, whatever).  Once I've hired a consultant for one part of the project, I'll often ask them to look over other consultants' proposals and suggest questions for me to ask.  And I'll frequently get the different consultants on the phone and make sure everyone is communicating, while listening attentively to what they say to each other.   

Kiosk 10.  Our first view of the space, back in January 2015.

Kitchen Design, Space Design, Architecture

Misa mined her network and came back with our first surprise: in addition to an architect, we needed a specialist kitchen designer.  This is somebody that helps identify all the equipment needed for your restaurant kitchen and designs its layout.  Misa found a good contact for us at Myers Restaurant Supply, the firm we ultimately hired to do the kitchen design work and put together our equipment package.  

In terms of hiring an architect, we'd wanted Misa to design our space.  But when we learned that this particular project requires sign-off by a licensed architect (not every project does), we realized that we either couldn't hire Misa, or we'd need to split the project between Misa and an architect.  The problem is that most architects will want to do the space design (the fun part) if they're also doing the technical "construction drawings" that get submitted to the building department.  Although it was possible to have Misa do the entire package and get a licensed architect to stamp her drawings, most architects wouldn't want to accept the liability that comes with signing off on someone else's work.    

It took some time to settle the architecture situation.  It was tough to find an architect with availability and willingness to work on a small and relatively low-dollar-value project like ours, especially if they wouldn't get to claim ownership over the design.  And looming in the background, of course, was the ever-present issue of cost.  When I finally had bids for various combinations of services, I talked to a friend's architect husband (who was not bidding) just to get a gut check on pricing.  This guy runs a small firm in San Francisco and assured me that his usual fee would be well in excess of the bids I had.  

In the end, we hired Crome Architecture to do the construction drawings and Misa for the so-called "space design drawings."  Crome is the architect on the overall Public Market project, is working with some of the incoming tenants on their design, and was available and willing to do only a portion of the project.  Hiring Crome made a lot of sense from an efficiency perspective, and helped balance the inefficiency of hiring a separate space designer: they already have a seat at the table, and probably would have been in charge of reviewing the work of whichever architect we hired for purposes of getting buy-in by the landlord.     

Floor Plan.  Inside Kiosk 10.

Wait.  I Need to Hire Another Consultant?

At this point, I've hired three people: a space designer, an architect, and a kitchen designer.  I'm definitely spending more money than I'd (naively) expected when we'd started.  But there's more!  As I was vetting architects and consultants for the job, and asking lots of questions about the overall process, who does what, and how much it should cost, I kept hearing about some mysterious "MEP consultant."  

The MEP is a special type of engineer that does all the detailed mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design, based on plans made by the kitchen designer and architect.  Initially I had a hard time figuring out how what the MEP does is different from what the rest of the team was doing.  But it seems that having one is absolutely necessary to building something (at least here in Northern California), so I rolled with it.  

The scary thing was that I kept hearing how expensive the MEP is, especially relative to how much work they do on the project compared to the other consultants, all of whom definitely spent a lot of time working on their surprisingly detailed and comprehensive submissions.  Numbers like $8000 were being bandied about, but I refused to believe it could be that expensive.  I couldn't even figure out how the MEP's role was different at this point!  How could it possibly be the most expensive line-item in the budget?  (Several architects told me that engineers have figured out how to monetize their services in a way that architects haven't.)  I ended up getting two bids: one for $6500 and one for $3800.  The lower bid was from an MEP that was already doing work at Public Market alongside the architect we'd hired.  We went with the lower bidder.

Is Everybody Ready?

So now the full design team is in place.   Kitchen design, space design, architect, MEP.  Total bill just north of $20,000.00 (I had hoped for $10K).  We're ready to design an awesome restaurant space.    

Next time: how we designed the kitchen.    

Who Said I Can Do Anything With My Law Degree? I Did.

After a decade in the law, I am thoroughly disabused of the notion--you've heard it! you've thought it!-- that a person can do "anything" with a law degree.  If this statement isn't entirely false, it's a an obscenely gross exaggeration.  In the law, specialization is the rule, and it's a process that begins early in a lawyer's career.  You leave law school, you start doing litigation, and pretty soon you're eternally branded as a "litigator."  Same thing if you start off as a patent lawyer, or a corporate transactional lawyer, or a regulatory lawyer.  

Success in the Legal Profession:  Build Yourself a Very Small Box and Work Your Ass Off

And this is just the beginning.  Over time, you'll be shunted into ever narrower sub-specialties if you want to go anywhere professionally.  You, too, can spend every day doing insurance coverage litigation for insurance company clients!  And when you're ready for a change, you can go in-house and manage insurance litigation for one of those clients.  Dream.  Fulfilled. A while back, I asked a few lawyer friends if they thought "you can do anything with a law degree."  One laughed, one scoffed, and one hung her head.  

