Tetsuya Wakuda strides straight past the “No Public Entry” sign on the auction floor of Sydney’s fish markets and plunges a finger into the notched tail of a shining, steel-gray tuna.
“Good color, not enough oil,” he says, shaking his head. He sets off at a near run across the briny floor until the gleam of a thousand tiny, luminous eyes pulls him up abruptly. The chef skids to a stop and sinks his hand, forearm deep, among the elastic little bodies of baby squid. “These!” he says, his round face wreathed in a smile of ecstasy. “These, I love!”
For an hour, Australia’s finest chef barges into cool rooms, steps behind counters, and peers into plastic tubs containing other restaurateurs’ orders. No doors are closed to him here. At 7 a.m., clad in a polo shirt, he is just as much at home among rubber-booted fishmongers as he will be at 7 p.m., immaculate in chef’s whites, greeting the Blahnik-shod clientele that has waited a month to get a table at his restaurant.
Tetsuya, who can’t bear to have the word fusion applied to his food—“confusion, that usually means”—is, himself, a fusion of the two very different cultures that have formed him. He can be matey and informal, calling himself “a terrible shit-stirrer” and cracking jokes with an Aussie’s irreverence toward sacred cows of all kinds. At other times, he projects a quietly centered Japanese reserve and speaks unselfconsciously of the importance of honorable behavior and commitment.
The first time we meet, it is late afternoon in the spacious bar of his restaurant, and he greets me with the vestige of a formal bow that his 20 years in Sydney have not yet quite eradicated. Outside, early-autumn light plays on camellias and water-splashed rocks in the generous garden that belies our location, tucked amid the city’s skyscrapers. Across the room, a wine merchant is pitching Margaret River Shiraz to an underwhelmed sommelier, and I have to lean forward to catch the soft-spoken chef’s words.
He is talking about the northern Japanese home-style cooking he grew up with in the city of Hamamatsu, on Honshu, Japan’s largest island. “I always liked a variety of food on the table. If there weren’t many dishes, I would say to my mother, ‘Is that all?’ And then I’d get smacked.” Because his parents were busy and fairly affluent—his father ran a fabric-sizing factory and his mother also worked in business—there were frequent evening outings for sushi or tempura, weekend excursions to Tokyo, and occasional treats at expensive restaurants to reward a good school report card. “I loved eating, was always hungry,” he recalls. But he never thought of becoming a chef: “Cooking was a girl’s thing.”
What he did know was that he would live overseas. “I was fascinated by foreigners, with other countries rather than my own.” At 22, he dropped out of business school, had a blazing row with his parents, and headed to Australia “because it was the easiest Western place I could get to.” He arrived with a single Adidas bag and hardly any English. Within a year, after stints as a dishwasher and prep cook, he met the patriarch of modern Australian cooking, Tony Bilson, a chef steeped in French technique but evangelical about Australia’s diverse produce. Bilson was looking for someone to do sushi. “I think he just assumed that because I was Japanese I would know it,” Tetsuya says.
He didn’t; and so, having accepted the job, he spent a day watching one of Sydney’s best sushi chefs at work. “I thought, he’s been doing that, and only that, for thirty years. I can’t match him. I’ll have to do something different.”
As he explains how he made things up as he went along, his hands fly, slinging imaginary ingredients. “What is it, sushi? What is it for? Wasabi, vinegar—these give appetite, lift palate. So, if you want to lift appetite, serve it first. But lighter, more delicate. What if you liquidize the rice? What if you make the wasabi a jelly?” And what if you serve the silky-sharp result in a Martini glass as the first of 14 small courses that are all just as original and unexpected? You might end up with one of the most award-garlanded restaurants in Australia.
Tetsuya credits Bilson with teaching him European technique and then encouraging him to put “my something in it.” Tetsuya and Bilson’s headwaiter started their own venture about a year later, and in 1989, Tetsuya struck out on his own, in a tiny unmarked shopfront wedged between a discount fruit barn and a charity clothing store in the Sydney suburb of Rozelle. Soon, the modest place was booked weeks ahead, and Tetsuya had to rent neighboring houses just to provide food and wine storage and “somewhere to do the next day’s braising.”
When the vast premises that had once housed the Suntory whiskey company’s early venture into upscale Japanese food came onto the market two years ago, Tetsuya didn’t hesitate. He wanted the space, but not simply for more tables. The new premises have 15 times the square footage of the old place, but Tetsuya has less than doubled the number of covers, to 90 from 55. “I wanted to realize my dream of what a great restaurant should have”—a spacious, private feel to each table, room for a 40,000-bottle wine cellar, a test kitchen where recipes can be tweaked without interrupting the flow of service, a chef’s private dining room with an open-plan kitchen where Tetsuya can cook for his friends. So unconcerned was he with the business logistics of a downtown restaurant that would essentially spurn the lunch crowd—Tetsuya’s offers lunch only on Friday and Saturday—that he fell asleep during a crucial loan meeting with his bankers. “My accountant says I actually snored,” he recalls.
