Gohanya Parole, 74 Years of Knowledge on a Plate

At 74, Emiko Sakurai could easily have chosen to enjoy her retirement peacefully. But she took a different path, and instead of sitting around, doing nothing, she opened her own restaurant in 2015: Gohanya Parole in Tokyo.

With over twenty years of experience in the restaurant industry as a caterer, this wasn’t a rash decision. Indeed, her past clients include Gucci and Issey Miyake, the great Japanese fashion designer, and she launched her first restaurant in the Japanese capital before deciding to quit at the age of 60.

But a problem remained: retirement bored her. Not satisfied with her ‘lazy’ life, she took advice from her friends, who advised her to start working again. And thus, Gohanya Parole was born, on the second floor of an apartment.

The now grey-haired chef is convinced that food is what connects us all. If there is belief in her cooking and flavours, she claims, her diners will taste the difference.