Dear guests, dear friends!
The New Year has opened for us. 2025. Akemashite omededou gozaimasu! Congratulations! Welcome to it accepting the promise of all good things! According to the Chinese calendar, it will be the year of the forest snake – a green snake that merges with the greenery of the trees. When new leaves sprout on the trees in spring, everything is fresh and much is to be born. So let’s gather courage so that we people too can be brave for the new being in the year of the sanke creative in the best sense of the word. We certainly want to honor wisdom, free from a slime of evil intentions.
Green snake. I’m thinking about what dish I could suggest in the symbolism of the forest snake. It will be a roll but I still work on its final form. With the New Year, we came out with a new kaiseki menu – winter kaiseki menu. I believe that it will delight you with its nobility. And since we are going through cold days, our experienced chef Jára will prepare your favorite dish oden, which also has a winter genus. You can order oden to take away or eat it in our restaurant, but you have to watch the days, because Jára will have the oden ready on Friday, January 24th and it will only be available until the batch is sold out. I deliberately choose the word batch, because in the Czech language the word has something to do with long cooking. Varka – varit. Yes, oden is cooked slowly and for a long time so that the broth and individual pieces of various types of goodies combine well and influence nicely each other. Our oden from honest dashi broth will include cuttlefish rings ika, konnyaku, mochi in aburaage, tofu ganmodoki with hijiki seaweed and gobo, tofu age, egg, daikon, renkon and kombu seaweed. The price is 330,- CZK.
Now, when you will go to Miyabi, please do not forget an important piece of information, which is that from this year Miyabi will have Mondays as a closing day. On these days, I will try to use Miyabi for special activities, during which I want to introduce various wagashi, i.e. Japanese sweets. The first thing I can promise is Monday, February 10th in the early evening, when we will have fresh mochi, kneaded from mochi rice in a mochi machine. By making Mondays free, I also wanted to meet the wish of our staff to have days when they can meet as a team not only to strengthen friendships, but also to learn new things especially in concern to the Japanese culture.
In February, we will continue with guided Omakase evenings with Mr. Saito. This is an opportunity for you to taste extraordinary ingredients in an extraordinary presentation in a nine-course menu. During the year, I would like to invite chefs from abroad to Omakase and celebrate so the Miyabi’s special anniversary. A significant anniversary – we will be thirty years old! I opened Miyabi on May 5, 1995.
To mark the anniversary, photographer Matěj Dereck Hard and I would like to organize an exhibition of selected photographs that we have created together for Miyabi over the past few years. I am really looking forward to it. I am also planning several ochakai (tea meetings) with renowned tea masters, calligraphy exhibitions and Japanese dance seminar in summer. I am really looking forward to friends who will come from Japan to support us. There is a lot to remember. Thirty years is a long time. Do you know the Japanese word goen? Metaphorically, it can be a stylish five-yen coin, but it is a fateful meeting. There were many fateful meetings through Miyabi! These people have enriched me immensely and I am grateful to them all. Thanks!
My feelings go also to you, our guests. Some of you have been coming to Miyabi for many years bringing your friends and acquaintances. I perceive the fateful goen here too. Bound, intertwined. Sometimes knots.
I’m thinking about knots quite a lot these days because I’m on a boat – a little old sailboat called the Freelord, and without well-tied ropes, knots, the boat wouldn’t hold up safely at the piers in harbors. Plus, we count knots to keep us moving forward – with the right wind and a smile on our faces.
I wish you too to sail the days of 2025 efficiently and joyfully! Akemashite omededou gozaimasu!
Your Miyabi Darja
