yuri
Dear Washoku Lovers,
Today, March 9th 2016, is the first anniversary of Washoku Lovers.
I wanted to thank you all very much for being a part of Washoku Lovers!
Washoku Lovers started as a community to spread the word of Washoku. Washoku means Japanese Food Culture as you know now. I wanted to recommend authentic Japanese restaurants, like I do for my friends. On the other hand, Japanese chefs follow the “samurai spirit”, they are very humble and won’t brag about themselves even when they should. Our aim is to connect you and our chefs to enjoy Washoku at restaurants, as the first step of your Washoku journey.
We started with the Chef’s interviews. We used these interviews to select and promote only the best and well-trained chefs. We created the Chef’s Gallery to introduce these experienced Washoku chefs to you. I was amazed to hear how much time it takes to train in Washoku from the chefs, it was not easy at all! They must have a huge passion to cook Japanese food outside of Japan.
However, as this community’s purpose is to spread word of Washoku, we knew it was important to have something to show and entice people to join as members. We started to distribute membership cards to each Washoku Lovers Member.
We selected restaurants, called Washoku Lovers Partnered Restaurants, which have a chef who trained in Japanese Food culture for a minimum of 2 years. This is an important condition in our selection of Japanese restaurants. We can show which Japanese restaurants are authentic by our Washoku Lovers sticker on their wall. They are guaranteed to be good! Washoku Lovers Benefits are available for Washoku Lovers Members only.
The benefits of being a member can be redeemed at Washoku Lovers Partnered Restaurants, and massive discounts apply for Washoku Lovers Events such as cooking events or promotions.
Our first event was Washoku Lovers Kitchen on July 7th 2015. Chef Raita showed how to cook wagyu in both the Japanese traditional sukiyaki way and his own creative style.
Our next event was to promote the book ‘ Izakaya’, by Hideo Dekura, at Kinokuniya book store on August 8th. We started to work with Ippin sake brewery from that date, and they started writing the IPPIN blog on our website.
We were so excited to create our first TVC for the Japanese Film Festival. The TVC showed before each film screened during the Japanese Film Festival in November in both Sydney and Melbourne.
We organised a Japanese Curry cooking class to promote the movie Midnight Diner, for the Japanese Film Festival 2015.
Then there was our first cross promotion marketing with our partnered restaurants, called Japanese Curry Month, in October. As a prize of the competition, we ran a Japanese Curry Rice cooking class for Washoku Lovers on November 22nd 2015.
This year, 2016, we celebrated the Chinese New Year in the Japanese way, called Setsubun, by making mochi and then we cooked mochi dishes and Ehou maki (sushi rolls) at the end of January.
We are so appreciative of our partners in Sydney and Melbourne, and our blogger friends from the Gold Coast! We are always happy to see you, and to talk about Washoku with wonderful influencers just like you.
Time flies extremely quickly. We are always thinking about what content we can provide to Washoku Lovers, how we can increase the number of memberships (free to sign up here), and what benefits would entice people to try Washoku as our members at our selected restaurants.
We would like to improve our service more and more to make everyone happy and healthy with Washoku. This is the main reason we have switched to digital benefits so we can help you enjoy our benefits from March 1st 2016.
I really appreciated having my great staff to support this project, Washoku Lovers. I am also very fortunate to be in the process of following my dreams.
One day everyone in the world will have Japanese ingredients and seasonings such as soy sauce and miso in their fridge, and enjoy Washoku and sake as much as we do now.
A big thank you again to be part of Washoku Lovers. We do our best to bring you on the most exciting washoku journey!
Arigatou＼(^o^)／
