This week, we shine the spotlight on a popular udon chain restaurant called Marugame Seimen. Its founder, Mr Takaya Awata, started the restaurant chain from scratch. He wants the company to become the world’s number one noodle company. The key to its popularity is the authentic udon noodles made fresh daily, using 100% domestic wheat flour. It has different varieties of udon, including kama-age udon, udon with spicy cod roe, udon with poached egg and udon with grated daikon radish. Currently, Marugame Seimen can be found at more than 800 locations nationwide. Examples are in Adachi ward in Tokyo, Higashi-Sendai and Iwate, Morioka City. Its most popular takeaway item is the udon bento, which was launched in April 2021.
Marugame Seimen also has a presence in nine countries and regions outside Japan, including in San Francisco. So it has more than 200 branches in Japan and overseas.
The company which manages the udon restaurant is Toridoll Holdings, located in Shibuya, Tokyo. Its president is also Mr Awata. He started the business by opening a yakitori restaurant and established Toridoll in 1990. He grew the business gradually and set his eyes on udon, which led to him opening the first branch of Marugame Seimen in 2000. Since then, he has expanded the company. Toridoll now has 1,752 restaurants in 31 countries and regions, and it is still expanding.
Furthermore, in addition to udon restaurants, it has been acquiring many restaurant chains in other countries. It now owns 20 brands of restaurants within and outside Japan. For example, Toridoll acquired a fried noodle restaurant chain in Europe in 2015. Subsequently, it spread to more locations and now has branches in nearly 20 countries. Toridoll has taken over seven foreign restaurant chains.
Mr Awata now aims to further grow the business into a world-class global food company. His goal is to have 5,500 restaurants within and outside the country by March 2028. One of them is TamJai, a well-known noodle restaurant chain in Hong Kong, with 162 branches in the territory. Mr Awata had eaten the food there during his visit to Hong Kong and fell in love with the flavour. So he acquired TamJai in 2018. It is known for its rice noodles, or “mixian”; it is made of rice and water. It also has six kinds of soups, the most popular being Chongqing Soup. The others include hot and sour soup and tomato soup. Furthermore, there are 10 levels of spiciness and customers can choose from 25 toppings.
Mr Awata then decided to launch TamJai in Japan. Mr Hiroyuki Hanabata was put in charge of setting up and operating the branch in Japan and visited Hong Kong in November 2021. He previously oversaw the operations of 200 Marugame Seimen locations in Japan. He returned to Japan in December 2021 after undergoing training at TamJai for a month. He set up a “replica” kitchen of TamJai and started making the six types of soups, closely following what he learnt during his month-long training at TamJai Noodles. However, he later realised that the spices used in Hong Kong could not be imported to Japan. So Mr Hanabata had to recreate the same flavour using the spices that are available in Japan. The TamJai branch in Japan was supposed to open in mid-March in 2022. However, due to COVID-19 restrictions at that time, the CEO of TamJai in Hong Kong, Mr Daren Lau, could not fly to Japan. So the launch had to be postponed.
After a while, Mr Hanabata finally managed to recreate the soups with ingredients found in Japan. Since Toridoll could not import the spices used in Hong Kong, he made do with domestic ingredients. As Mr Lau needed to check the flavour of the soups before the restaurant opens and he could not enter Japan because of the spread of COVID-19, he agreed to do so at TamJai’s test kitchen in Hong Kong itself. He was happy with the six soups and approved all of them.
In February 2022, Mr Hanabata got customers in Japan to do the taste test of the six soups as well. There was also a dry run ahead of the grand opening of the restaurant, with newly hired Japanese chefs preparing the dishes. As both events were a success, the first branch of TamJai in Japan finally opened its doors on March 31 2022 in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Tips:
1) Marugame Seimen’s most popular takeaway item is udon bento
2) Chongqing Soup is a must-try item when eating at noodle restaurant chain TamJai in Hong Kong
Source: CNA
