WARUDE Japanese Bowl and Taco in Brooklyn, NY was opened in 2018 by husband and wife team Yuichi and Hiroko Iida. More than a restaurant, the WARUDE vision is to energize a movement for a better future and build a community that you will be proud to be part of. The goal with WARUDE is to contribute to a positive cycle of better food culture, better environment and improved quality life for everybody. 

As well as founding WARUDE, Yuichi is a musician who plays Afro-Caribbean, African and Japanese drums. While traveling and playing in Jamaica Yuichi was introduced to “ITAL” food, a Rastafarian philosophy based on unity with nature and increasing your vital energy by eating whole, unprocessed food from the earth. In essence Ital food is means vital food.

Through his study of Ital food in the context of Japanese cuisine, Yuichi found brown rice to be a potential superfood in terms of both nutritional and other inherent health benefits. Looking deeper, he found that since brown rice contains bran (the outside of the grain which can be exposed to chemicals) it is very important to use and eat only organic brown rice. Then the lightbulb went on! “Wait a minute… what about other food?” Researching how our foods are produced, Yuichi realized how vulnerable we all are to toxic persistent pesticides that harm us, farmers, the earth and the next generation. 

Alongside healthiest products, the other magic ingredient in the WARUDE recipe is the tradition of Japanese home cooking. Hiroko Iida grew up playing in the kitchen of her parents’ Japanese delicatessen in Osaka, Japan. This popular store had been open for more than 40 years and was widely loved by customers and as part of the neighborhood. When the store closed in 2018 Hiroko inherited the recipes and decided to introduce true home style Japanese food to Brooklyn. 

Every effort is made to use ingredients that are organic and as close as possible to their most natural form: truly vital foods. So that’s the secret - ITAL foods x Osaka Home Recipe = WARUDE JAPANESE.

One example of these unique and healthful ingredients is the organic matcha green tea which Yuichi sources through local connections to organic tea farmer in his home town Shizuoka. WARUDE imports this high organic matcha directly, enabling high quality at a reasonable price.