Ayako & Family

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Ayako & Family

Located in Yakima, Washington, Mair Farm-Taki is one of the most highly regarded and unique local organic Japanese farms.

Ayako & Family is a women-led and family-owned jam company based in Seattle, Washington, distinctive for their heirloom and heritage plum flavors, with all fruit sourced from Certified Organic Japanese farm Mair-Taki Farm. Ayako Yoshikawa Gordon started making jam under the Ayako & Family label in 2010, inspired by her belief in building community through soulful, handcrafted goods. Now owned and

operated by her daughter, Alessandra, Ayako & Family produces over a dozen flavors, specializing in plum varieties exclusive to Mair Farm-Taki from which the fruit is sourced. Ayako & Family is based in Seattle, Washington.

01/25/2024

𝑭𝒐𝒓 𝒎𝒚 𝒍𝒖𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒐𝒖𝒔 𝒇𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒅,
𝑺𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒉 𝑷𝒆𝒏𝒏, and

The first time we met was 2013 for a job interview at your restaurant, Frank’s. I was 25 years old and used a rubber band to tie up my hair, and when I walked through the front door of the parlor, I remember thinking, if mama knew about the rubber band, I’d be dead.

Nemo, The Most Handsome Boston Terrier, walked in from the dining room to greet me with an air of ownership because you raised him roaming the restaurant corridors, up and down the 55th street hill between Pair and Frank’s. It’s a route that would become a bold line in my identity mapping, too, seven years, a five block micro-universe of champagne dreams, belly aching laughter, and an unprecedented style of hospitality that taught me not just how to serve food, but how to be an impeccable host no matter where I was as I journeyed through my career in restaurants, my business now, and my many homes.

Sarah, you changed my life. You were my mentor in a way that felt missing from my young adulthood, as a kid who was forced to grow up fast. You showed me that work and play could be a beautiful symbiosis of things, that we were serious and committed to excellence and that included building an indestructible foundation for our own joy. Some might call us indulgent but I’ve never felt more wild and deeply in love with life and friendship more than when we were closest. You normalized splits of Deutz and Dick’s fries in the parking lot. You took us up onto the roof of Pair on a freezing New Year’s Eve for fireworks we couldn’t guarantee would even be seen because we were already luminous from the dinner we shared beforehand. You made aperol spritzes out of the trunk of your car on the rocky shore of the hood canal. When we camped on Lopez Island, you rolled out an Afghan rug for our fold out chairs so we could watch the sunset barefoot and at home. And in the deepest moments of loss, which we navigated together and apart, you gave us all permission to be free from scarcity. Even throughout your illness, that part of you was so clear.

Through elephant tears, reconciling my own grief and lost love, I am so glad you are free. You are profoundly courageous and you went out with a rare warm, winter sun. There is no doubt that you orchestrated that, too. I am so grateful to have walked through your doors, that you took me in even with the rubber band on my disheveled head, and that I got to experience over a decade earthside with you. I cannot wait to see you again.

11/13/2023

Accountability post — thank you to everyone who showed up on a stormy morning this weekend to buy jam.
Keep the pressure on, xx. ❤️🖤🤍🌱

11/12/2023

🌟The return of Shokupan🌟

So as promised, here is the quick and dirty run down of the announcement I made yesterday in conjunction with promoting our pop-up event next weekend. 💞 We’re bringing the shokupan, toast and loaves, back to market December 2nd. 👀👀👀 AND Yes, the shokupan will be available for pre-order purchase this morning at 9am PST via our website for pick-up only on 11/19 at TiVOLi during the hours of the event. ****This is crucial— please do not pre-order bread if you cannot pick up that morning. We’re baking these babies fresh and our entire company is taking the ensuing week off for the holiday so we will not be offering refunds or arranging alternative pick up times if you miss the window. Thank you for understanding!

