How One Word From a Columbia Professor Built Yuzu Group

Min, founder and CEO of Yuzu Group, says the entire growth of his restaurant company, from one yuzu-infused ramen shop in Siam Square to a lineup that now includes Yuzu Suki, Yuzu Omakase, and Thai Thai Boat Noodles, comes down to a single habit: asking. It's advice he picked up from a professor at Columbia, where he finished grad school right before opening his first shop, and it's the thread running through everything he told Students Incorporated hosts Mr. Jason and Proud about starting the company, hiring for it, and managing the stress of scaling it.

Min built his ten-brand company inside a market that has kept expanding around him. Thailand's foodservice industry is projected to be worth roughly $38.1 billion in 2026, on track to grow past $55 billion by 2031, and chained restaurant outlets specifically, the category Yuzu Group belongs to, are expanding faster than independent operators as the market grows. Bangkok alone hosts more than 55,000 registered food and beverage outlets, meaning every one of Min's ten brands is competing for attention inside one of the most saturated restaurant markets in Southeast Asia.

Betting on a Flavor Nobody Else Was Serving

Eight years ago, fresh out of Columbia and back in Bangkok, Min came across a space in Siam Square and had to decide what to do with it. He thought about what he liked to eat and where his strengths were, and landed on ramen infused with yuzu, a combination he'd tried in Tokyo and elsewhere but hadn't seen served in Thailand. That gap was the opportunity: if he did it first, he reasoned, nobody else would be established in the space yet. He brought in a team of Japanese R&D staff and spent more than a year developing the recipe before Yuzu Ramen opened in 2018. Yuzu Omakase followed within months. Eight years later, Yuzu Group has grown into roughly ten food brands, including Yuzu Suki and Thai Thai Boat Noodles.

The category Min chose turned out to be an unusually durable one. Japanese food is the most popular international cuisine in Thailand, with more than 5,000 outlets nationwide, but industry trackers reported in 2026 that the broader Japanese restaurant market had shrunk for the first time in nearly 20 years as it entered what one trade group called a "fully mature" and increasingly competitive phase, pushing weaker mid-tier operators out. Ramen shops were one of the few segments still growing through that shakeout. Min's early bet on a ramen concept, made years before the market matured, put him in almost exactly the corner of the industry that held up best.

The Professor Who Taught Him to Ask

Asked what he still carries from his student years, Min didn't point to a class or a case study. He pointed to a professor named Mark, who told him that everything he'd achieved traced back to one action: asking. Min took it literally. When he hits a wall (in the business, with a team decision, in any context), his response is to ask the people around him: his team, his seniors, his mentors, whoever has expertise in that particular problem. "I think everything that has made me who I am and my team today is I asked my way through," he said, adding that people tend to underestimate how much power there is in simply asking rather than guessing. It shapes his hiring, too: he says he wants team members who are specific about what they want, whether that's a long-term goal or just a clear financial target for the next six months to a year, because a defined ambition is what lets him help someone actually get there.

Skiing Through the Trees

When the conversation turned to the pressure of running a multi-brand company, Min described his approach to stress with an image from the slopes.

You have two choices: you look at the trees, or you look at the way.

Stress, he said, comes from facing a situation without knowing what to do, and staring at the obstacle doesn't produce a path around it. The trees are real, and he doesn't pretend otherwise, but fixating on them isn't the same as finding the route through. When he or his team can't solve something, they don't force it: they set it aside, give it time, talk to more people, and circle back later. He judges each day not by whether every problem got fixed, but by whether they did their best with the time they had. If they did, the unsolved parts just carry over to tomorrow. It's part of why, he said, he still sleeps through the night.

Why the Next Big Trend in Restaurants Is Doing Less

Min's read on where dining is headed starts with a broader observation about consumer behavior since COVID: people are saturated with screens, data, and digital noise, and he thinks the response to that saturation is a shift toward the offline. Going out to eat, in his view, is becoming less about the meal itself and more about a deliberate pause, a chance to relax and wind down away from a screen. That's pulling the industry toward simplification: smaller menus, fewer SKUs, more minimalist interiors. A restaurant built around chicken over rice, he argued, should sell chicken over rice. The moment it adds noodles or expands the menu just to offer more, it becomes harder for an already-overwhelmed customer to process. He expects that kind of narrowing to be close to mandatory across food and beverage over the next three to five years. Industry forecasts for 2026 back up the direction of his bet, if not the timeline: multiple restaurant trend reports this year point to menu simplification and a return to straightforward, authentic dishes over "overly conceptual" dining, with operators leaning on tighter menus and bundled offerings rather than expanding for expansion's sake.

That same instinct toward restraint shows up in his advice about spending. The mistake he sees most often in young entrepreneurs, including an earlier version of himself, is over-investing: insisting on the best sound system, the most expensive table, premium finishes on a first project, because it's tempting to want the best version of everything. His advice is blunter: a business exists to turn revenue into profit, so spend on what actually drives revenue and hold back on what doesn't, no matter how appealing it looks in the moment.

Start Online, and Don't Measure Your Dream Against Anyone Else's

For students weighing a first project, Min's advice is to start online. He pointed to e-commerce specifically, arguing that the barrier to entry is minimal and the reach, if you understand how social platforms and their algorithms work, is close to limitless. He said that if he were 18 or 19 again, that's exactly where he'd put his energy first.

The numbers make his case for him. Thailand's e-commerce market grew 51.8 percent year-on-year in 2025 to roughly $35.5 billion in gross merchandise value, one of the fastest growth rates in the region, and social commerce specifically has become close to the default way Thai consumers shop: about 88 percent of consumers in Thailand say they've bought something directly through a social platform. Southeast Asia's social commerce market as a whole is projected to top $80 billion in 2026, and platforms competing for that volume have started underwriting the cost of entry for new sellers directly, waiving commissions for first-year sellers and bundling in logistics and marketing support, lowering the barrier Min is describing even further than it was when he started.

His closing message was less about tactics and more about scale. He encouraged students to dream as big as they want, but warned against measuring that dream against someone else's. Whether someone else's ambition is a fortune or something as different as planting a million trees, the two aren't comparable, because people don't want the same things. His one condition: as long as pursuing it doesn't mean taking advantage of or being unfair to other people, it's worth going after, whatever shape it takes.

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