Naoki Matayoshi visited the restaurant and said, “I learned a lot…” Reason why spice curry restaurants with prices in the 2,000 yen per dish range are trying to go upscale even further.
I really want to make Japan a better place through spiced curry!
This is the grand dream of Seiji Okano, owner and chef of “KOKOPERI Curry” located within a minute’s walk of JR Osaka Tenmangu Station in Minamimorimachi, Osaka City.
In 2011, after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Okano closed the Internet company he was running with a friend and rented a farm in his hometown that had been in use for generations. He rented a local farm that had been in use for generations. He started selling citrus fruits grown by his parents on the Internet while practicing pesticide-free cultivation, and the sales were good from the first year.
While getting a feel for it, around ’13, I read in a magazine that spiced curry was popular in Osaka, and I started eating around. About two years later, in 2003, I rented a space at a friend’s bar in Minami-Senba to sell curry, and the sales were good. The next year, ’16, I started selling at this restaurant, and that is where I am today.
Gen Hoshino and Hitomi Yaida also made secret visits to the restaurant.
When customers enter the store, they are first handed a tablet with the words, “Please take a look at this first.
The tablet contains a video explaining the KOKOPERI Curry’s menu for about 1 minute and 30 seconds. Next, the customer watches the next three-minute video and orders his or her curry. The owner himself appears in the video and explains the types of curry and how to order it, based on a video that was previously broadcast on TV.
He explains, “Net, the cost of curry has become so high that I can’t hire anyone. Embarrassingly, I run the restaurant by myself, so if there are multiple customers, my hands stop while explaining curry to them, and I don’t want to delay serving curry to waiting customers, so I made the video.”
Now, when we took our seats and looked over the menu, what surprised us was the pricing. The price for a set of three kinds of curry with a drink starts at 2,200 yen.
Generally, the market price for a spiced curry lunch is around 1,200 to 1,700 yen, but even with a drink, the price is 2,200 to 3,100 yen. This is a very aggressive price setting. Why is KOKOPERI Curry so expensive?
I think the cost of our curry roux is probably the highest in Japan. If you know our cost and process, it’s not expensive at all. In fact, it is cheap! I think you will be surprised.
The price has risen as a result of our pursuit based on beauty: “We don’t offer our customers ingredients that we wouldn’t eat ourselves on a daily basis. The ingredients that Kokopelli Curry actually uses and recommends to customers are 1.5 to 3 times the normal price. We carefully select the most expensive ingredients in the curry world.”
How expensive are they exactly?
To give you an example, there is no curry restaurant in Japan that uses oil that costs 1,500 yen per liter in 2023. Probably 95% of restaurants use canola oil or salad oil, which costs about 400 yen per liter. Therefore, oil alone is expensive, costing more than 1,000 yen.
Of course, we are particular about not only oil but also water, salt, seasonings, and broth, so we are proud of the fact that our customers’ tongues do not feel rough after eating our curry, nor do they suffer from stomach upset or heartburn.
It seems that the owner of the restaurant created the text so that customers can share the above reasons and his thoughts and commitment to curry. It is up to the customers whether they read it or not, as it is a huge amount of text that would take 30 minutes to read through!
Celebrities often come to eat here on their own. We often have celebrities come to eat with us in secret, such as Minamoto Hoshino, Naoki Matayoshi, and Hitomi Yaida. Matayoshi-san took about 30 minutes to read the text carefully and said, ‘I read the whole thing. I learned a lot.
