Ross Shonhan is a noodle geek. He is also a 6ft 4in former rugby-playing Aussie, so you might not want to tell him to his face. He is certainly passionate about “all the things a bowl of noodles can be” and is very pleased that his restaurant, Bone Daddies in Soho, is the only venue in London to be represented at the Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum, Tokyo’s museum dedicated to ramen noodles (yes, such a place actually exists).
Yet he is also very happy if customers come into the restaurant and don’t even recognise that the spirit of the place is Japanese.
“I am not trying to force it down people’s throats. You’ve got to be very careful if you are trying to recreate a traditional food, especially if you are not from that part of the world and you don’t make it too contrived,” he explains. “I just wanted people to experience the great ramen that I had in Japan and to give it a London vibe.”
As well as the funky name, the London spin involves rock ’n’ roll music in combination with very subtle black and white posters of trendy Japanese youngsters.
Shonhan’s love affair with Japanese food began when he landed the head chef job at Nobu Dallas 10 years ago and his subsequent travels to the US honed his desire to bring real ramen, not the heavily processed version experienced by most visitors at Japanese transport interchanges, to London. Plus the style of cooking really appealed to him after his more formal cheffing career.
“Ramen chefs are like the punk chefs of Japanese cuisine – there aren’t really any rules,” he says. For Shonhan, the drive behind the circa £17 spend per head outlet is 100% the food – as he puts it: “I didn’t work as a chef for 20 years to serve shit.”
He managed to spend only £120,000 on the fit out of his inaugural, 60-cover rest-aurant, which opened in Peter Street in 2012. Now it consistently serves 2,700 customers a week (although this dips in the warmer months). It still irks him that the one criticism sometimes levied at Bone Daddies, usually from customers of Far Eastern origin, is that the food is not served authentically boiling hot. They say he’s toned it down to suit the British palate but the fact is beggars couldn’t be choosers when he was looking for his first site, so he’s ended up in a restaurant that has the kitchen in the basement (not to mention wonky walls), making it impossible to serve noodles at the ideal temperature.
Despite his slight obsession with ramen, Shonhan originally intended to make his debut restaurant a high-end Japanese steakhouse – 100 covers, £80 to £100 spend per head. It makes sense given his experience at both Nobu and, later, Zuma in London.
What he hadn’t quite factored in was the difficulty in finding and securing any site, let alone one large enough for such a concept and in a suitably prestigious location. After leaving Zuma, he had formulated three business plans: one for the ramen bar, one for the steakhouse and one for an izakaya – a Japanese pub that often serves a wide range of traditional Japanese dishes from sushi to yakitori skewers. The site reality-check led him to focus first on the noodles – something he is now grateful for because it gave him experience in a very different and fun part of the eating-out market, helped him develop his business skills and allowed him to really fine-tune the steakhouse idea.
Before Bone Daddies, agents weren’t exactly helpful so his property searches involved walking the streets and knocking on doors. He endured six months of rejection from the owner of the Malaysian restaurant that previously occupied the Peter Street site before she even agreed to have a conversation with him.
Trustworthy backing
Happily, the success of the first restaurant has eased that process somewhat. Bone Daddies outlets now also operate above Whole Foods Market in Kensington, and a pop-up, Bone Daddies Shackfuyu, also in Soho (which is likely to become a full Bone Daddies sometime next year), but it is the latest site in Old Street, which is likely to open next month where Shonhan feels the combination of the one-level property, the lessons learned from the other sites (eg, the popularity of takeaway at Kensington), and a bit more money to spend on fit out, will make Bone Daddies fulfil its potential better as a concept that has legs.
“I am never going to be that guy who rolls out 100 restaurants around the UK; that doesn’t excite me. But I think we could do 10 in London and still maintain the quality,” he says.
The izakaya concept never quite materialised and is unlikely to now. Shonhan originally planned to put it into the Covent Garden unit he acquired not long after opening the first Bone Daddies, but the space lent itself to a food-focused operation – in this case principally DIY-fill hirata buns, so Flesh and Buns was born. At the time, the concept of buns was almost unheard of here, but now Shonhan says “every man and his dog does beer and buns”. During the week, the neighbourhood restaurant does circa 200 covers, going up to 450 on a Saturday. Average spend is £32 per head and, like Bone Daddies, the F&B sales mix is around 70:30 in favour of food. The kitchen skills required for the concept are reasonably complex, hence Shonhan does not feel it has the scalability of Bone Daddies. However, he says he would be keen to do a ready-filled bun takeaway version in Soho, especially now awareness of buns generally is so much higher.
Shonhan has a number of silent business partners and, impressively, also has the backing of Bernard Kantor, the managing director of Investec Bank. “I got screwed very early on by a backer and it was a vast learning experience,” he says. “Once I had secured a site, I went pitching to a couple of different people I had met over the years and, ultimately, Bernard gave me the best gut feeling.”
His instincts didn’t let him down. Shonhan says that despite his hugely responsible job, Kantor is always there to talk to him and is incredibly enthusiastic about his ventures – he had been a customer at Zuma, although the two didn’t meet at that time.
“I had heard horror stories of investors who think they own the place and come in expecting free food and drink and to dictate what goes on the menu.
“I wanted to get a partner who would let me fly and I’ve been very lucky,” Shonhan adds.
Kantor is very keen on the steakhouse idea and Shonhan reckons, realistically, it will be one and half to two years before it is up and running. The latter’s dream is to make it a signature restaurant that he can take to key locations around the world – and he can’t wait to get back to doing what he loves best, cooking.
“If I achieve even half the success of either Nobu or Zuma, I will be extremely happy,” Shonhan says.
He definitely has the ingredients to make this happen. Not only does he have the backing and now the experience as a restaurant operator, he has an inherent determination never to give up.
Injury curtailed his original ambition to become a professional rugby player, then he briefly studied nursing with a view to becoming a physio.
He didn’t like it and thought cooking may suit, having enjoyed home economics at school and worked in a butcher’s shop in his teens. He did a four-year apprenticeship in Australia, then moved to London, working at Asia de Cuba then the Dorchester before heading to the US to work with Texan chef Stephen Pyles.
‘Amazing’ experience
When he jumped in at the deep end, taking the head chef job at Nobu Dallas, he recalls: “I didn’t know what I didn’t know. “I was 26 and I was well in the shit, with Nobu himself [metaphorically] kicking the shit out of me. But it was career changing.”
His way through it was working 21-hour days – growing up on a cattle farm in the outback of Australia and the rugby training had given him the stamina to stick it out, even though all the original sous chefs quit.
It is not a style of management he would ever employ himself, even though he can now look back at that time as “amazing”.
He wonders aloud if he is a bit soft on his own staff, but almost in the same breath talks about how one day he’d like to bring more disadvantaged youngsters into the industry, particularly at Bone Daddies.
“You see it happening at those high-end restaurants, but most of those kids would never have been to one before, so they are not going to feel like they belong.
“I felt the same coming from the countryside. I remember the first restaurant I went to as an adult – it was an Italian, and I felt incredibly awkward.”
He is certainly living proof of how any-one with the right mindset – no matter their background – can use their noodle to get on in the restaurant game.
