Now, ramen shops have proliferated in cities from Los Angeles and New York to DC, Chicago, and even Milwaukee. People stand in line for ramen. Chefs create mash-ups of ramen and hamburgers, and people stand in line for those, too.
Behind the scenes of the so-called ramen boom of recent years is Sun Noodle. Over the last 33 years, the Hawaiian company has built three factories which pump out a combined 90,000 servings of ramen noodles per day. It sells these noodles to notable ramenya across America, including nine of New York Times critic Pete Wells' picks for the top 10 ramen destinations in New York. Ivan Orkin, one of Japan's most respected ramen chefs, says that Sun Noodle was the clear choice when he recently opened two restaurants in New York City. And Momofuku's David Chang, who is often credited with the rise of ramen in America, believes that Sun Noodle facilitated that boom. "It's an entire micro-industry they've created," he says. (...)
Sun Noodle Begins
A trip to Hawaii was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to an 19-year-old Hidehito Uki. He was working for a noodle factory in the Japanese countryside when he got the call from his father, who operated another noodle company named Unoki in Japan. His father's business partner had pulled out of their project in Hawaii just before it opened. The project was dead, but a noodle-making machine remained on-site. Did Hidehito want it?
Hidehito arrived in Honolulu in 1981. He didn't speak any English, and he didn't know anything about the Hawaiian noodle market. All he knew was that people in Hawaii were interested in noodles, particularly the local variety called saimin, a native Hawaiian noodle soup that is similar to ramen but made with egg noodles and topped with things like Spam. Saimin dates back the islands' plantation history, and was such a locally beloved comfort food that McDonald's already offered saimin on its menus in Hawaii by the time Hidehito arrived.
There were about 20 noodle manufacturers on the island of Oahu at the time, mostly churning out saimin noodles. There were a few ramen shops and plenty of instant ramen available, but Hidehito didn't find much in the way of fresh ramen as he launched Sun Noodle. The quality of the flour wasn't very good either. "I was so surprised, and I wondered if I could have a successful business in Hawaii," Hidehito says.
Getting that first customer did turn out to be a challenge. Hidehito's strategy was to bring samples to potential clients who didn't really understand what he was offering after years of working with instant noodles. They didn't want to eat Hidehito's noodles with their unfamiliarly firm texture, a result of the alkalinity that is key to fresh ramen noodles. He would listen to their feedback, return to his factory, and make the noodles again. Hidehito went back and forth about 15 times with Ezogiku, a small Japanese ramen shop that had opened its first international location in Hawaii seven years earlier. The owners were impressed, and Ezogiku became Sun Noodle's first customer. More customers came. (...)
Sun Noodle has a reputation for working with chefs to create a noodle that best complements their broth recipe. At the New Jersey factory, there are 40 recipes for dough on the master sheet. Each of these can be cut differently — wavy, straight, thick, thin — meaning that there are altogether about 120 types of ramen noodle produced on just one assembly line in the 10,000-square-foot factory. "Can you imagine a bakery that makes 75 kinds of bread, 80 kinds of bread?" Orkin asks.
And Sun Noodle is obsessive about the quality of each of these 120 types of ramen noodles. Every detail matters, starting with the flour. Sun Noodle uses eight different types of flour from suppliers in Canada, Australia, and America, in various combinations. The flour is tempered for at least eight hours at a temperature between 62 and 67 degrees. The factory filters water on a reverse osmosis machine, and constantly measures the humidity of the factory to adjust the water levels correspondingly. Sun Noodle also adds kansui, a mix of sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate, to the water in order to reproduce the alkalinity of Japanese water that makes ramen noodles firm and springy.
