Tonkotsu Brand Guidelines: A 2012 Soho Ramen Bar With Its Own Noodle Room

Two friends, a sushi bar and a run of Saturday pop-ups.

Tonkotsu is a London ramen group founded by Emma Reynolds and Ken Yamada. The company says it opened its first restaurant, Tonkotsu Soho on Dean Street, in 2012. Restaurant Online, the trade title, reported in November 2012 that the Dean Street site had recently opened, and Time Out also dates the brand’s arrival in London to 2012; the same trade title’s profiles of 2017 and 2019 give 2013 instead.

The pair did not start with ramen. In a 2017 profile, Restaurant Online described Yamada as coming from a chef background, with parents who worked in hospitality in Japan; the company says he comes from Shimoda, on the tip of the Izu peninsula in Shizuoka. With a third friend, the barrister John Zimmern, who the magazine said remained on the board as a silent partner, they opened Tsuru, a fast-casual restaurant selling handmade sushi, katsu curry and ramen, on Canvey Street behind Tate Modern in 2007. Two more Tsuru sites followed in the City of London, at Bishopsgate and Mansion House, but Reynolds told the magazine the team soon recognised that Tsuru was not a brand that could expand far.

Ramen looked like the gap. The founders tested the idea with a series of ten Saturday pop-ups at Tsuru, the magazine reported, boiling pork bones for hours in their flat on Friday evenings. The company says the pop-ups began in 2011, that 30 people came to the first and 120 to one held ten weeks later, and that Reynolds and Yamada cooked a ramen from a different region of Japan each week. A business plan followed, and the Dean Street site — three floors, which the 2017 profile said larger operators had passed over — became the first Tonkotsu.

“If you don’t make your own noodles, you’re just a soup shop.”

The line the company puts at the top of its website is a remark it attributes to an older ramen chef the founders met in Japan after opening in Soho: if you do not make your own noodles, you are only running a soup shop. The company says it did not make its own noodles at first, and changed course after that trip.

Restaurant Online described in 2017 how that worked in practice. Reynolds and Yamada flew to a noodle-machine factory in Tokyo and chose a relatively simple machine, which took six months to arrive. Yamada could not find ramen flour in the UK, and after many trials settled on one from a specialist mill in Oxford; London’s hard water was treated with an industrial filter and alkaline salts to give the noodles their elasticity. Today the company says it makes all its noodles fresh every day, in a Noodle Room at Tonkotsu East in Haggerston where diners can watch, and that its broths, katsu curries, gyoza and sides are made from scratch.

The menu centres on ramen. Time Out counted eight kinds of ramen in September 2025, from a chilli tofu bowl to the extra-spicy “Geki Kara” with pork belly, alongside noodle salad, katsu curry and a seasonal special. The company names its pork and egg suppliers, Dingley Dell and St Ewe, and sells its own Eat the Bits chilli oil and a chilli ketchup, which it says hold a two-star Great Taste award. It also brews a beer with Thornbridge Brewery, the Mikan Shimoda Pale Ale, named, the company says, for the Japanese satsuma and Yamada’s home town.

Recognition came quickly. In the October of its opening year Tonkotsu won the cheap-eats category of the Observer Food Monthly Awards, Restaurant Online reported in 2017. The same profile set out how the format bends to its sites, from a 20-seat counter in Notting Hill and a 15-seat counter in the Selfridges food hall to the three-storey Soho restaurant, and quoted Reynolds on a planned rebrand meant to give the group a more consistent image without losing what she called its independent feel: “We don’t want to over brand it.”

Ramen and noodle-bar chains.

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.

From one Soho site to a UK group.

Growth came site by site. Restaurant Online reported in 2017 that Tonkotsu East, on Dunston Street in east London, followed Soho, then a restaurant on Mare Street, a counter in the Selfridges food hall in London and, in September 2016, a second Selfridges counter in Birmingham, the first Tonkotsu outside London. By February 2017 the founders ran seven Tonkotsu and two Tsuru restaurants, the original Tsuru on Canvey Street having been turned into a Tonkotsu. A more formal Japanese restaurant, Anzu, opened at St James’s Market in November 2016; it was later converted to a Tonkotsu, and that site closed in January 2019, the magazine reported.

In June 2019 the investment firm YFM Equity Partners took a minority stake, Restaurant Online reported, with Sarah Willingham, formerly of PizzaExpress and Bombay Bicycle Club, as chair; the founders remained involved, and the group then ran nine London restaurants and the Birmingham counter. YFM lists the deal as a 2019 growth-capital investment and still lists Tonkotsu in its portfolio, describing it as founded by Reynolds and Yamada. The company’s website now groups its restaurants under London, Brighton, Bristol, Bath and Birmingham. In September 2025 Time Out reported that Tonkotsu had announced a larger Birmingham restaurant at Grand Central, replacing the Selfridges counter at the Bullring that had traded since 2016, and a first restaurant in Cardiff, bringing its announced UK total to 20.

For a design guide, Tonkotsu shows how a ramen brand can be built around one visible process — noodles made where diners can see them — and adapted to sites from a 15-seat counter to a three-storey restaurant. Compare Shoryu, another London ramen group that opened in 2012, and Ippudo, the Japanese-owned chain Restaurant Online named in 2017 among later arrivals in London’s ramen market. For this guide we use charcoal, a chilli red and a broth cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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