Wharton MBA Quits Bain For Noodle Shop

THE NOODLE IDEA

At Wharton, Okutsu did a lot of listening to entrepreneurs. He found it really interesting — he was there, after all, to work on an idea of his own.

The idea first came to him in 2012. He was living in Shanghai, taking a year off from Bain to study Chinese. While there, he started thinking about which industries would be best for a startup in Shanghai. “One was noodles, and one was cosmetics,” he says. “So as I wrote my B-school applications, I actually wrote about a noodle startup as my goal.”

When he got to San Francisco, the timing was perfect to start tweaking and perfecting the idea. “Unlike classes in Philadelphia, all classes in San Francisco were squeezed into certain times, so some days we wouldn’t have any classes,” Okutsu says. “And you don’t spend all your time studying, like you might in Philadelphia, so I had a lot of free time.”

He used his free time to work on the basic concept of a noodle restaurant, and he finalized his main plans before leaving the Bay Area.

“I tried to open the concept,” he says. “It’s noodles, but it also has a strong tea component. For lunch and dinner I’ll serve noodles, but for afternoon tea there will be tea and tea desserts. The format looks almost like a café. You’ll pay upfront, and then you’ll sit down and the food will come to your table.”

EXCHANGING BUSINESS EXPERTISE FOR A RECIPE

But Okutsu is a business guy, and even after tweaking his idea to perfection, he still needed more. Specifically, he needed noodle recipes — something he managed to work out in San Francisco too.

Around the same time Okutsu was in the city, a Tokyo-based chef was opening a San Francisco shop. The chef’s noodle dishes are similar to what Okutsu aspires to serve, so he hoped to strike some kind of deal. He cold-called and asked to work at the restaurant for a month or so, to learn how to cook the noodles. It didn’t work out, but something else came of it.

The chef needed help making connections in SF – something that would be easy for Okutsu. Between Wharton and his years at Bain, he has quite a bit of experience and lots of connections on the business side. Okutsu helped him create a pitch deck and introduced him to lawyers, and in return, has gained a culinary advisor.

A $200,000+ BILL

After San Francisco, Okutsu returned to Pennsylvania for his last semester and graduated with the Class of 2016. The only thing was, he had been attending Wharton on Bain’s dime, and he was expected to return to work.

But he was committed to the noodle idea at this point. “Bain is a great, great place to work for, and I really appreciate every single bit of the experience there, as well as the personal ties I made through the Bain network,” Okutsu says. “I always try to convince Bainies to stay at Bain. But then, at the bottom of my heart, I always wanted to start up a business myself.”

So he quit his job. Right away, Bain sent him a bill for his education. “They asked me to pay the tuition all at once. It was more than $200,000,” he says laughing. “It wasn’t funny at all,” he says, still laughing.

But he paid it, and left for Shanghai to get started. Since then, he’s hired a creative director to do branding for his company, and he’s interviewed a head chef. He hasn’t found a location yet, because he says he’s being very careful. “You can’t screw up on location,” he says. “So you have to wait until you find a place you’re very comfortable with.” In the meantime, he’s buying kitchen equipment and working on creating a name for his restaurant.

To make as much as he did at Bain, he says he’ll probably have to open three stores. His goal is 30. “My base will be in Shanghai, but I’d like to expand,” he says. “It’ll be the first city, but not the last.”

DON’T MISS: WHARTON MBA CLASS OF 2018: NOW WHAT? or TOP 100 MBA STARTUPS OF 2016