ISSUE 15 – NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 – FREE
Koo’s Mari Kure Shropshire’s unwritten pubs Opera star Kim Begley: All the World’s a Stage Jack Andow, remembered Educating Zoe The Palmers’ roll Reviewed: Bull Sir Job Charlton The salmon return Woodpecker Rally
“One of the big factors when we opened was that the Michelin stars came to Ludlow at the same time. People would stay at Mr Underhill’s for three nights and try different restaurants. Now, it feels that people stay for one night, it’s harder for everybody.” MARi Kure, the stylish founder and owner of the acclaimed Koo, Ludlow’s only Japanese restaurant, has led a very interesting life, that took her from Tokyo to London and LA and then brought her, some 16 years ago, to South Shropshire. I met up with her the day before Trump’s surprise victory in the US and Mari, who lived and worked in California for five years, is saddened but not surprised by the divisions in the huge country, feeling that America isn’t anywhere near as well integrated as the UK. “London really is a great cultural melting pot and not like LA, each culture stays within themselves in America.” Mari was also tired when we met, not that you’d know it from her energy as we chatted over tea; she suffers from lupus, an
auto-immune disease that flares up every now and then. She manages it as best she can with regular tai chi and through eating healthily, as well as through medication. A true foodie with a passion for music, travel, arts and culture, Mari specialises in traditional and healthy Japanese food with a twist, and Koo is entirely her own invention. So how exactly did she end up here in Shropshire, in this small market town? “When I first moved here, I kept on repeating myself. There was a lot of interest in me and the restaurant and I spoke to the papers and found I kept saying the same thing…” It’s both a combination of chance and practical thinking that led Mari to Ludlow. She’d fallen in love and got married to a man
in London having headed to the UK capital to brush up her English after studying English literature in Japan. They lived first in the capital before moving to LA and running a French café in West Hollywood for half a decade in the ‘80s. It sounds rather like the Wild West at times with one of her staff not turning up for work one day because he’d shot someone and had been arrested. “We were raided by police once and it was interesting,” she says. “There were already some very wealthy Russians who used to come in who I believe might have been Mafia. And certainly Enzo – he ran a tiny tailor’s not far away but he was actually a Mafia frontman. He’d bring in customers who were really quite shady, watching everything.” Things came to a head
– www.ludlowledger.co.uk –
when a “crazy homeless guy” who Mari was sure had taken a cocktail of drugs, nearly hit her over the head from behind with a rock. She hadn’t even known he was there but a regular, who happened to be a security guard, spotted him in time and tackled him to the ground, effectively saving Mari’s life. “Oh yes,” she says very calmly, “it was a very big rock, I think it would have killed me. LA wasn’t a nice place to live at the time – I wanted to take the kids (her two daughters) away from there really.” When her father died, Mari, an only child, understandably wanted to return to Tokyo to be with her mother. Her husband went with her, took up aikido and they remained
Continued on page 10 >