OUR TEAM

This small team has a combined experience of more than 100 years in Japan and has dined out here at least 20,000 times. We've been to everything from what Swedes would call a "sausage stand" to the three-Michelin-star restaurants that Tokyo is now overflowing with. Regardless of the price point or ambiance, we never compromise on the flavors and the overall experience.

Dag Klingstedt

Dag has lived and worked in Japan for most of the time since August 1982. In other words, he's a member of the Swedish veteran's club in the country. For a large part of this time, his work has focused on communication in the form of writing (both press and advertising), drawing, and lecturing. This also includes a great deal of sales and consulting, as well as a period in the early 90s as a foreign service officer at the Swedish Embassy in Tokyo. What has remained constant throughout all these years, regardless of the job, has been an almost total integration into Japanese society with its culture and customs, where one of the most important ingredients has been the food and drink that is so extremely vital to the Japanese.

Japanese people cannot do business without eating and drinking together. That's just how it is. They are perhaps the planet's most serious gourmets—and often gourmands—and this has, of course, rubbed off on Dag, who is now trying to lose weight after gaining 32 kg since arriving in the land of the upward-moving scale. Let's just say he's eaten himself happy and content on virtually all of the nearly 11,000 days he has spent in Japan.

This weight gain, largely caused by what is now approaching 8,000 restaurant visits, can now, so to speak, benefit you, as you can now leverage Dag's unique expertise; few other foreigners in Japan have the same dining knowledge literally "under their belt"!

Rieko Mise

Rieko was born in Osaka and grew up in Nara prefecture. She has lived in Tokyo since 1985, except for the 13 years she spent in Stockholm. Rieko originally worked as a fashion illustrator but is no stranger to any creative work. Today, she works as a chef, photographer, illustrator, columnist, and floral arranger (ikebana). A couple of days a week she works in the kitchen of a restaurant in Tokyo's popular Ebisu district, and with her own company, SPISEN, she works with catering, where the Swedish and Icelandic embassies are two of her main clients. During her last year in Sweden, she worked in the kitchen at Blue Light Yokohama, one of Stockholm's most popular and authentic Japanese restaurants.

Rieko's interest in food is in her genes. Both her mother and brother work in the restaurant industry. Or, her mother worked, we should say. She took the liberty of calling herself a retiree a few months ago, as she felt that working at a restaurant six days a week was enough now that she had turned 83.

People often talk about perfect pitch when a musical person can reproduce a note exactly as it was sung or played. Rieko does the same thing, but with her taste buds. She has an incredible talent for tasting and analyzing a dish to very accurately determine what it contains and how it was prepared, and then to recreate it at home in her kitchen. As a knowledgeable Japanese person about food, she is also a whiz with raw ingredients. If you want a soy sauce that beats Kikkoman's by a long shot, or any other ingredient in Japanese cuisine, she's the one you should ask for advice.

Akihito Mochizuki

Akihito was born and raised in Yamanashi prefecture, the place in Japan that produces most of the country's wine. It's also known for its excellent horse meat, among other things. After studying at the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo, Akihito has worked both in the financial world and as a consultant, primarily in internal training for large companies such as Toyota and Panasonic. He is an incurable gourmand who has eaten his way through a very large number of Japan's top restaurants. Due to his enormously broad and deep knowledge of not only food and drink but also all sorts of other things, such as classical music, he has been given the nickname "Mochipedia" in recent years.

Akihito is the man you can drop on the street almost anywhere in this country, and he can immediately show you the way to the nearest high-quality restaurant. We are grateful to be able to use this living database.