How it started and how It's going
Felipe and his passion for the sushi
For almost 20 years Felipe and his wife Veronica had been developing Japanese restaurant concepts together, providing management, strategic planning, marketing and design. They have the knowledge and expertise to create and define Japanese restaurants, the brand positioning and expansion, from the initial idea through to the construction, start-up and beyond.
Everything started back in 1997, he was a commercial pilot when he fell in love at first sight with Veronica in a Sushi bar in Caracas-Venezuela. Veronica was working as a part time waitress while she was studying graphic design. To impress her, he decided to become a sushi encyclopaedia and visited her every week to show her his “sushi knowledge”, and his strategy worked! Today after more than 20 years together she is the love of his life, they have a sushi loving daughter and their life revolves around Japanese gastronomy. Some people know him as @Susherito, meaning the little sushi man in Spanish.
Among other things, they were the creators and founders of the first sushi bar chain in Madrid, SushiOlé (2004-2008), Sushi House (Mallorca 2008-2010), Japo Express (Mallorca 2010-2011), Oh! Sushi (Miami 2011-2012), Sugoi JPN (London 2017), Japanified (London 2021), Kawaii Bowl (London 2021). We might say they are a couple that knows the Japanese fine dining and casual restaurant industry with a proven record of successful concept development. They have also advised and eaten in more than 500 different Nihon restaurants in cities around the world, including Chicago, Miami, California, Madrid, Barcelona, San Sebastian, Paris, Caracas, Santiago, San Juan, and of course, London.
Through the years Felipe, AKA Susherito, has been in many important media channels, like:
CNN en español, Telemundo 51, Univision, Mega TV, Univision Radio, Miami Herald, Radio Caracol, TVE1, TeleMadrid, Emprendedores TV, El País, El Mundo, ABC, revista Hola, El Universal, EL Nacional, Estampas, Globovision, Circuito Onda FM, Vanidades, Diario Tal Cual, Inspirulina, Radio Universo, Good Food BBC, London BBC Radio, The Independent, Hello Magazine, Sunday Express, The Telegraph, The London Economic, Metro, among many others.
Susherito
In 2008 they were opening a new Sushi Bar in Mallorca Island (Spain) and Facebook was founded, they immediately realised about the potential of this new platform, Felipe didn't like the way people was interacting with their Facebook page, "it is like the people is talking to a online page instead of a person, manager or the owner, it is too cold" he said, and had the need to change that.
He started thinking about a virtual "manager" that could have a presence on the Internet and be able to kindly attend the customer's inquiries and transmit the sushi culture at the same time in a cool way. He called his father in law, Aristides Silva, a very prestigious Creative Director in Miami, to ask his opinion about the idea and to see if he could help him out to create this new character that, a couple of years later, will become an important sushi culture ambassador on social media.
When Aristides got it, he sent it to Felipe and wrote in the email, here it is, the susherito (little sushi chef in Spanish)... And that's how everything started, by the year 2011 @Susherito was one of the world's top sushi influencers on Twitter, won the Twitter Awards Telefonica Spain in the category "best brand" (Coca Cola and Telepizza were in the final), it was the first important recognition of many that will come later in Felipe's background.
In August 2021, his 13 years old daughter came up with the idea to create some NFT with Susherito and its family of figurines. With her iPad, Apple Pencil and Procreate she created our first NFT collection, all of them handcrafted and unique...