Sometimes customers wonder why Keiko’s restaurant is called Den. Andy was the first person to come right out and ask her though. But the thing is, even Keiko doesn’t really know the answer. Let me explain.
It was Keiko’s late husband who started the restaurant a few years before they were married or even dating. Since Keiko speaks English her first thought upon hearing the name was that he was pretty hip to have an English name for his restaurant. She assumed that it was ‘den’ like a place to hang out or a cozy room with a fireplace.
But what if it wasn’t English? It could be Japanese. There are plenty of Japanese characters that are read as DEN. For example,
- 殿 (an important hall or a suffix for a type of royalty)
- 電 (electricity)
- 田 (rice field)
You could also just use the Japanese phonetic alphabet and write it as デン orでん.
As Keiko aged, she secretly liked to imagine it written as 伝 which is the first character in the word for tradition. After all, Kyoto is known for as the place where Japanese tradition lives.
All this is just conjecture. The sign above the shop is simply written as でん and the menu header is Den. Go figure…right? The more you get to know Keiko, the more you’ll see that she doesn’t live in a black and white world at all!
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