In the areas far from the epicenter of the massive earthquake that hit last month, it seems people are getting back to restaurants and diners in town as before.  However, we can’t be so optimistic for our future, because of requiring power saving efforts caused from many power plants shutdown and fears of radiation-polluted foods.   It brings negative impacts to Japanese food service industry, which means we are forced to lose something essential in our daily lives.

On this website, we covered a challenging project by an alliance of Tokyo restaurants and bars who are familiar with Internet marketing, which is called #smileat, and we also decided to launch our new project together with them.   The project, we named it Startup Dinner, is to host Startup Dating events at restaurants and bars in town for encouraging their business suffering from post-disaster downturn.   Our events can take place at any sites as long as there would be a room for meet-up opportunities.

Present new services, talk with entrepreneurs and develop new businesses.   When lively voices and loud-outs come out from restaurants and diners in town, there will be an atmosphere where something new will happen and may change the current difficult situation.   Hitoshi Nakamura, leading the #smileast project as well as running some restaurants, Osamu Ogasawara, the co-founder of a Roppongi-based standing bar specializing in serving sparkling wine, and Jin Uehara from MyNet Japan, who is familiar with restaurant-related web services, kindly agreed to our proposal for launching the new series of events.   We appreciate their understanding and cooperation.

Now we’re planning to have the first event in April at Butagumi-Shabuan which is a restaurant located near Roppongi and specializes in serving slices of pork parboiled in hot soup.   There will be some presentation segments for introducing new web services.   We are waiting for tech start-ups who want to present at lightening talk sessions.   If you are interested in presenting, please drop a line with names of your company, person(s) in charge, service description and a URL to info[at]startup-dating.com.   We will let you know in return when the opportunity is available.

Keep you eyes on this story for future updates on the first Startup Dinner event.   Thanks for your interest and attention.