KIRIP TRUMAN:
Self-taught and at the cutting edge of the cocktail world. Building cocktail recipes around aromatic ingredients. ＜Part 1.

These days, social networking sites have enabled talented bartenders to be "discovered". Toru Kiriyama may be one such bartender. He has an amazing cocktail recipe construction method based on aromatic ingredients, which he says he has researched independently based on food pairings!

writer：Akihiko Nishio　撮影：Naohiro Kurashina

Creating a shop that embodies the image in your head.

It may look messy, but it's a restaurant that embodies what's in my head (laughs)."

As owner-bartender Toru Kiriyama explains, even though there are many different elements packed in, they are harmonised in a strange balance.

He only asked for the design from the skeleton, but he finished most of the interior design himself, from the counter and ceiling to the window treatments.

Kiriyama opened the BAR KIRIP TRUMAN in Kitahama, Osaka's business district, in July 2017, more than five years ago.

The shop is located along Kitahama and Tosabori Dori, at the northern end of the wider Honmachi business district.

Combined with its location facing the river, it is an area in Kitahama with a particularly large number of cafés.

If anything, the nights are early and there are only a few bars dotted around.

'When it first opened, unlike now, it was a two-faced bar with eight red, white and bubbly wines by the glass and several hundred whiskies, and the clientele were upper 30s to 60s.'

It was only around 2019 that we started to focus on cocktails instead of wine.

'We started making our own cocktail books and it was just at the beginning that we had the Corona disaster. ...... 'The denominator of bar lovers was small to begin with, and the bigger companies in the neighbourhood were ordered to ban drinking, so there were even fewer people drinking around.'

The challenge was to reach a different audience.