STORY

 

Carbon pots for the living room

My father, the founding president of our company, first encountered the wonders of carbon when he was a healthy young man. He was dismayed to learn that this fine material was being used only for industrial purposes, and was filled with a strong desire to let everyone know about carbon, to have them eat food made even more delicious by this fantastic material. He developed the first generation of carbon cooking pots, a sweet potato cooker.
The sweet potato cooker became a hit product, and continues to be a popular item to this day.

A chance meeting with Chef Shintaro Katayama

A Japanese restaurant in Toyonaka (Osaka) decides to use one of our carbon pots to provide customers with delicious rice
One day, my father was looking around at the other customers when he approached Shintaro Katayama, who was then still a young apprentice.
'When you open your own restaurant one day, I want you to use this carbon pot.'
Katayama-san was struck by my father's extreme enthusiasm for carbon, and decided at once that he would one day use it to serve delicious rice to his future customers.

Persistent challenges and new developments

Around that time, my father was conducting repeated development of a prototype carbon panel for cooking particularly juicy meat with the master of a Yakiniku (Japanese BBQ) restaurant in Hattori Ryokuchi (Osaka). At the same time, at 'Kiraku', another yakiniku restaurant in Sannomiya (also in Osaka), he perfected a carbon core that used carbon instead of charcoal, after more repeated trial and error. By introducing these new products, it became possible to cook juicy meat hygienically and without getting dirty, bringing a completely different cooking style to these restaurants.
And again at this time, he perfected and released a winged carbon pot, developed jointly with the President of Yamatogushi Planning, for 'kamameshi', a rice, meat and vegetable dish served in the pot itself. This groundbreaking carbon pot was capable of cooking rice with a single tablet of solid fuel.

Inheriting the evolution of the carbon cooking pots

Several years after this, my father passed away.
And approximately 6 months after that, in April 2013, Katayama-san opened his own restaurant 'Rakushin' in Fukushima-ku. Osaka.
HIs delicious rice, cooked with affection, became one of the signature dishes of his restaurant.
Although there were initially only 4 of these particular carbon cooking pots in the world, strong demand from Rakushin's customers led to a decision to mass-produce these pots.
We developed new products after making repeated improvements to the many products that my father had developed in collaboration with various chefs.
Every day I devote myself to fulfilling my father's dream of delivering the flavors of foods cooked in carbon to as many people as possible.