A little back story about us and why we do what we do…

When we set up our own business with irori in the middle of the 2021 lockdown, with just a few pennies in our pockets but a lot of courage, imagination and pragmatism, we are very happy and proud of how everything has developed so far. We started with food boxes in which we sent our menus all over the country. When the restrictions were relaxed, we also cooked at guests’ homes as a private dining concept and because we could only drive on sight, we said we would stay afloat with pop-ups until gastronomy became a little more plannable and we started looking for a suitable property that met our requirements. So for the first two and a half years we actually cooked completely without a restaurant, so we had a production kitchen, our wine storage, including a glass washer in a different location, as well as our pickled ingredients and ferments. It was always very exciting and we were always able to fight our way through, whether it was a pandemic, crises, inflation, etc. We were always inventive and flexible in our ideas and concepts without losing our line. There is a lot of hard work and meticulousness behind our irori. We want to be a place of hospitality at eye level, of Omomtenashi, a place of retreat and the opportunity to switch off and let go. It is intended to connect our homeland and the region with Japan, because for us the land of the rising sun is one of the greatest inspirations for creating value, details of perfection without dogmatism but also an awareness of the small details of life in order to experience even more enjoyment and joy of life. We were then very lucky in 2023 to gain a foothold as a restaurant in Neustadt an der Weinstraße under the Hambacher Schloss in Diedesfeld and to have a place where we could bring everything together and get a central operation up and running, in addition to pop up events all over Germany, as well as in Japan, as well as private dining. But in Diedesfeld the optimal situation was still too big, too expensive, too much investment backlog and no prospect that this could or would change. After our health thwarted our plans in 2023 and we had to reduce the intensity of our countless hours of work and stress, we finally found our place of dreams while searching from Frankfurt to Basel and from the Moselle to Würzburg, namely the Isenhof in Knittelsheim, a small, old & crooked half-timbered house with a great reputation and exemplary maintenance in the southern Palatinate. Even today, there are only two of us who run the irori and we still have someone to help us clean and we have lovely temporary helpers who support us and our family for the service.

We are very grateful to have finally arrived, that so many of you followed us and that many curious people joined us…See you soon!