Recently, a switched reluctance motor is widely used in various industries because it has many advantages such as a simple structure, robustness, less maintenance, high torque/weight ratio, and easy speed control over other types of motors. However, a switched reluctance motor inherently produces acoustic noise and vibration caused by torque ripple. Applications of these motors where silent operation is desirable have thus been limited. In this paper, a new stator pole face having a non-uniform air-gap and a pole shoe attached to the lateral face of the rotor pole are suggested in order to minimize torque ripple. The effects of each design parameter are validated using a time-stepping finite element method. The parameters are optimized by utilizing response surface method (RSM) combined with (1+1) evolution strategy. The result shows that the optimized shape gives higher average torque and drastically reduced torque ripple.