Our Commitment to Great Ramen

Our founder Tsukasa Maejima was born in 1962 and raised amid the abundant nature of Kochi Prefecture in Shikoku. He opened Ramen Setagaya in 2000 and Hirugao the next year, before incorporating the restaurants as Setagaya Co., Ltd. in 2006. Self-taught for a decade, Maejima thought outside the box, bringing the world a series of new brands that attracted a lot of attention for their originality. He has also supervised collaborations with other companies that have led to a string of popular products. After opening a restaurant in New York in 2007, he began actively working to expand Setagaya overseas, particularly in the USA and Asia. Our New York restaurant won the restaurant section of New York magazine’s Best of New York awards next year it was opened, and attracted a lot of attention as a forerunner of the global ramen boom. Maejima became publicly and privately nicknamed “Mr. Ramen” in fond recognition of his work as a leader in Japan’s ramen world who strives to nurture new players and broaden the scope of the industry both in Japan and overseas. Each day, he works passionately to make ramen a beloved inexpensive dish among people around the world.

The broth of ramen is ramen’s life itself, and proprietors of ramen restaurants put all of their passion into it.
Our founder’s greatest commitment has always been to put our souls into that bowl along with the ingredients, imagining the customer’s satisfied expression. Every step of the process, from the selection of ingredients to the adjustment of the heat to the variation in salt quantity by season, is the result of years of trial and error and experimentation with the principles of broth through Maejima’s self-study.
No matter how much the times may change, we want people’s love for our ramen to remain unchanged, so each day our chefs work passionately to bring you ramen with the very best broth.