Tetsuya hunches over a steaming plate of Yanni’s handmade linguine topped with the very squid he had greeted with delight early that morning. He devours them with relish, neither speaking nor looking up, forking pasta rapidly into his mouth, then wiping his plate with a heel of bread until every drop of sauce has been consumed. This is a man made happy by food. A sausage of quail and pig’s trotter also vanishes in a blink. When a marron crayfish with nettle sauce arrives, he polishes off the crustacean, then puts away half of Armando’s as well. The way he eats evokes both the ravening hunger of an insatiable adolescent and the sublime joy of a connoisseur in rapt appreciation of a masterpiece.

Between courses—and only between them, for Tetsuya doesn’t raise his head while there’s food before him—he regales his fellow chefs with kitchen gossip: the underling, for instance, who refused to taste a piece of the Wagyu beef he has managed to source in Australia. “He said, ‘I don’t like meat.’ I said, ‘You don’t have to like it. You do have to taste it, so you know what good taste is.’” He tries to define the Japanese word umami—which translates roughly as “tastes good” and is also a kind of fifth tongue sense, neither sour nor sweet, bitter nor salty.

For help, he turns to his partner of more than a year. Tetsuya used to be one of Sydney’s most celebrated bachelors, famous for making Valentine’s Day dinner at his restaurant a singles-only night, no couples admitted. He often proclaimed that the breakup of an earlier marriage had convinced him that the life of a truly dedicated chef was unsuited to deep romantic entanglements. But then he went to London to consult for a hotelier friend’s new establishment, Mju. He was eating at a nearby trattoria when he spotted a very beautiful Japanese woman struggling with the heavy door and jumped up to help her. “I know who you are!” she exclaimed. “You’re Nobu!”

Somehow, the budding relationship survived this, and Hiroko Hosomi, a collector of old master drawings and 20th-century ceramics, has now left her art behind in her St. James’s Square house and relocated, to live with Tetsuya downtown, near his beloved fish markets and his restaurant.

When I ask Hiroko if she remembers the first meal he cooked for her, she smiles. “I cooked for him,” she replied. It was a simple, home-style meal, straight from the table of his childhood. Pickles, rice, a little grilled meat; the Japanese version of a madeleine.

They have been together ever since.

Tetsuya’s

529 Kent Street

Sydney

02-92-67-29-00