What inspired an English man to create a Japanese restaurant?
When I was eighteen I went to Tokyo. It was the late eighties, and it was still pretty unusual to see any Westerners in Japan, but by one of those strange coincidences, I was there at the same time as a girl from my school in Lewes, Caroline Bennett. We decided to meet up and we chose a conveyor belt sushi bar to eat in. It wasn’t the first time I had eaten sushi, but I still wasn’t very familiar with it. At any rate, I have this distinct memory of the sushi we ate tasting awful. It nearly put me off eating sushi altogether. Seven years later, we opened the first conveyor belt sushi bar in Europe in Liverpool Street Station, London. Probably because of that experience in Tokyo, we decided that Moshi Moshi should serve really good quality sushi, in spite of it being a conveyor belt sushi bar. Opening the first conveyor belt sushi bar in Europe must have been quite an experience! I remember it being really tough. At the time, virtually all Japanese restaurants were owned by the Japanese,
