COVER STORY
With so much premium produce fetching top dollar elsewhere, how do we hold onto enough for food tourists and ourselves? Two Michelin-star chef Tetsuya Wakuda is among industry leaders keen to strike the right balance
With so much premium produce fetching top dollar elsewhere, how do we keep enough for food tourists and ourselves?
I f you know where to look, Tasmania is an extraordinary source of fine produce. And it has been that way for a long time. Locals know where to find the good stuff – typically, it’s just down the road at someone’s farm, jetty or winery – but for many years, there was a disconnect between visitor expectation and experience. The amazing produce tourists would hear about from afar often seemed elusive on the ground. Restaurant fare was hit and miss, with few menus demonstrating the connection between paddock and plate, if indeed there was one. And as for the service? Well, let’s just say many people in the restaurant trade still flinch to recall the withering criticisms meted out by a national restaurant critic after his encounters with blundering floor staff who understood neither cutlery nor provenance.
We’re familiar now with the impetus known as the “Mona Effect” on high-end food tourism in the state from the opening of the museum nearly seven years ago. It brought not only a greatly expanded restaurant clientele but a spirit of creativity and local pride that plays out in numerous excellent new-generation eateries.
As well, we’ve seen the rise of farmers’ markets such as Hobart’s Farm Gate Market and Harvest Launceston and the expan- sion of independent local supermarkets, with the Hill Street Grocer notably committed to selling Tasmanian rather than other-origin produce whenever possible. Consumer understanding of seasonality has soared.
Somewhere amid all this positive growth and appreciation, though, we’ve missed a few opportunities, says Brand Tasmania ambassador Tetsuya Wakuda.
The celebrity chef has a connection with Tasmania that stretches back almost three decades to a maiden trip to source ocean trout for his eponymous Sydney restaurant. Over time, that Petuna-grown fish became his signature dish. His confit of
ocean trout has been a fixture on his Sydney menu for more than 20 years. Marinated in a garlic, thyme and basil-infused oil, slow-cooked and served with crispy shards of kombu seaweed, sea salt and chives over a bed of fennel salad, Tetsuya’s ocean trout is said to be one of the most-photographed dishes in the world.
In his role with Brand Tasmania, the two Michelin star chef has taken our fine-produce story to the world for a decade and a half. But increasingly, Tetsuya finds himself flipping the lens and looking back at Tasmania through a food tourism rather than export prism.
“It is important to look ahead and plan for food tourism growth,” he tells TasWeekend at a promotional event for Tasmanian food in Melbourne last week. “Unfortunately, I think Tasmania, when you get busier, you do something only then, but not forward thinking. If perhaps Asian airlines direct flights happen, the entire tourism will change.”
For a start, we need to swiftly intercept more crayfish and abalone before it leaves the state and get it onto our restaurant menus for the growing Chinese tourism market, he says.
National figures released by the Rural Bank on Wednesday showing crayfish (rock lobster) comprises 53 per cent of Australian seafood exports to China give an idea of its popularity. The Asian nation’s 286 per cent increase in Australian seafood imports for the 2017-18 financial year over the previous year – and the rising spending power behind it – is also food for thought when it comes to what to serve that market in Tasmania.
It’s not news that there is a hole in premium seafood offerings, with most of it fetching top dollar on interstate and international markets, but what’s changed is the higher demand for it in restaurants here driven by an evolving visitor profile.
With Tasmania supplying world-class cray and a quarter of the world market’s wild abalone, many affluent tourists expect to find it and savour it at the source.
“Mostly, local people think ‘why pay that kind of money, we can catch it ourselves’. That’s why you don’t get it,” says Tetsuya. “Tourists would pay for special seafood at the going price. It doesn’t have to be an abracadabra dish, but it needs to be there.”
Both cray and abalone are served at a limited number of Hobart restaurants including highly regarded Me Wah, at Sandy Bay’s Magnet Court, where a slow-braised whole blacklip abalone (200g) entree is priced at $85, Mures Upper Deck and Franklin.
Beyond that, there are tourism experiences including a Seafood Seduction tour run by Pennicott Wilderness Journeys, where staff dive for crays and abs that are cooked on deck.
While a crop of talented young Hobart chefs is getting creative with some lesser-known species at some of the popular new restaurants, Tetsuya sees a wealth of opportunity for serving fish species less popular with locals to tourists.
