Today we’d like to introduce you to Shion Aikawa.
Shion, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Before Ramen Tatsu-Ya opened in September 2012, Tatsu (my brother) and Takuya ‘Tako’ Matsumoto (his friend and fellow chef and deejay) had the idea of making the first brick and mortar ramen shop in Austin. Back then, I was working as a salesperson at a design firm in L.A. and I didn’t enjoy it. I thought it would be cool to join Tatsu and Tako to help open the restaurant. I made the move to Austin in June of 2012 to lend a hand.
The space we got for our first ramen shop had previously been a restaurant, so it wasn’t a space we could quite call our own. We had to clean up everything and remodel. I remember scrubbing all the pots and equipment from the previous restaurant in the hot sun. Maybe we didn’t have “a place of our own,” but we did have ramen recipes that we were working hard on, and drive. We just really wanted to make it happen. The rest is history.
Before my restaurant days, I studied International Business at the University of San Francisco. At first, I used my background to help with the creation of Ramen Tatsu-Ya’s drink program. With marketing and price positioning in mind, I helped create a mix of drinks that was cool, creative and cohesive.
Eventually, in early 2015, we opened up a second shop in Austin. At both of the ramen shops, we had lots of parties between 20 and 30 people that were in town for the weekend to enjoy music festivals. People from Houston were going there to eat our ramen. The feedback from those guests was always, “come to Houston.” We really looked into it and found that there was a large population in H-Town that could possibly dig what we were doing.
We jumped on the opportunity and opened a Houston shop in February of 2017. I now help oversee operations at all three ramen shops, with a fourth location in Austin coming in the near future.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Overall it’s been really smooth. Honestly, we underestimated how much interest there would be about ramen and Ramen Tatsu-Ya—a great scenario to be in. We weren’t expecting, for example, to have lines of customers waiting to eat our food. The lines happened from the beginning and we’ve been trying to catch up ever since.
Stemming from that, we are very adamant about the speed of service—anything from transaction time to getting food out to the guest has been carefully timed out and tweaked operationally. We are always working on better servicing people who come in and really living up to their expectations. We talk to people and get their feedback.
People told us it would be cool if we sold beer in line, or added fans or misters outside, so we did.
In Houston specifically, we’ve been a newcomer from the beginning in the sense that we weren’t the first ramen shop here. We are constantly learning from guest comments about what Houstonians like and making tweaks accordingly. We want to serve Houston in the best way we can, and we understand that Austin and Houston are not the same.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Ramen Tatsu-Ya story. Tell us more about the business.
As a company, we started out with Ramen Tatsu-Ya as a one-off ramen shop and we’ve grown to three shops, with the fourth one on the way in Austin. Because we started out with a ramen shop, I feel like we are always going to be associated with ramen.
A year ago we opened a new spot called Kemuri Tatsu-Ya in Austin, which is a Japanese izakaya with barbeque elements. Soon, we’ll open another concept in Austin, Tiki Tatsu-Ya— a bar with Tiki drinks and other new creations, often with a Japanese sensibility. We also plan to serve our take on Tiki cuisine. We’re becoming a group of restaurants with different concepts in mind. We may be growing but, at our core, we specialize in making Japanese food accessible to people of all walks of life, and making it translate well in local communities.
My most proud moment as a company is our ability to retain our team-members and build them, empower them, and see them go up in the ranks and be successful in their areas of expertise. Everybody’s growing, together. We think that the most important thing is to be able to grow people, and I think this also sets us apart from others. We understand that the evolution of a business happens with different personalities. The cool things is that it’s a natural evolution of personalities.
Pricing:
- Ramen, $9.75-13
- Sides and Small Bites, $2.50-6
- Beverages, $2-12
Contact Info:
- Address: 1722 California Street Houston, TX 77006
- Website: ramen-tatsuya.com
- Email: info@ramen-tatsuya.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ramentatsu_ya_houston
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ramentatsu.ya.houston
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/RamenTatsu_ya
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