When I was young.

Born into a traditional Japanese family, I had Japanese food every day growing up. I moved to London when I was five and back then, there were hardly any Japanese restaurants and ingredients weren’t accessible.

We’d pack our suitcases back from Japan, full to the brim with key Japanese ingredients, which we’d savour for as long as it lasted!!

All my cooking skills are thanks to my mama and obachan (late grandma) teaching me since I was little using these self-imported ingredients.

It all started with a rice ball.

At primary school in North London, I remember feeling embarrassed about opening up my lunch box to my rice ball, as friends had peanut butter and jam sandwiches:“uhhh, what’s that” they’d say, pointing to this unfamiliar black and white ball.

I wasn’t fluent in English yet then either and I remember spending lunch breaks hiding in the toilet eating my rice ball quietly (don't worry, I'm ok guys! Haha). That didn’t last long and I was quickly back in the playground, this time, pitching why rice balls are the best frickin’ thing they’d ever tasted. They’d be lucky if I let them have a bite!

Soon enough, I’d convinced them and went from complaining ungratefully to my mama to pleading she showed me how to make them so I could feed everyone. That’s when my passion for Japanese food truly began.

Why I started Makes Miso Hungry

Everyone knows me for the Japanese cooking obsessed person that I am and so when restaurants closed during lockdown 2020 I became a go-to person for friends and colleagues for their Japanese food fix and that’s how I started Makes Miso Hungry – an authentic premium Japanese meal kit business!

I was an unfulfilled lawyer of 10 years at the time, daydreaming about having my own food business one day and was loving the requests I was getting for Japanese recipes, running zoom sushi and gyōza making classes…

My friend Ed called me from an Asian supermarket stomping around flustered trying to gather the ingredients to make sushi for his mum. “Yoko, I haven’t got an effing clue what any of this stuff is and what it says on the label…”; “Crazy how all of this just cost me £100 and I’m never going to use it after this.”

Everyone's obsession with Japanese food.

That’s when I realised that so many people love Japanese food but hardly anyone cooks it at home. Many of us eat out at Japanese restaurants but wouldn’t know where to begin when it comes to getting Japanese ingredients and the idea of cooking it is intimidating. Maybe you've tried making sushi once; and now have wasteful bottles of expensive Japanese ingredients collecting dust in the back of your cupboard...

So I decided to create a brand that makes it easy and accessible for you all! My mission is making cooking Japanese food easy. I source and prep everything, pre-portion all the hard-to-source ingredients and include my recipe cards in every box so that it’s easy for you. I deliver it right to your door so it's convenient too! We’re a fun educational experience!

I love that our kits bring people together!

And our obsession with Quality Ingredients.

When creating our boxes, we never want to compromise on quality. It's also so important in Japanese cooking to use seasonal ingredients and we do just that. The Japanese cuisine has such simple yet beautiful flavours and we're so excited to introduce them to you.

All our Japanese ingredients have been imported from Japan, and the fresh produce has been hand-selected from Billingsgate Fish Market, Smithfield’s Meat Market and New Covent Garden Vegetable Market to bring you a truly special curated recipe box.