By 6 o’clock, the line at Marugame Udon at Stonestown had grown so long that the cashier darted out into the parking lot to re-channel the people into a series of switchbacks. Docile and hungry in equal measure, we inched forward in the same way we do for airport security and the rides at Great America. Conversations in Cantonese, Tagalog, English and Mandarin started and stopped in the same impatient syncopation.

Marugame, owned by a Japanese company with close to 1,400 restaurants in Japan and abroad, isn’t the only Asian restaurant chain to land in the Bay Area. Ippudo Ramen (Japan), Bake Cheese Tart (Japan), Din Tai Fung (Taiwan) and Bonchon Chicken (Korea) have all opened here in the past few years, drawing the kinds of lines that only seem to coalesce around Saturday-brunch favorites like Brenda’s French Soul Food and Plow.

If Bay Area residents are so chain-averse, how can we be so chain-crazy as well?

Consider the fast-food populations of San Francisco and Columbus, Ohio, whose human populations differ by just 10,000. According to the health departments of both cities, San Francisco has just 12 locations of McDonald’s, 8 Taco Bells and 44 Subways, compared to 38 McDonald’s, 26 Taco Bells and 70 Subways in Columbus. (The outlier: Starbucks, which has 81 stands in San Francisco and 48 in Columbus.)

San Francisco’s formula-retail restrictions, which apply to restaurants, cafes and retail shops with more than 11 locations, have been effective in limiting the mall-ification of the city. Critics of the restrictions, such as the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, also mention that they have made it difficult for local startups to grow beyond a certain size on their home turf.

At the same time, Northern California has become a major target for bakery chains such as Beard Papa from Japan, 85C from Taiwan, and Paris Baguette and Tous Les Jours from Korea. Masatsugu Sawaki, a representative for Bake Cheese Tart, which has 40 locations in 10 countries, says San Francisco was attractive to the corporation because it is similar in spirit to Tokyo. He sums up the factors as “foot traffic and culture.”

Kay Doling, a representative for Toridoll, the company that operates Marugame Udon, also cites foot traffic as part of San Francisco’s appeal, along with San Francisco’s large Asian population. Toridoll also owns other noodle concepts. “Ramen is kind of overwhelmed, so we’re looking to (introduce) a little healthier, lighter broth,” she adds.

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More Information Three chains worth waiting for Bake Cheese Tarts:Westfield San Francisco Centre food court, 865 Market St., S.F., cheesetart.com. Open daily. Terribly light and none too sweet, these cream-cheese tarts with crunchy shells are worth $3.50 apiece, depending on how much value you assign to your time. Marugame Udon: Stonestown Galleria, 3251 20th Ave., San Francisco, (415) 680-1280; www.marugameudon.com. Open for lunch and dinner daily. Any of the preparations — such as Bukkake Udon ($4.50 medium/$5.50 large) in a rich soy-and-oyster sauce — that allow you to focus on the udon noodles instead of toppings are best. Although it’s easy to load up your tray with tempura and onigiri, don’t. Ippudo Ramen: Bay Area locations at 2015 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, and 18 Yerba Buena Lane, San Francisco; http://ippudo-us.com. Both open for lunch and dinner daily. Ippudo shows off its consistency best in the noodles, ordered to your firmness, as well as the Akamaru Modern bowl ($15) whose pork-bone broth is amped up with miso. Does it outclass the more artisanal Japanese export Mensho Ramen or local favorites Orenchi Ramen and Ramen Shop? No, but the lines are much shorter.

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I asked Nicole Duncan, an editor with QSR magazine, a trade journal for the fast-food industry, for her thoughts. She wrote in an email, “I don’t have data to back this up, but my opinion would be that international brands, by the sheer nature of their global roots, do not elicit the same unsavory feelings among consumers as their U.S. counterparts.” Our unfamiliarity with even the biggest chains, Duncan added, made us less likely to see them as exploitative — or even to mistake them for mom ‘n’ pop shops.

Just as the construction of a vast network of freeways literally paved the way for the 1960s Era of Franchises — led by Howard Johnson’s and McDonald’s — social media has become the mechanism by which the crazy popularity of these import chains spreads. But their success may be more dependent on two other factors: demographics and travel.

Almost a quarter of the population in the nine-county Bay Area is Asian or Asian American, according to 2010 U.S. Census statistics. According to a recent Pew Research Group, 73 percent of U.S. residents who are Asian were born in another country: Our cultural ties across the Pacific are strong and, given the ease of international travel, fluid. The Beijing-based Little Sheep hot pot chain can open up here, and customers are already familiar with the brand. Friends of mine can compare the prowess of Din Tai Fung locations in Santa Clara, Shanghai and Taipei.

When I pigeonholed people waiting in line outside the Bake Cheese Tart — what were they going to do, give up their place to avoid me? — several had traveled to Japan in the past few months and wanted to recapture what they ate there. Kasey Chiu of Sunnyvale said he had eaten a tart from Bake’s competitor, Pablo, in Tokyo in November. “I loved it,” he said. “It was life changing.”

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As Marugame’s line approached the door, signs instructed customers how to order: grab a tray, order an udon bowl by number, ask for it hot or cold, move down through the tempura station to the cash register. On the other side of the glass noodles, workers transferred mesh bags of boiling udon to holding tanks, heated up individual portions and then dipped them into a noodle dryer that looks like an inverted Bullet blender cup before dressing them to my specifications.

Whether they originated in Tokyo or San Diego, the promise of chain restaurants has always been modernity and consistency.

We have learned to place our trust in the corporation, in place of the individual chef, to ensure that the noodles or hamburgers that we have always enjoyed will always be enjoyable, always the same, no matter where or when we eat. We trust that machines will roll noodles to the same thickness and fill cheesecake tarts to the exact consistency, a regularity ensured by months of engineering and quality assurance. Even when it comes to Din Tai Fung’s manual dumpling folders, we expect the cooks to observe standards that have been exactingly modulated.

When the chain restaurant comes from Asia, I think we’re betting that this consistency will endure across the Pacific Ocean. How many times have I been told, “This ramen is fine for San Francisco but it’s nowhere near as good as your average bowl of noodles in Japan”? Perhaps a chain will never reach the culinary heights of a master chef cooking in her home country, but it seems to eliminate the perennial sense of ersatz that clings to North American versions of a Japanese, Korean or Taiwanese dish.

How were Marugame’s noodles, you ask? So wiggly they appeared electrified; their texture had hit an appealing midpoint between marshmallow and jujube — a texture few local Japanese restaurants can achieve.

In my darker moments, I worry that our collective furor over new chain restaurants means that we have given in to the belief that individuals are always fallible. Perhaps I’m too big a believer in the myth of individual genius, but there was something hollow in the appeal of the broths at all the Asian noodle chains I ate at, some lack of idiosyncracy. (The cheese tarts at Bake, I had to admit, were pretty good.)

Perhaps the real driver for these long lines is scarcity. We Bay Area diners do seem to rush to embrace chains that seem exotic to local tastes: The few local branches of Southern California’s In-N-Out Burger are perpetually swamped, and any article about New York-based Shake Shack’s forthcoming San Francisco location sizzles along our social media connections like a lit fuse.

The manias of previous years, such as the cream puffs from Beard Papa, have already dissipated. In fact, last week it was easy to get into the 9-month-old Ippudo branch in Berkeley on a weeknight; nearby Bonchon Chicken, which has 16 Northern California locations, was empty, too.

Perhaps what we line up for is novelty, the very opposite of what restaurant chains provide.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com. Twitter/Instagram: @jonkauffman