Afuri Brand Guidelines: Yuzu Shio Ramen Named After a Kanagawa Mountain, 2001

A shop named after a mountain and its water.

Afuri takes its name from a mountain. The company says the name comes from Mount Ōyama, known locally as Afuri-yama, at the eastern end of the Tanzawa range in Kanagawa Prefecture, west of Tokyo, and that the water drawn at its foot was used for the soup of its original shop. The company describes the peak as an old “rain-falling mountain,” where people once prayed for good harvests and to which large numbers of pilgrims travelled during the Edo period.

The business behind the brand is AFURI Inc., which its corporate page says was established in November 1995 and is led by its representative director, Hiroto Nakamura. The ramen came later. According to the company’s own timeline, the shop that started the brand, ZUND-BAR, opened in 2001 at Nanasawa in Atsugi, at the foot of the mountain. Willamette Week, the Portland weekly, gave the same year in October 2021, describing a humble noodle shop at the base of Mount Afuri, and English Wikipedia names Nakamura as the founder.

In 2003 the company opened AFURI Ebisu, its opening shop in Tokyo. The timeline says the aim was to let more customers taste the ZUND-BAR ramen, and that Ebisu served it from an open kitchen to a counter, a format the brand has kept. Harajuku followed in 2009, Nakameguro in 2011 and Azabu-Jūban in 2013; in 2014 three more shops opened, two in Roppongi and one in Sangenjaya. The company now lists offices in Atsugi and in Shibuya, Tokyo.

Clear broth, yuzu and a central kitchen.

The signature bowl is yuzu shio ramen: a clear, salt-seasoned chicken broth finished with yuzu, the small citrus fruit. The company describes its ramen as lighter and more delicate than many styles and says the yuzu goes both into the broth and on top, alongside pork grilled over charcoal. Willamette Week in 2021 called the style chintan, a clear broth, and also singled out a meat-free hazelnut tantanmen on the American menu.

Behind the shop counters sits a central kitchen. AFURI says its soups, its salt and soy seasoning bases and its chashu pork are all prepared at a central kitchen in Kiyokawa, a village in Kanagawa’s Aikō district near the mountain, and then finished and served in each shop. Its timeline records a new central kitchen completed in 2019. The company’s English pages sum up its approach in one word, “Higher,” and pair it with the line “One ramen. One staff. Always higher.” That is its own motto, given here as such.

Over the 2010s the Japanese chain widened. The timeline lists AFURI Shinjuku in 2016, a shop at Tomamu in Hokkaido in 2017, and shops at Yokohama Landmark Tower and at Metsä Village in Hannō in 2018. A spicier offshoot, Karakurenai, opened in Ikebukuro and Shinjuku in 2019. An online shop followed in 2020 and a ramen-and-dumpling shop called Setsu in Niseko in 2022. In 2025 the company opened shops at Shibuya Dōgenzaka and Yūrakuchō, and a format called SUPER RAW at Takanawa Gateway.

The same timeline shows how the company tends its older sites as well as adding new ones. Ebisu, the opening Tokyo shop, was renewed in 2019, the year the Roppongi Hills shop moved and reopened; shops at Grandberry Park in Minami-Machida, at Green Springs in Tachikawa and in the Shinjuku Sumitomo Building followed in 2019 and 2020, and AFURI Minami-Aoyama opened in 2024. Beyond Tokyo and Yokohama, the timeline names sites at Tomamu and Niseko in Hokkaido and at Metsä Village in Hannō, Saitama Prefecture.

Ramen and noodle bars.

Ramen chains often present themselves through the room before the bowl. Ichiran, the Fukuoka chain, seats diners in what Brooklyn Magazine described in October 2016 as “flavor concentration booths”: single stools walled on three sides, with each bowl passed through a rolled bamboo blind. Other chains publish photographs of wooden counters, open kitchens and shop fronts hung with noren, the short split curtains that hang across a doorway.

Menus are usually named plainly. Many chains build their offer around one broth and say so: tonkotsu, the pork-bone broth associated with Hakata in Fukuoka, or the shio, shoyu and miso styles. Bowls often carry short house names; Ippudo, for example, names its two main tonkotsu bowls after white and red circles. Order forms or ticket machines may let diners choose the firmness of the noodles, the richness of the soup and the amount of garlic or chilli sauce, as Ichiran’s paper form does.

The corporate side is published separately. Company pages list founding years, founders and head offices. Some chains are private firms run from their home city; others sit inside listed holding companies that also run udon, soba or other restaurant brands. Overseas branches can be run by the company itself or by local partners, and shop counts change, so the figures in this guide are given with their date and source.

Packaging has become a second shop front. Chains sell boxed noodles, sauces and cup noodles under their own names, some made for them by instant-noodle manufacturers, and those products carry the restaurant names and colours onto shop shelves far from the restaurants.

A partner in America and franchised shops.

Afuri’s move abroad began in the United States. Willamette Week reported in October 2021 that, about ten years after the original shop opened, Nakamura partnered with Taichi Ishizuki, chief executive of a California-based restaurant group, to take the ramen to America. The opening shop outside Japan was in Portland, Oregon, in 2016, in a former warehouse on Southeast 7th Avenue; the paper said the company chose the city for the quality of its water, which it compared with the spring water at the original shop. Shops in downtown Portland and in Beaverton followed.

English Wikipedia says the American business, Afuri USA, is owned by Ishizuki and, citing the Portland Business Journal, that he owns the Portland restaurants, has franchised outposts in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto and Vancouver, and co-owns two locations in Portugal. A ramen-and-dumpling shop opened in Portland’s Slabtown district in 2022, according to English Wikipedia, and the downtown Afuri Kara Kurenai closed in January 2025. English Wikipedia describes Afuri, also known as Afuri Izakaya, as a chain based in Tokyo with locations in Oregon, California, Canada, Hong Kong, Portugal and Singapore, including two in Hong Kong and one in Singapore. The original Southeast Portland site now trades as AFURI Izakaya, its website shows, serving sushi and small plates alongside ramen. The Japanese timeline also lists Lisbon in 2018 and Singapore in 2019, and Willamette Week counted shops in Hong Kong by 2021.

For a design guide, Afuri shows how a place name can carry a brand: a mountain, its water and a citrus note, repeated from Atsugi to Portland. Compare Menya Musashi, another Tokyo ramen company, and Ichiran. For this guide we use a mountain green, charcoal and yuzu yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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