Blue C Sushi team to introduce Seattle to Japanese-style noodle house

Steve Rosen and James Allard, the tech-boom entrepreneurs who brought us the ever-(r)evolving Blue C Sushi, have another project in the works: Boom Noodle, which borrows its name from the Japanese phrase "my boom" — used to describe one's latest obsession.

Their boom is a Japanese noodle house that spans 4,500 square feet of high-profile slurping space anchoring the new mixed-use building at 12th and Pike. The Capitol Hill restaurant and bar (1121 E. Pike St.) is slated to open in September, as is the third Blue C Sushi (www.bluecsushi.com) at Alderwood Mall.

The Blue C boys are clearly obsessed with tweaking Japanese culinary trends for a broad Seattle audience. While they didn't exactly introduce Seattle to kaiten (conveyor-belt) sushi, they've certainly upped the ante for an experience geared not only to the sushi-lover but the sushi novice, marrying high-tech mechanics, quality ingredients and experienced personnel in a mod-nod to sushi sampling.

As a soup-noodle maniac devoted to Chinese dumplings, Vietnamese pho and Korean naeng-myun, I have to wonder why Japanese noodles have gotten the short shrift locally. Sushi we've got — in spades. Noodles, not so much. At Boom Noodle, we'll slurp soba, ramen, somen and udon served hot, cold, in soups, with dipping broths and even pan-fried. In addition, the menu will offer small plates, a short list of meat and seafood entrees and Japanese desserts, served at lunch and dinner.

Tapped to head-up the kitchen is Jonathan Hunt, a talented and creative chef, late of Lake Union's high-end Lowell-Hunt Catering, who has done an impressive disappearing act since severing professional ties with his longtime business partner, Russell Lowell, more than a year ago.

Lowell, by the way, has since renamed and relocated his catering kitchen and special-events space, now known as Russell's on Wall Street (www.rdlcatering.com). He's opened Russell's Dining & Bar in a renovated barn in Bothell (3305 Monte Villa Parkway, 425-486-4072) and continues to operate the cafe at Molbak's in Woodinville.

And in the meantime, in what sounds like the makings of an HBO sitcom, Hunt spent several months as the personal chef to a Saudi prince who'd set up temporary quarters in Seattle.

Hunt shopped for fresh ingredients at Pike Place Market, accompanied by the prince's Arabic-speaking staffers, before ferrying the goods in a limo to their home-away-from-home at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. There, he cooked multiple meals in the hotel's kosher kitchen for the prince and his entourage of 40, using more cardamom in a month than he's used in a lifetime.

And all along, Hunt says, "I was biding my time until I got what I consider the greatest opportunity of my career thus far." That opportunity came last fall, when Rosen convinced him to quietly come aboard the noodle boat.

Since then, he's been gaining fluency in Japanese cookery, developing recipes with the help of Blue C's co-founder Shinichi Miura; lead chef Mitsuro Takahara (whose father owned a Tokyo ramen shop for 30 years); sushi chef Toshi Moriya (a familiar face from Belltown's Wasabi Bistro and Mill Creek's Wasabi Bay); and Satoru Sugitani, who will be leaving Blue C to become Hunt's right-hand man at Boom Noodle.

"I've never been this excited about food," says Hunt, whose culinary experience is steeped in European tradition and firmly rooted in the Northwest. During the past nine months, he says, "I've eaten and experienced so much, on the Japanese level. I'm so turned on by it. The deeper I go into this, the more I learn about it."

He's learning more while in Kyoto this week, apprenticing at a busy noodle shop before traveling to Tokyo for a culinary tour. Hunt says he's heard-tell of fanatics in Tokyo so in tune with their favorite ramen shops "they can smell a chef's coat and tell you where he works. Imagine 20 sushi places in Fremont," he says. "That's how dense Tokyo and the ramen shops are."

"One thing this process taught us," says Rosen — who envisions Boom Noodle as a growing enterprise (read: chain) built to introduce the joys of Japanese noodles to a wider demographic — "is that if you ask 100 Japanese people what makes the ultimate bowl of ramen, you're pretty much guaranteed to get 100 different answers."

Nancy Leson: 206-464-8838 or nleson@seattletimes.com. More columns are available at seattletimes.com/nancyleson.