Ramen Tatsu-Ya's Shion Aikawa. [Photo: Andrea Grimes/EATX]
Last year, Shion Aikawa left Los Angeles and a cushy corporate gig — company card and all — to move back to his hometown and teach Texans how to eat, and appreciate,...
Ramen Tatsu-Ya's Shion Aikawa. [Photo: Andrea Grimes/EATX]
Last year, Shion Aikawa left Los Angeles and a cushy corporate gig — company card and all — to move back to his hometown and teach Texans how to eat, and appreciate, ramen. It was a gamble, but Aikawa says he's the kind of guy who doesn't like to have regrets. And he knew he would regret not helping his brother launch Austin's first-ever brick-and-mortar ramen shop.
Opening Ramen Tatsu-Ya, says Aikawa, is exactly what he wanted — even if that meant day after day of scraping crawfish out of an old walk-in freezer and crashing on a foam mattress top in his brother Tatsu's extra room. After years in the corporate world, Aikawa wanted to remember what it was like to put his aching feet up and drink a cold beer after service.
He's only 27, but it's not hard to see why, when Aikawa's Young Guns nominations came in, one industry fan called him the "youngest old man alive." He might be retired from the jet-settiing business world, but as director of operations at Ramen Tatsu-Ya, Aikawa's working harder than ever, giving folks the "awesome" experience of tasting their first authentic bowl of ramen in a strip-mall storefront on a highway service road, deep in the heart of Texas.
Aikawa was born in Tokyo, but moved with his mom and his brother to Austin when he was six years old. That's where the story begins. Well, almost — just as Aikawa gets rolling on his background, a woman swings the front door open at Ramen Tatsu-Ya, perhaps pleased to have beaten the usual queue of patrons braving the Texas heat to stand in the hour-long line typical of dinner service at Tatsu-Ya. Aikawa jumps up to give her the disappointing news: there's no line today ... because they're closed today.
Does that happen a lot?
It does, especially on Mondays. I actually wanted to set up a tripod and a camera right in front of the door, so you can see sad people. It would be funny, but I don't think it would be appropriate.
Let's talk background: have you always worked in restaurants?
After high school, I stayed here in Austin for a year and a half or so at Austin Community College, not knowing what to do, like any other kid. For my birthday, I ate at Uchi. This was in like, 2005. So it was really new, before Phillip Speer was there. And Paul [Qui] was like, rolling maki. Kaz Edwards, at Uchi Houston, he was a fry cook. He was doing the tempura station. So the way I learned to cook — and to clean, first and foremost — was from those guys. It was pretty cool. I was there for a few months only, until I decided to move to San Francisco for university and studied international business. But I kept cooking.
I worked at Alembic, which is on Haight and Ashbury; it's really more like a bar than anything. But it's a small kitchen, you got to do whatever you wanted. Just learning about the local ingredients there, going to farmers' markets. It was a really good learning experience.
From there, I moved to Tokyo to follow an internship. In business, actually. I worked at a Fortune 500 company, but they never had penetrated the Japanese market. They had a new start-up in Tokyo and I was invited to be interning there and then I was a product manager.
That must have been a pretty incredible experience, living and eating in Tokyo.
I got to travel, because being a product manager in a place that didn't have a manufacturing facility, I was able to go to China and Korea to all the factories and visit a lot of places, food places, which was really important to me. For example, Shanghai has these really kick-ass soup dumplings and Korea has these barbecued chicken feet with makgeolli. Every restaurant or hole in the wall would have their own alcoholic beverage. It's really easy to drink. It gets really dangerous at the end because it just comes back at you. And eating really spicy food, man … I was definitely eating right when I was in Tokyo and abroad. That's one of my stron
