Futago, the yakiniku chain twin brothers started in a 13-tsubo shop, has opened its first new location in two years. While its domestic count fell from 110 stores to 75, the company chose not to grow bigger but to bring back the face of its very first shop.
1.On September 14, a new branch of the yakiniku chain Osaka Yakiniku Horumon Futago opened on the ground floor of a building on Kuyakusho-dori in Kabukicho, Shinjuku. It has 38 seats. It opens at 6 p.m., closes at 4 a.m., and never takes a day off. This is Futago's first new store in about two years and its fifth in Shinjuku.
2.Put two press releases from the operator, FTG Company, side by side and the direction of the numbers is plain. Futago had 110 domestic stores at the end of August 2024. At the end of this August it had 75. The trade outlet Foodrink News wrote that growth stalled after the chain passed 100 stores, and that overseas expansion, a salad specialist and new formats aimed at Gen Z did not deliver what was hoped. Makoto Morikawa, who became president last year, calls the new store "machi-yakiniku", neighborhood yakiniku. The term is borrowed from machi-chuka, the Japanese word for the corner Chinese diner.
3.The company says it has changed its shopfront for the first time in about 16 years. Red lanterns and a black noren now hang under the yellow sign, and inside, wood-grain wall panels meet benches padded with red cushions. Each table holds a small grill, and a silver exhaust pipe drops down over it. Standard-issue tableware has given way to ceramics, and staff greet guests in Osaka dialect. The new slogan, "腹へったら、誰でもふらっと寄ってや", is Osaka talk for: if you're hungry, anyone can just drop in.
4.The original of this look was in Gotanda. Twin brothers Ri Sunchol and Ri Sunbon grew up with a mother who ran a small yakiniku shop in Tsuruhashi, Osaka. The 13-tsubo shop the two opened in Gotanda in May 2010 was store number one, and the goal was to bring Tsuruhashi-style casual yakiniku izakaya to Tokyo. Futago means twins in Japanese. They reportedly chose Gotanda because it is full of office workers on weekdays and families on weekends. That flagship, which used the same tables for 15 years, reopened on November 27, 2025 under a new sign, Yakiniku Futago.
5.The signature dish is Hamideru Kalbi, Japanese black wagyu short rib whose name means spilling off the plate. A single wide sheet of tightly marbled rib is laid across the grill from one edge to the other. Staff, not guests, cook it. While they flip it with tongs, cut it and set it piece by piece on each plate, fat drips through the grate and smoke rises, and the guest never has to pick up the tongs. It costs 2,948 yen.
6.Horumon is in the name because the shop sells Osaka-style offal. Marucho, beef small intestine laid on the grill as one long uncut length, costs 2,629 yen, and a mixed horumon platter tossed in sauce costs 1,419 yen. Every drop of fat from intestine sends flames up, so whoever grills it cannot step away, and the inner fat has to render before the outside burns. This is the cut where staff grilling earns its keep.
7.In the early days, what put a line outside the Gotanda shop was service. Casual yakiniku places where staff grilled the meat for you were rare then. In an interview, Morikawa said staff spend about 20 minutes with a guest who stays two hours. From the start, portions were half a normal serving at half the price, and the more cuts a table orders, the longer staff stay at it. The company says its repeat rate is above 60%.
8.Machi-chuka won people back in Japan because you can see the owner's face in the shop. Futago's new store is closer to a chain trying to design that face in. It picked an old-style shopfront over a logo-led sign, ceramics over standard tableware and dialect over scripted service, and the press release even named the new store manager and quoted them. A facade can be rebuilt by contractors, but the face of a shop is the person standing in it.
9.The money shows up first on the menu. Hamideru Kalbi lists at 2,948 yen, or 2,178 yen for guests who join the F-POINT membership. The gap is 770 yen, 26%. Member discounts on other items run around 10%, yet the deepest cut is on the signature dish. It is built to turn a first-time guest into a member on the spot, and only once member records pile up can repeat visits be managed as numbers.
10.Sales for a single store are not disclosed. Take an evening spend of 5,500 yen per head and assume the 38 seats fill twice a night, and a day comes to about 420,000 yen. Open 30 days a month with no closing day and that is roughly 12.5 million yen a month. In Kabukicho, open until 4 a.m., guests after the last train may fill one more round. All of this is an estimate built on industry norms.
11.People are the heavy cost. Because staff do the grilling, every table needs hands, and the six hours from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. are late-night hours on which Japan's Labor Standards Act requires a 25% premium. Put yakiniku food cost at the 35 to 40% the industry usually cites, and the remaining 60% or so has to cover labor, rent and the late-night premium. How much of that can a shop that stations a grilling server at every table spend on people?
12.The franchise recruitment material lists a 1 million yen franchise fee, a royalty of 5% of sales and a model-store operating profit of 1.38 million yen a month. It does not give the model store's sales. Set against the estimated 12.5 million yen above, the royalty would be a little over 600,000 yen a month and the operating margin around 11%. What a franchisee buys with that 5% is the brand, meat sourcing and training. The grilling hands and the dialect this store puts forward add most to the training load.
13.Futago went abroad early. It started with Taiwan in 2013 and entered New York in 2014, and in a record the company itself posted on its official blog in 2023, it lists closed shops in Shanghai, Chengdu, Taiwan, Fujian and Hawaii. The same post says the salad brand GREEN BROTHERS, launched in 2016, reached only four stores in seven years. This is a company that publishes its own failures.
14.In the two years the domestic count fell by 35, overseas stores went from three to six. Under the structure set up in 2025, the founding brothers took overseas and Morikawa took Japan. Overseas keeps widening, while at home the company chose to fix what a single shop looks like instead of adding more. The first new store in two years from the president in charge of Japan looks like the 13-tsubo Gotanda shop of 16 years ago.
15.A yakiniku chain whose domestic store count fell from 110 to 75 in two years opened a new store and chose a neighborhood shopfront and staff-grilled service over scale. Run the same shop until 4 a.m. in Korea and the labor math changes first. Businesses with five or more employees must pay 50% on top of ordinary wages for work between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., twice Japan's 25%. For a shop where staff stand at every table grilling meat, the premium on those six late hours eats into profit before the cost of the meat does.