In the modern legal economy, years of experience in some niche area are what get a lawyer hired.  The attorney is often viewed as nothing more than a sum of the boxes he's checked multiplied by the number of times he's checked them.  So even though you probably could do a lot of things with your law degree if given the chance--you're smart, you're motivated, you're more than sufficiently type-A--that chance is hard to come by.  Not without knowing exactly where you want to go ahead of time, and hustling for it pretty relentlessly.  If you want to do something different from what you've done, you're going to sacrifice something to it make it happen.  Money, responsibility, time, your Eternal Salvation, whatever it is.  If you want to make a move out of the law altogether, god help you (read great Slate pieces on this here and here).      

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Sandy Cohen seemed to have a satisfying career with a law degree.  But do you really need to chase clients or even show up to work when you're independently wealthy?  Shit, I'd put up with Caleb Nichol as a father-in-law for that kind of freedom.   

But Wait, I Can Do Other Things.  Pretty Well, Actually.

So that's all sort of unfortunate, at least if you thought you'd have some special leg up as a lawyer, but then realized the law is just like every other job, and that a JD affords a lot less professional mobility than does an MBA.  But this isn't the end of the story.  There's a distinction between the practice of law and being a lawyer.  It's the practice, the working profession, that enforces specialization, putting its practitioners into ever narrower and deeper boxes.  Being a lawyer is different.  Lawyering to me is a skill set, an ability to identify complicated rules and apply them to facts.  Lawyering is about spotting problems and and solving them.  Being reasoned, exercising judgment.  

Well, guess what? It doesn't get much more general than doing things like following "rules" and exercising "judgment." These things are kind of elemental to most jobs.  And the other thing lawyers are really good at is adapting to new sets of facts and new sets of rules; they can handle steep learning curves.  Not necessarily shitty lawyers or the narrow-minded ones, mind you, and those are legion.  Note: This last point shouldn't be terribly surprising, given the vast waves of lawyers pumped out of America's cash cow law schools every year, having learned little more than how to study for the bar exam (which exam, by the way, tests little more than rote memorization of arcane rules, in the form of an epic and totally pointless professional hazing ritual).  

You Really Can Do Anything With a Law Degree! California Pizza Kitchen founders with miscellaneous notables.

Start a Company: You Might See Value in Your Law Degree

Here's why this is all important, and why I'm writing about it here at Ramen Chemistry.  I've never organized a business before, or even had a business-type job.  This is new territory in so many ways.  But at the same time, it feels familiar and and I feel well equipped to do it, due in good measure to those lawyering skills.  Starting a business is all about handling tons of diverse things you haven't done before; identifying what you need to do, and gathering enough information to get it done effectively.  

The other key thing is that lawyers are trained to deal with government agencies, navigate procedural bureaucracies, and interpret contracts.  And what do you think a lot of organizing and running a business is?  My first task ten months ago was to study basic corporate structures and pick which one fit best with Shiba Ramen's business goals.  Then I formed the Shiba Ramen Corporation with the California Secretary of State, set up its board of directors, wrote its bylaws, issued stock, and drafted a shareholder agreement, filed for federal S-corporation tax status, applied for a federal trademark and a state alcohol license, negotiated a commercial lease, and reviewed commercial liability insurance policies.  Among other things.

I've decided to do this basic legal work myself, not only because I think I should be able to, but because I want to make sure that I can.  By doing it myself I learn about all sorts of subtle factors that influence my business.  That helps me make important decisions as I put all of the pieces together to make this enterprise happen.  And it puts me in a better position to manage outside attorneys if and when Shiba Ramen becomes a bigger company and my do-it-yourself approach to legal work ceases to be practical (or smart for the company).    

Now, here's the final thing.  None of the lawyer tasks I mentioned is beyond most people; the problem is that some definitely require access to specialized knowledge.  But most of this information is readily available on the web, and none of these tasks actually requires a lawyer.  They take place at the interface of law and basic business.  Objectively, we're not talking about anything too much more complicated than filling out taxes or applying for a mortgage.  

Legal Stuff.  Starting a small company involves lots of basic tasks that are often performed by lawyers.  

Ramen Chemistry is going to do a series laying out in plain English the lawyery things that have to be done every time a business starts, whether it's a ramen restaurant or any other small startup.  Like I said, some of this stuff can get complicated, but it's not the Higgs Boson for god's sake.  Most people will--and most should--hire lawyers for at least some of these things.  The goal here is to provide a resource for people seeking practical knowledge to get them through the process, and to help them know when they need a lawyer and how to be an informed client.  The other goal is to send a message to all the disaffected lawyers out there.  You can do anything with your law degree, as long as you don't expect some employer to look at your JD and roll out the red carpet for you.  You've got to be willing to do it yourself.  No doubt you can.   