Just before 6 p.m., Tetsuya excuses himself to attend the nightly staff meeting. He has 54 people working for him, 22 in the kitchen. Together, they discuss who will be coming that night like a family running through a dinner party guest list. “This place is like my home,” he explains later. “I want the people who come here to feel that as well.” Accordingly, tables at Tetsuya’s are only booked once for the night, in the European style, rather than turned over as swiftly as possible in the increasingly annoying U.S. fashion. Tetsuya wants his guests to linger, to enjoy the food and their companions. “Food is the binding agent, but a great meal is more—the company, the service, the feeling that someone wants to give you the best he can.”
Tetsuya used to spend most of the day and night in the kitchen, “head down, chopping every vegetable myself.” He doesn’t do that any more. “About six or seven years ago I started giving the young chefs more responsibility. Everyone in there can cook everything we do now. Technique—anyone can learn it, and then you practice. After that, it all comes down to palate. You either got it, or you don’t.” There are no raised voices in this kitchen. A rebuke from Tetsuya takes the form of a light touch on the small of the back followed by a low-voiced admonition. “There are two things I might say. Either, ‘Do it over again,’ or else, ‘Never let me see you do that again.’ ”
These days, he spends more time visiting suppliers and thinking about produce and ingredients. Every dish he makes is ingredient-driven. A shot glass of an intensely flavored, reimagined gazpacho garnished with spiced tomato sorbet came about after one of Tetsuya’s suppliers started growing vibrantly flavored cherry tomatoes; his signature dish, the confit of Petuna Ocean trout with kombu crust, was developed in conjunction with the fish farmers who supply the trout. Wondering why the always-good fish were sometimes exceptional, Tetsuya worked with the Tasmanian couple who raise them until, together, they had perfected the growing conditions.
“Then you work to lift the taste,” Tetsuya says. “What kind of cooking is best for this? Sear? Cook through? I change the temperature, change the timing. Poach in oil, poach in stock. Try everything, find best. After that, what’s good with it?” Here, he draws on Japanese flavors—the zestiness of yuzu juice, the freshness of shiso leaves—and also the robust Mediterranean tastes he came to love while cooking and eating with other immigrant chefs of Sydney, as well as the produce, from tropical to cool-temperate, that his new country provides in abundance. So, a tian of lightly smoked trout will be infused with black truffle oil; seared swordfish will be served on wakame and sauced with a mix of mirin, soy, garlic, and black olive paste; scampi, marinated in walnut oil and lemon juice, will be set on top of a dice of pawpaw and cucumber and garnished with tonburi—Japan’s “mountain caviar” fern.
Tetsuya also puts a great deal of thought into the progression of dishes: “Each one must lead to the next, building on the taste; so, raw before cooked, steamed before grilled, sea before land.” A sliver of creamy Heidi Gruyère coupled with lentils and dates makes a brilliant transition between savory courses and sweet. Even the parade of desserts is carefully structured. This nod at a cheese course will be followed, in season, by a plain slice of perfect, intensely flavored muskmelon. Then, maybe, a meltingly soft bavarois of sesame swathed in a black sesame seed cream. This painterly combination of light and dark gray has flavors that are nutty, earthy, but still not too sweet. “Salty and sweet tires the palate, fills you up,” he explains.
In the evenings, he’s in the dining room as often as the kitchen, chatting with guests in a way that would have been unthinkable to him early in his career. “I had to grab him by the collar and drag him out front,” says Armando Percuoco, a Neapolitan chef who spent much of his early career charming Sydney diners into pushing beyond the then-accepted limits of Italian cuisine. Recalls Tetsuya: “Armando would say, ‘Explain! Express yourself! Tell them why you did this and not that.’ I didn’t want to do it—my language, my shyness—but Armando made me realize that you have to communicate.”
Tetsuya firmly believes in giving guests what they want. “If someone wants his meat cooked to buggery, I’ll make sure to cook it to buggery. Because when you come to a restaurant it’s a treat, isn’t it? I’m not running some school here where people have to come to learn what they’re supposed to like to eat.” And as it turns out, the greatest insight into Tetsuya’s approach to food comes not from watching him at the market, or at his restaurant, but by joining him at table. After the fish markets, he proposes we join his mentor Armando for lunch at MG Garage, the celebrated restaurant of their friend Yanni Kyritsis.
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