Japan, the land of cherry blossoms, sushi and...haggis?
You heard that right.
This is the story of how Scotland's national dish made its way 6,000 miles round
the world to the land of the rising sun.
This tale begins in 2014 when Japanese food lovers,
Yoko and Kitz went on holiday to London, but they were worried about one thing
They met grilled cheese experts, Paddy and Carol, who run Denney's,
a cafe and street vendor specializing in haggis toasties.
It's hard to pinpoint the actual moment when we had the sort of haggis toasty
epiphany. I think it was my idea.
I'm still claiming it as mine, but. Growing up,
we would eat haggis quite a lot in the northeast of Scotland.
It made sense to make this grilled cheese toasty more Scottish by just adding
haggis, this sort of ubiquitous national dish of Scotland.
And it wasn't long until Yoko and Kitz were trying this new dish.
So Paddy, what actually is haggis?
Haggis is lamb offal mixed with oats and spices. So you've got like heart, lung,
and liver of the lamb mixed with oats and spices.
It's then cooked inside the lining of the sheep's stomach.
It's hard to make that sound appetizing.
Sorry. You generally call it like a spicy lamb sausage.
Spicy lamb sausage is an ice entry level way to describe haggis.
So
completely out of the blue,
I received a message on social media from a girl called Yoko.
She had explained that they had visited the stall on Broadway market in 2014,
and they just really loved the idea of the haggis toastie and just overall
thought it would really work well in her hometown of Tokyo.
Because Yoko and Kitz couldn't import the haggis,
they had to learn how to make it from scratch.
The land of the rising sun had never seen such a creation.
And it wasn't long until Carol and Paddy wanted in on the action as well.
We were off the plane. we met them within maybe two hours,
and the first thing we ate was the Macbeth Haggis toasty. It was like identical.
It may as well have been made in our kitchen here.
You see now someone 6,000 miles away doing the same and making a living out of
it. It was hugely emotional. Yeah, this is like
our little baby at this stage.