TONCHIN BROOKLYN

Tokyo tonkotsu carried to Williamsburg

The broth sets the pace for Anan Sugeno, Chef at TONCHIN BROOKLYN in Williamsburg, New York City, where Tokyo tonkotsu ramen holds the center of the room. Anan Sugeno carries the house practice as founder and president here, part of a family line that began in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district in 1992, when Katsuhiro Sugeno and Motohiro Sugeno opened a ten-seat ramen counter near Ikebukuro Station. The New York chapter began in 2017, when Katsuhiro and Anan Sugeno launched Tonchin in Midtown with Tokyo Tonkotsu Ramen as its signature. Williamsburg followed in July 2022, not as a copy of the first American room, but as a wider restaurant built around the same noodle discipline. Sugeno’s work now sits across New York City, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles, a structure that asks the craft to survive transfer: different kitchens, different teams, different service rhythms. His own phrasing stays close to the work. “Tonchin and restaurants have always been a huge part of who I am.”

Ramen with a longer table

TONCHIN BROOKLYN keeps ramen as the anchor, then gives the table more room around it. Tokyo tonkotsu remains the signature bowl, joined by Smoked Dashi Ramen, chicken wings, kakigori shaved ice, and Tokyo Banana pudding. The menu is à la carte, with appetizers and izakaya-style dishes running beside the noodles rather than waiting behind them. One published kitchen detail matters because it belongs to the bench: the chashu begins with pork belly simmered for hours, a slow step that has to hold its texture once it reaches hot broth. The Brooklyn room also turns toward fresh local food in a Japanese spirit, with a New American inflection rather than a strict ramen-counter model. The beverage program changes the pace of the meal. Natural wine sits beside the ramen program, not as decoration, but as part of the restaurant’s Brooklyn grammar, giving pork, smoke, salt, and shaved ice a different set of edges.

The room after the first Brooklyn stop

The room works with the energy of Williamsburg: lively, compact, and close to the counter without becoming casual in its habits. Bowls move through a modern Japanese dining room that has more range than the original ten-seat counter in Tokyo, but the pass still returns to broth, noodles, pork, and timing. The location is a few minutes from the Bedford Avenue L Train stop, the first Brooklyn stop after Manhattan, which explains part of its rhythm. The restaurant opened when Brooklyn diners were staying closer to home, and it kept that neighborhood logic rather than behaving like an overflow room for Midtown. Natural wine on the table, ramen on the pass, kakigori at the end; the sequence belongs to this address.

Standards across more than one kitchen

Sugeno’s current work is as much operational craft as kitchen craft. A multi-site ramen house depends on delegation without losing the method, and his advice is plain: “don’t try to do it all yourself. Build a team that knows their strengths and weaknesses.” That is the live question for TONCHIN BROOKLYN now, how Tokyo Tonkotsu Ramen keeps its line while the house stretches through Williamsburg, New York City, and Los Angeles. The bowl to read closely remains Tokyo Tonkotsu Ramen.