I'll unroll this series over time, in no set order.  Obviously it's not as interesting to read (or write) about as ramen, culture, or design.  Or Japanese "maid cafes," for that matter (upcoming topic!).  I don't want to bore you unless you want to be bored!  This stuff is for people with a particular interest.  

Profiles in Ramen, India Edition

It was a bit good fortune that we encountered Satoshi Akimoto during our field trip to ramen school. This guy is undertaking a very serious ramen project.  A year ago, he was working as a mechanical engineer at Nissan, doing things like designing auto suspensions and chassis.  Now, in an abrupt career redirection, he's a just a few months away from opening one of  India's first authentic ramen restaurants.  It's an interesting story, and one with some obvious parallels to ours.

When we arrived at Shoku no Dojo early on a Wednesday morning, most of the students were huddled around a table, hunched over pens and papers, working out the recipes they'd serve in the school's training restaurant a few days later.  Akimoto was set apart, standing at the ramen bar and working on a laptop.  This guy looked like he was working.  The others were kind of shooting the shit. He was clearly the most intense student in class.

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After a few minutes of walking around the Dojo shooting pictures of the scene, I parked myself at the bar where Akimoto was working and started talking about what he's doing in ramen school.  I had time to chat while Hiroko was getting some thoughts on kitchen design from the other Akimoto, the guy who runs the Dojo.  

Akimoto told me he'd lived in the U.S. a few years ago, in Detroit.  He was there doing engineering work for Nissan.  After a few years back in Japan, Nissan sent him to Chennai, India in 2012.  He went alone, while his wife and two boys remained in Japan.  It appears that there's a decent-sized Japanese expat community in Chennai, and Akimoto was on the board of the local Japanese society.  This activity plus business connections he made in cycling group helped him get a sense of the economic opportunities there.

He realized there's a serious business opportunity in India.  There are essentially no ramen restaurants in India; it's a completely untapped market.  Akimoto wants to start the first real Japanese ramen shop in India, and then expand from there.  He wants to be the guy who brings ramen to India.  

Japan, Inc. Logo..  Akimoto created a Japanese corporation, called Japan, Inc., as well as an Indian entity called GRP for "Global Ramen Project."  The text says "Japan."   

So six months ago, he came home to Japan for one week, just to attend the first half of the ramen course at Shoku no Dojo (he had come back to finish the course in April when we met him). He went back to India, resigned from his job at Nissan, and now is in the midst of opening his first ever business.  He's doing it in a foreign country, and one in which he's only lived for 2 or 3 years at this point.  He calls it the Global Ramen Project.

Akimoto is opening his restaurant Aki-Bay Ramen this July, partnering with a Japanese friend.  The name combines their respective names, anglicizing the spelling a bit.  Over the past few months, he hired an Indian lawyer to get his corporate stuff up and running , and used his network from cycling to find a space in a local mall with two floors and a balcony.  He's signed a lease, and now he's back in India overseeing design, architecture, and construction, lining up his suppliers and working out his recipes.  Everything is happening at breakneck pace. Apparently he's going to be featured on a TV program, a segment of which will be filmed at Shoku no Dojo! 

Kanji.  Chinese characters for "Aki" and "Bei."

Aki-Bay is going to focus on chicken and vegetarian ramens, using no pork in the broths, to conform to Indian dietary sensibilities.  Akimoto will probably bring managers from Japan to work at the business.  He's going to have his noodles specially made in India, but he'll have to import his kansui (carbonate salts) from Japan, the ingredient that is the sine qua non of ramen noodles.

Akimoto told me that he's also going to make an effort to introduce India to more Japanese culture than just ramen, starting with matcha green tea.  This goal really resonated with me and Hiroko, because introducing and translating Japanese culture is definitely something we intend to pursue through Shiba Ramen and this blog.

You can follow Satoshi Akimoto on Facebook here.

Profiles in Ramen, Japan Edition

In Tokyo last month, Ramen Chemistry sat down to talk about the ramen business with two chefs, one (Keiichi Machida) an established Tokyo presence who's about to open an outpost in Toronto, the other (Satoshi Akimoto) an engineer who just quit his job at Nissan to open his first restaurant in India.  These meetings, one planned and one by chance, were of special interest to us.  Both chefs are examples of people who, like us, got into the ramen business from outside of the restaurant world.  And all three of us are today working on projects to bring ramen to newer markets outside of Japan.  

I asked both whether I could profile them at Ramen Chemistry.  Then, like the (diligent) lawyer that I am, I pulled out a notebook, and took a (low-key and cooperative) deposition of each.  Hiroko translated between me and Machida, but Akimoto and I talked directly.  Today I'll profile Machida, and later this week will profile Akimoto.  