As a part of the shokupan relaunch, I had to think long and hard about how it serves us and you, and how to make it a more sustainable offering in the long term. So beginning with the pre-orders today, the loaves will see a price increase to $12/whole and $7/half. We are so proud to have maintained a fixed price for the bread over the last 6 years (as in we have not done a single price increase since we launched in 2017), despite wild increases in the price of our ingredients. And because we center equity and quality above all else in our practices, we commend our local flour mills, wheat farmers, and fruit farmers when they, too, need to shift their pricing to keep up with the pressures of inflation and equitable labor.

So head over to our website — link in bio — to pre-order bread for 11/19. And if you haven’t already, you can still purchase tickets to our pop-up event, on the Saint Bread events calendar page. xx Happy sunday xx

11/11/2023

🖤🍞ᑭOᑭ-ᑌᑭ🍞🖤

Join us, Sako Gordon of Ayako & Family and Yasuaki Saito of Saint Bread for our second Kissaten pop-up café event, coming to .in.seattle in Fremont on 11/19, Sunday.

The event is homage to our hāfu ハーフ heritage, a Japanese-Western brunch featuring our shokupan (yes, it’s back), with a playful nod to yōshoku and regionally significant foods we encountered and cherished in our respective homes as kids here in the states and in Japan.

Not surprisingly, our expressions of identity meet so well at this very intersection of tradition and non-tradition. This kissaten pop-up is unconventional hospitality. It's Japanese, it's American, it will not conform to your expectations. The menu centers a special sandwich born in St. Louis, named for another city, created by Chinese cooks, served on house-baked shokupan, plus a play on Japanese café sides, rounded out with a real treat: Ayako’s cheesecake with our Damson Plum jam.

This is a ticketed event so snag your sets via the link in bio, where you can also view the tasty menu we have in store for you and of course, where your imagination can come up with the ensuing good times and the company you’ll want to bring along.

We will be baking Shokupan for this event 💋 and it’s going to mark the relaunch of our bread program after a month long much needed hiatus. In celebration, we will be retailing whole loaves for pre-order only via our website to be picked up at TiVOLi during the event. You do not need to purchase a ticket to pre-order loaves. Pre-order for bread will open up tomorrow, 11/12, at 9am PST, so y’all have a heads up. More on the future of bread and toast tomorrow 🙏🏽 For now, get your tickets and we look forward to sharing space with you.

11/10/2023

Thank you to Taylor of for breathing humility and strength back into our hearts. On Saturday, 11/11, we will be donating 100% of our University District farmers market profits to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

With this, I am reminded that intercultural engagement is so much at the core of liberation work and how inherent it is in our community. We mobilize humanitarian aid through vehicles of creative expression, whether that be food, music, poetry, which naturally bridges identities, histories, and experiences in ways that force us to face oppressive structures and entities as a collective. Many of us may not know how be activists, or even be in a place to educate, or know the chronology of histories of oppression, yet nevertheless, when we feel the urgency to be in solidarity and heal ourselves, we show up the most effectively when we focus on generative action. By making something and disseminating it.

The key, as I am continuing to learn, is that we have to find ways to sustain our engagement against anti-blackness, anti-semitism, Palestinian occupation and genocide, because there are so many forces pushing against us that thrive off those very things. As food makers, as humble as the work is, everything that comes from our hands becomes someone else’s sustenance and also, communicates a vital expression of life, death, suffering when the voices behind the most imminent demands are silenced. And those narratives connect us, they are our stories. What a privilege we have to be here, with the resources, the community we have, the safety of not being bombed at any minute, to lose communication with a family member, to not be imprisoned, and that is our power here. Many of us know what it is like to be disempowered and this is the time to feel powerful and throw it into the ring.

Grateful to be in community with people in food that generate offerings in the way they know how and can. It’s not the first time we’ve showed up together in this way and it won’t be the last. Free Palestine 🌱

11/05/2023

So many people are too busy convincing each other of their virtuousness in the safety of their homes here only as it pertains to binary colonial narratives and the comforts it provides those few. Proof of humanity for innocent lives should not be a requirement to demand an end to deliberate g*nocide and justice for the 8,000+ already killed. P4l3stin3 should be free, period, and has needed freedom for generations. Colonialism is insidious because it has us saying, they deserve to not be murdered, instead of, they require a liberated and joyful life. I refuse to perpetuate the bigotry that has been prescribed to their resistance to decades of occupation and violence by colonial powers backed by the globe’s wealthiest and most thieving. Centering public gestures of virtue amidst the mass murder of an entire people does not bring children, their mothers, families back from their rubble-filled unmarked graves. Blood stains. It will not cure your dissonance. 🇵🇸

10/20/2023

Work lately 🕺🏻

Filling box trucks with jam. When y’all said more jam you meant it.

