Turning the Western-style izakaya into a yakitori family diner (1999)

What it means to change the format

To read the sequence — yakitori bar, Western-style izakaya, Japanese-style yakitori family dining — as nothing but the wandering of a company that could not settle on a format is to miss the point. Awata had run early into a wall: a drinking place serving customers on their second or third stop of the night cannot raise its spend per head, and the base of the business stays thin. The conversion to Toridooru can be seen as an attempt to get over that wall by widening the customer base to families who could use the restaurant from midday.

Toridooru did not, in the end, hold the company up. The year after the shift to families, Marugame Seimen was struck, the face of the company moved to udon, and yakitori family dining never took the leading role. Even so, the pattern — cooking shown in front of the customer, a suburban site, families welcomed from lunchtime — carried straight into the design of Marugame Seimen’s stores. The key to preparing the next core business appears to have lain less in the format itself than in the work of grasping afresh what customers actually value.