It opened as a small shop with eight seats in a low-traffic alleyway in Shibuya ward, Tokyo, in 2006 by Chef Yamamoto.

There were few customers when it opened, with sales of around five bowls of ramen a day. “It was tough to live, and I had to live by selling household goods. I was constantly thinking about how to get customers to come in, and the days were mentally tough. Ultimately, I came up with the idea of “Improving the taste, making it unique in Japan, in a way no one can imitate it.”

Every day, from early morning to midnight after business hours, I mastered the ingredients at my shop and continued making prototypes without sleeping. I used to sleep using two chairs at my shop two times a week and kept learning. After three years, I could sell 40 bowls on average daily to live somehow. It was excruciating, physically and mentally, so I got sick many times, and I had to close my shop temporarily many times. I was thinking of going out of business. However, I couldn’t give up my goal of becoming the “No.1 ramen shop in Japan”, so I kept studying ingredients and improving it 30 to 50 times a year.

Finally, in the 5th year, I could create flavours that customers would accept and sell an average of 60 bowls daily. In the 7th year, I got first place in a magazine evaluating Japanese ramen shops for the first time; after that, there was a line (about 20 people) at the shop from beginning to end; in the 9th year (2015), in the “Michelin Guide Tokyo,” the shop in Tokyo was evaluated for the first time and won the Bib Gourmand.

The taste improvement was evaluated in the same year, and it was awarded one Michelin star, one of only three shops worldwide. Even though it was reviewed by the world’s gourmet guide, or it could have gotten first place five times among Japanese ramen shops, I stayed at the shop two times a week to keep developing the taste for 12 years. Currently, I’m continuing to improve the taste to become “the world’s No.1 ramen shop and creator” with the goal of “creating a unique taste that no one can imitate.”