The Soul of Noodles
Hidehito & Keiko Uki
Like the simple noodle, we started from humble beginnings. Our founder, Hidehito Uki, came to Hawai`i from Tochigi, Japan in 1981 with just one suitcase, a single noodle machine, and a passion for sharing high quality, Japanese noodles. Visiting prospective customers everyday, Hidehito would go door-to-door with samples of fresh noodles and return back to the factory to customize the noodles according to the chefs needs. Every restaurant had a noodle dish they called its own craft noodle.
Down the street from the Sun Noodle factory in Honolulu, Hidehito met his wife Keiko, who owned her own okazuya (Japanese delicatessen). Keiko soon felt the same passion and dream with Hidehito to spread the love of noodles beginning in Hawaii, the us and other countries around the world. Hidehito would make and deliver the noodles, while Keiko would manage and handle all the companies other affairs.
“Hawai`i and its community welcomed us with open arms, with aloha, and we are thankful because Sun Noodle would not be here today,” Hidehito would say. Hidehito learned to create noodles, other than the traditional Japanese noodles like ramen, yakisoba, nihon soba, and udon, to also service Hawai`i’s diverse, melting-pot community: Saimin, Okinawa Soba, Chow Mein, and Chow Fun and so forth.
Founded in Hawai`i, the spirit of aloha is the soul of our noodles and our extended Ohana as we expanded outside of the Hawaiian Islands to Southern California in 2004, New Jersey in 2011 and New York City in 2012.