Petrochemicals to Ramen

According to Keiichi Machida, "passion" is the key to a successful career in ramen. We met Machida at the bar at Kyouka, his restaurant in Tachikawa, a somewhat anonymous and remote district in the deep and dense urban expanse west of Tokyo. Hiroko had gotten to know him last fall when he taught her about ramen at Shoku no Dojo. The two of them talked about Shiba Ramen's kitchen design plans while I took pictures of the space and the food. Afterward, we headed to a local cafe for Japanese desserts (black sesame ice cream parfait for me) and talked to Machida about his life in ramen.  

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Kyouka.  http://blog.livedoor.jp/zatsu_ke/archives/51375043.html

Fifteen years ago, Machida made a living as the owner of a small petrochemical import company.  He apparently started making ramen broth after buying some pork bones for his german shepherd.  He had to cook the bones to make them edible for the dog, and decided to put the soup stock to use.  

Around this time, he was sitting around with his family over the New Year holiday, watching TV.  They randomly saw a program that featured a segment about a ramen museum and restaurant complex in Yokohama (pictures below), which was hosting a televised competition looking to discover creative new ramen chefs. Since he'd been making soup, his family thought he should check it out.  So at the spur of the moment, they took a field trip to the museum.  They actually weren't too impressed with what they ate there, and thought they could do better.  Machida's family encouraged him sign up for the TV contest.  He went for it.

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Instant Celebrity

422 people entered the competition.  The first rounds were on paper, narrowing the field before the televised portion.  Machida advanced.  At this point, he realized he actually needed to learn something about making ramen!  So he went to a meat supplier, and asked what ingredients other restaurants were using.  And he went around and ate a lot of ramen.  He even rooted around in some ramen shop's garbage to find out what supplies it was buying!  

It all worked: he ended up making it to the semifinals.  After that, he spent a year eating ramen and refining his recipes before opening Kyouka.  He started off specializing in chicken chintan ramen (i.e., clear chicken ramen).  He explained to us that from the start he had some notoriety in the ramen scene, because of his TV appearance and the media attention that followed.  Because he was talked up in the food media as some kind of "charismatic chef," (apparently there was some public infatuation with Japanese celebrity ramen chefs at the time), he felt pressure to innovate.  So about two years in, he started seriously studying ramen, becoming empirical and systematic in his approach to product development.

Today he's known for shoyu (soy) ramen.  He emphasizes complex recipes with natural ingredients.  He uses over twenty ingredients just in the soup of his ramen, not including the tare, oils, or toppings.  He even uses six different types of niboshi (dried sardines)!  As I mentioned in my post about Tokyo ramen, my reaction to his soup was that it has some deep essence of the ocean, without being fishy.  The recipe must be really refined to make a product like this.  We suspect it would be pretty expensive to make a product like this in the U.S. given the limited availability of Japanese specialty ingredients.  

Empire Building

After 15 years of running only Kyouka, Machida is now in expansion mode.  While he still works in the kitchen at Kyouka once a week or so, handling special recipes, he's opening a food court kiosk down the street in Tachikawa later this year, where he expects to serve 1000 bowls a day!  He's become the consulting chef for a new pair of Toronto shops, called Touhenboku Ramen.  Touhenboku is owned by Zuimei Okuyama, who Machida helped train at Shoku no Dojo last year, and it specializes in chicken-based ramen.  And now that he has some familiarity with the Toronto scene, he's planning to open an outpost of Kyouka there within the next year.    

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Touhenboku Ramen.  Machida serves up ramen in Toronto.  Image www.torontolife.com.

Views on Ramen

We asked Machida how ramen has changed in Japan over the course of his career.  He explained that before he got into the business, Japanese ramen underwent successive style trends, usually focusing on regional specialties; there was a Sapporo miso boom, and a Kyushu tonkotsu boom.  When he started off, the focus had shifted from the ramen to the chefs themselves.  Later there was a trend toward thick, rich broths.  But it's expensive to make thick broths, and the ramen scene reacted with a tsukemen trend (tsukemen is a style of soupless ramen where the noodles are dipped in a sauce, and it's cheaper to make).  After that, simplified tastes took over (Machida gave an example of chicken ramen that emphasized the flavor of chicken).  Now he thinks ramen has become really fragmented, the sheer amount of competition causing restaurants to distinguish themselves in ever-increasing varieties, often employing singular strong or unique flavors.  

Machida also gave his opinion of ramen in the U.S.  He thinks that New York ramen beats out the West Coast.  The New York ramen scene is more mature, he explained, and the ramen there is often better than in Japan.  

I say let's see what we can do about that out here in California!  Next time, ramen in India.