ne nasi mon
Food practitioner
& Kikizakeshi
Helsinki
Food knowledge
travels with people.
I work with food as a form of knowledge: something people carry, adapt, share and pass on.
My practice moves between cooking, sake, fermentation and food education. I am interested in the tacit and embodied knowledge that lives in everyday food practices and in the ways that knowledge changes when it encounters a new place.
Cooking
Home cooking, catering and baking.
I work as an independent cook, with a focus on Japanese home cooking and food practices shaped by seasonality, preservation and fermentation.
My work includes private and party catering, lunch services, pop-ups and collaborative food projects. I also bake sourdough bread and work with fermentation as part of everyday cooking.
Selected work
Catering & food projects
Catering for private gatherings, community events and collaborative projects, as well as lunch services and pop-up cooking.
Sourdough & fermentation
Sourdough baking and fermentation are part of my ongoing cooking practice. I am interested in how techniques travel and how they can be adapted to ingredients and conditions in different places.
Greece Residency · 2024
A two-and-a-half-week food residency in Greece, working with local ingredients, cooks and food knowledge in Halkidiki and Thessaloniki.
Rather than reproducing Japanese food in Greece, the project explored what happens when the knowledge I carry encounters the food practices already present in a place.
Kikizakeshi
Sake sommelier · SSI certified
As a certified Kikizakeshi, I work with sake through tasting, pairing, consulting and education.
For me, sake is also a way of communicating traditional food knowledge: rice, fermentation, seasons, regional practices and the people behind them.
Sake work
I work with restaurants, importers, producers, cultural organisations and individuals.
- Sake consulting
- Pairing design
- Tastings and dinners
- Professional training
- Guest sommelier collaborations
- Food & sake events
Education
Food knowledge, fermentation & Japanese home cooking.
I design workshops around practical food knowledge: cooking, fermentation, preservation and Japanese everyday food practices.
The aim is not simply to teach recipes, but to make knowledge tangible through doing, tasting and making.
Workshops
Workshops can be developed for individuals, communities, cultural organisations, restaurants and food projects.
- Japanese home cooking
- Fermentation
- Miso and koji
- Food preservation
- Japanese food culture
- Sake and food pairing
Available in English, with selected projects available internationally.
Zestii Kitchens
Co-founder & organiser
I co-founded Zestii Kitchens, a social enterprise building shared infrastructure for small food entrepreneurs in Finland.
The project explores how kitchens, skills, networks and other business resources can be shared to create more diverse and human-scale food economies.
About Zestii
Zestii Kitchens brings together food entrepreneurs, cooks and communities around shared food infrastructure in Helsinki and Oulu.
My role includes community building, kitchen operations, food projects and developing the organisational structures that allow independent food practitioners to work together.
Practice
Across cooking, sake, education and community food work, I am interested in the knowledge people carry in their bodies and everyday practices.
My thinking is influenced by Slow Food and by a belief in food cultures that are diverse, local, accessible and connected to the people who practise them.
I am particularly interested in tacit and embodied knowledge: the things we learn by doing, tasting, observing and sharing, often without ever writing them down.
More about ne nasi mon
“Nenasimon” comes from the Japanese expression ne nasi mon — literally, a person without roots.
I use it less as an absence of connection and more as a way of thinking about practices that can travel. Knowledge can be carried from one place, encounter another, change and take root again.
Food is one of the ways I explore this movement.