About Funyaosu

One night, after closing at the restaurant where he was training, he sat down in a corner of the kitchen. When he set his knife down from his exhausted arm, the strength drained out of him and a laugh escaped — “funya.” In that moment, something came undone inside Toma Ashiichi. “I must be strong.” “I must be perfect.” — for the first time, he felt he could gently nod to the self who had believed those words.

“Funya” is the sound of letting go. The sound of a heart grown soft, having stopped trying quite so hard. And “osu” is what he calls himself — as a man, as a cook — the self who still faces forward. Together, “Funyaosu” was born as the emblem of “a man who lives embracing his weakness.”

Dejiru turns cloudy white when the flame is turned off. Yet Toma realized that this very cloudiness is proof of umami and of kindness. Not perfect — a slightly cloudy drop. It is within it that the richness of life resides.

And so, on the day in February 1986 when he first hung his noren, he named this restaurant “Funyaosu.” Believing not in strength, but in the “core” that lies within softness. So that everyone who visits may leave a little “funya.”

The words written on the sign: “What we longed to see was your smile.” They are also a prayer, to recover the smile he himself had once lost. That single moment of a soft “funya” smile beyond the steam — that is the very reason “Dejiru and Cuisine Funyaosu” exists.