On some of his frequent visits to Tassie, Tetsuya loves line fishing for parrot fish using mussels on a hook as bait, a method that he chuckles is practically fail-proof off the back of Rob Pennicott’s cruise boats. He adores the taste, which he rates only second to his beloved ocean trout, and yet has noticed most Tasmanians do not eat it, preferring to feed their ongoing passion for flatties. Yet parrot fish steamed with ginger, he says, is considered a delicacy at Sydney’s Golden Century, a Hong Kongstyle mega-banquet restaurant with live fish tanks that’s been running for almost 30 years.
Tetsuya’s biggest vision beyond a premium seafood intervention is for a year-round market and casual dining hub at Princes Wharf 1 on the Hobart waterfront inspired by the famous La Boqueria food market in Barcelona.
The 59-year-old Japanese-born chef, who owns a second high-end restaurant in Singapore, was talking up Tasmania in Melbourne early last week. First he spruiked our clean, green “beyond organic” brand to buyers and media at the Fine Food Australia 2018 trade show, speaking on a panel with TV personality Ray Martin, Tasmanian chef Rodney Dunn and Pure South Dining head chef David Hall. Later, he co-curated a Brand Tasmania degustation dinner at Pure South restaurant in Southbank showcasing Tasmanian flavours.
For that restaurant’s head chef, David Hall, cooking alongside Tetsuya was a “once in a lifetime experience”. Over the past three years, Hall has made many trips down to meet our suppliers, with the Southbank restaurant dedicated to serving Tasmanian fare. Every time he visits Hall feels right at home. “It reminds me of Scotland,” says the Glaswegian. “The places are very similar in terms of climate and landscape including the clean air water and soil. There’s the highlands, too, and the slower pace of life. And like Scotland, Tasmania has good beef, venison, pork.”
Meeting the farmers has given him a different level of respect for the product. “There’s that next level of care when you can picture where it’s from.” As for the ingredients? The flavour is extraordinary, he says. Even humble winter vegetables, such as carrots, are the sweetest and tastiest you can find anywhere. That traditional carrots and honey combo? Well, Tassie carrots are sweet enough on their own.
Rodney Dunn, of the acclaimed Agrarian Kitchen Eatery at New Norfolk and established cooking school at nearby Lachlan, did the third year of his chef’s apprenticeship at Tetsuya’s Sydney restaurant alongside his good mate Luke Burgess, who went on to co-found short-lived but groundbreaking Hobart restaurant Garagistes.
For Dunn, meeting up with “Tets”, as he is fondly known, in Melbourne last week to speak on a panel at the Fine Food Fair felt “kind of surreal”. Now that he’s back in the restaurant game himself, Dunn appreciated the chance to talk to his former boss about staying the course in a notoriously tough industry.
It was also a chance for Dunn to reflect on the changing Tasmanian food scene since he arrived with wife and business partner Severine Demanet from Sydney 11 years ago with a back-toearth dream of starting a paddock-to-plate cookery school.
“We envisioned the way Tasmania has headed, but the speed at which it’s happening now is really encouraging,” he says.
“It was slow at first, but now so many people are embracing Tasmania as a food destination. Previously people knew there was amazing food here, but they’d come down and say ‘where do I find it, how do I access it?’ People who live here know that if you go down the road at this time of year, Jimmy is selling his pink eyes and you can get fresh eggs from over there. But now people’s access point is a restaurant. That’s a massive change over the last decade.”
Ray Martin, another Brand Tasmania ambassador on the panel, says that when he was a child growing up in Tasmania, “it was all about apples and chopping down trees”.
“I’m excited to be here,” he says at the Fine Food Fair, “because I grew up in Launceston when it was all clean, green and healthy, but it wasn’t very interesting.”
On a recent trip to King Island with Tetsuya, the famous former 60 Minutes reporter not only feasted on wallaby, cray, beef and cheese but watched an edible seaweed harvest. “King Island is like a microcosm of Tasmania,” he says. “I couldn’t have imagined this when I was young. We always ate well, because that’s Tassie, but the idea of getting truffles or wasabi, well, it’s extraordinarily exotic.”
Tasmania is on the right track, he says, in continuing to develop a range of quality products for tourists and export. “If it gets boring,” says this TV veteran “then people move on.”
If Tets has his way, that won’t happen for a long time yet, not if we can capture some of that hedonistic haul from the craypots to win a few more fans, anyway.