If you go out for ramen in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles — or even as far afield as Paris or Amsterdam — chances are good that a business founded in Kalihi made the noodles.

The operation behind this ramen powerhouse is Sun Noodle, now the supplier to major retailers like Whole Foods, Costco and a dozen other grocery chains, as well as some of the best restaurants in the country.

Sun Noodle’s roots stretch back to 1981, when Hidehito Uki, the 19-year-old son of a noodle-maker from the Japanese prefecture of Tochigi, arrived in Honolulu with a bit of seed money, some old machinery and very little English.

But he came with a clear vision: to bring the quality and variety of Japanese noodles to Hawaiʻi. On the streets of Honolulu, he looked up at the blazing, beautiful sun and decided to name his company after it.

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Today, Sun Noodle presides over an empire, with factories in Hawaiʻi, California, New Jersey and the Netherlands. Known for its obsession with quality and craftsmanship as well as the variety of its noodles, it has become the supplier of choice for some of America’s most renowned chefs, including Masaharu Morimoto and David Chang, who serves a special variety made with upstate New York barley at the Momofuku Noodle Bar in Manhattan.

Though Hidehito is still the CEO of the company he founded more than four decades ago, he has gradually handed parts of its operation to his children, Kenshiro and Hisae. Kenshiro, Sun Noodle’s President of North American and Europe, has led the company’s expansion.

A Pearl City High School graduate and a college soccer player at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, Kenshiro joined the family business as a newly minted MBA in 2008 when Sun Noodle was finding its footing on the West Coast. Soon, he began envisioning the company as a national brand. For him, the logical next step was a factory on the East Coast that could supply the booming ramen scene there.

Today, if you make the 10-mile drive west of Manhattan, you can see what Kenshiro built. Each day at Sun Noodle’s factory in the New Jersey borough of Carlstadt, the company makes 150,000 servings of ramen.

After putting on protective clothing and walking through a booth with dozens of protruding tubes that blew away dust, I emerged to see the heart of Sun Noodle’s East Coast operation. Kenshiro, who was amiable and quick to smile, showed me the bustling production floor. Across a large space, lines of sophisticated machines turned huge rolls of noodle dough into beautiful strands. 

In rooms off the factory floor, Kenshiro explained the types of flour Sun Noodle uses to instill complex flavors in its ramen. He talks about flour with the care that a winemaker discusses his grapes, that a chocolate maker obsesses over cacao beans.

Much of Sun Noodle’s flour comes from Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States, each one offering subtly different textures, levels of smoothness, and fiber content. For specialty noodles, like the ones David Chang uses, they look to small producers in upstate New York or Japan. Altogether, the New Jersey factory produces 108 varieties.

In one sense, Sun Noodle was perfectly placed to benefit from ramen’s explosion in popularity 15 to 20 years ago. It had the infrastructure in place, the skill to produce quality noodles at scale and connections with national distributors. In fact, the company drove the market and helped fuel the trend.

Besides producing top-rate noodles, the company has been a key evangelist. It’s hosted chefs, run seminars and organized “ramen flights,” a play on the beer flight where hungry people can try small portions of ramen from across Japan. Its “Ramen Lab,” a pop-up shop where the public can watch how different varieties of ramen are made, has helped Americans see how rich and diverse the dish can be.

Sun Noodle’s ambition stretches beyond North America. In 2023, the company opened a factory in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, where it produces ramen for distribution to nearly a dozen countries across Europe. 

And while it is a rare example of a homegrown business that has gone global, the family company is still headquartered and deeply rooted in Hawaiʻi. Local culture — and the neighborhood of Kalihi above all — are not just origin stories for Sun Noodle, but a cultural polestar.

“Kalihi raised us. It’s where Sun Noodle was born,” Kenshiro told me.

Recently, Hidehito has been working to bring his noodles full circle: back to his home country of Japan. Rather than pitch ramen to the people who invented it, he’s decided to put saimin — the distinctly local spin on noodle soup with roots in the plantations — on Japan’s noodle map. So far, the reception has been enthusiastic.

Before I left Sun Noodle’s factory, we ordered dry mein from a restaurant chain that Kenshiro supplies. The noodles were everything you want from ramen: springy, chewy, eggy. And while they contained a liberal amount of garlic and chili — a possibly unwise choice given my meeting on Madison Avenue an hour later — I felt no regret. I eagerly scarfed down the whole box.