FOUNDER’S STORY
One night, I stood motionless before a menu.
Summer 2021. At twenty-five, I arrived in London as a diplomat at the Embassy of Japan in the United Kingdom. So began four years on British soil.
One evening, I found myself at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese — a venerable establishment rebuilt in 1667 after the Great Fire of London, and a literary haunt once cherished by Dickens himself. I settled onto a smoke-darkened wooden bench and opened the menu. Before me lay ingredients I had never heard of, and dishes whose names defied even guesswork.
I longed to try them. Yet one wrong choice, and there would be no taking it back. My phone offered nothing but the dry, mechanical translation of words. The waiter, sensing a foreigner, recommended only the safest options. In the end, I ordered the fish and chips.
That night, beside me at the same table, a stranger had ordered something that looked wonderfully delicious. What had it been, I wonder still — the dish of a lifetime that I had perhaps allowed to pass me by. The regret returns to me, even now, in quiet moments.
It was no different in Milan, nor in San Sebastián, where I travelled with the woman who was to become my wife. Poring over the menu together, we ended up ordering only the dishes we already knew.
If only we could see what lay beyond the menu. That dish of a lifetime — surely anyone might find it. In London, as in Milan, the thought grew only stronger.
June 2025. I returned home and took over the family business, becoming the fourth generation to run a restaurant company now in its seventy-fifth year. Nearly a year had passed when I gave voice to a frustration I had carried for years — the frustration of the unread menu. Koki Yui — my friend since secondary school, by then a lawyer specialising in start-ups — gave me the push I needed. “That problem,” he said, “is one you can solve.”
I have left the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but my wish to be of service — to Japan, and to the world — remains unchanged. If the people of the world could engage more deeply with the food cultures of other lands, surely the world would become richer. Diplomacy through food. A place where, beyond borders and beyond language, cultures meet through a single dish. That is what MENU-PAAN seeks to embody.
In the near future, should the chance arise to travel abroad with my wife, I should like to visit a small restaurant in some country town, MENU-PAAN in hand — to encounter a foreign dish I have never tasted, the kind beloved by the people of that place.
━━ Rokusaburo INUI (Co-founder of MENU-PAAN, fourth generation of a 75-year-old kushikatsu restaurant)