We are currently only shipping once weekly on Wednesdays because we are smol and thoughtful and have lots of other moving parts to put energy into *and* if you need gifts/orders by a certain date, just email us. We do our best to accommodate your requests bc we do love you very much. ☀️

10/19/2023

We often get the question, what’s the difference between all of the plums?

What we’re made of is a vast spectrum

10/15/2023

This Sunday morning, a few things to show for our very hard work this season and something you can enjoy, too:

Ayako & Family mascot enamel pins are here and maybe it’s something you never knew you needed until now. I’ve already fastened one to my bike bag and a jacket collar, catching the hot glow and shadowy side of the solar eclipse yesterday. Yuru Yuru was illustrated and brought to life by NYC based artist, Lauren Martin. Mirroring my queerness, my 36 years that I’ve called Capitol Hill home, with the chuck taylors and baseball cap, leafy green, walking around with too much underarm, misfit and curious. Could that be you, too?

With stone fruit trees at rest, I’m finally able to share the rest of 2023 harvest jams with you. On the web shop this morning at 9am PST and also at markets, the full collection of plum jams, 20 varieties, and the last of them, including our flagship plum flavor, Damson Plum, the first to ever go into our hex jars under the guidance of my mama’s hand 13 years ago. French Plum to come next week to punctuate the season. Please peruse the site, and the market stall, if anything to just enjoy the beautiful gradient of red and gold tones.

Last week, I learned that one of my favorite food writers, Ruth Reichl, had fallen in love with our Black Pearl Plum Jam by the spoonful and wrote about it in her newsletter. We shipped off 130 orders. When I’m packing up shipments, I see your names, new and returning, and sit with the awesome sense of wonder that the written word is, the impact of our voices, and that we are able to offer access to our jams to people all over the country. Thank you for choosing us, our farmer’s fruit, and disseminating all that love throughout your communities. It makes its way back to us, which is incredibly special. As a writer, I never take for granted the magic and impact of writing as vehicle for affirmation and tangible support.

As I’m writing this, the sky is clearing and I wonder if you’ll join us in thought or in person in this sun, however momentary, and breath in the immense privilege of being in our living bodies, reading this or whatever or whoever it is you have before you.

09/21/2023

Six years ago I started baking Shokupan. As it has since passed through the hands of many wonderful bakers in our tiny bakery, I can now say that in its current form, perfectly handmade with all of its humanist variances from loaf to loaf, pridefully sourced, and perhaps the most delicious, we are putting the recipe away and saying good night to the loaves for the last time this weekend.

So please, come by markets Saturday and Sundays, grab a loaf for now and one for your freezer, and a toast to remind you of how a simple thing can connect us, even when it’s gone.

Thank you to every Ayako & Family baker

09/19/2023

𝙏𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨 𝙄 𝙇𝙤𝙫𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙈𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙈𝙚 𝘾𝙧𝙮

To the person who held my arm and looked at me in quiet; to the person who handed me a warm loaf of bread they had baked and wrapped in butcher paper so neatly; to the friends who put their arms around me and let me scream into their chest; to the friends who put food in my backpack for later; to the people who asked nothing of me; to the friend who asked me to breathe with them; to the persons who read my words; to the people who offered money; to the fruit, which has nothing to do with any of this; to the fruit, which has everything to do with this.

09/15/2023

The last opportunity to get Shokupan is the weekend of 9/23-24, for a little while. Processing processing processing … in more ways than one.

Content heads-up: death, illness, grief, anxiety, self exploitation.

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Seattle, WA

Website

http://ayakoandfamily.com/

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