Maiko Kyogoku is the Owner of Bessou — a restaurant showcasing a modern take on Japanese comfort food. As fate would have it, Bessou is housed in a space on Bleecker Street in the NoHo neighborhood that formerly was Maiko's favorite cash-only Italian restaurant in NYC. Maiko has not had a linear or direct path to restaurant entrepreneurship; in fact the very opposite. Growing up, her father opened the first sushi restaurant on the Upper West Side. She would go on to work in children's publishing, work on Sesame Street to becoming famed artist Takashi Murakami's right hand before fulfilling her aspirations of operating her own restaurant.