The story behind the noodles.

In 1989, when I started surfing, the dark days of the thruster were at their peak. This was a few years before Joel Tudor came along and the surf film Litmus opened people's eyes to the idea of riding something other than a six-foot shortboard. All I cared about was longboarding — which meant it was nearly impossible to find a board over seven feet, and even if you did, you were treated like some kind of freak, exiled to the obscure, out-of-the-way spots away from the frantic ass-wigglers.

I grew up inland and came to surfing late, at 20, so I was never indoctrinated into the Southern California shortboard cult. I just wanted to follow my heroes from the glory days — men like George Downing, Dale Velzy, Greg Noll, and Hobie Alter. I'd read the stories of simpler times: people camping along the California coast, living off the sea, building their own boards, and, without knowing it, inventing the whole surfing lifestyle. Somewhere I scrounged up a triple-stringer 9'6" and started trying to build my own version of those old days.

Fast forward. Martha's Vineyard, 1995.

One cold December afternoon, after surfing for hours in the snow, a few of us were huddled around the woodstove eating Vietnamese food we'd cooked, riffing on surfboard ideas and tossing around names for the boards I wanted to build. I looked down at the package the noodles had come in, and there it was: BÁNH PHỞ.

Now, I know. A guy from inland naming his life's work after a Vietnamese noodle. Bánh phở is literally the flat rice noodle in a bowl of phở — so in plain terms I named my surfboards "flat noodles." I'm aware of how that sounds. But it stuck, and thirty years later here we are opening up a shop!

The "Crispy Noodle" half came from Tu Lan, on 6th and Market in downtown San Francisco — the little spot Julia Child wandered into in the '70s and made semi-famous. Their crispy noodle dish is one of the great meals of my life, and Banh Pho' Surfboards & Crispy Noodle arrived almost fully formed. That was it. I had a name.

Then I needed a logo, and again it felt right to look back at my heroes. A lot of my favorite shapers from the '50s and '60s built their logos around an oval. Two of the best — Reynolds Yater and Hobie Alter — set a modified oval on top of a tapering base. That became my foundation.

So that's what the mark is: a noodle bowl carried inside the same oval my heroes used. The woodstove on the Vineyard and the shaping bay in one shape — where I come from, and what I'm chasing, in a single logo.