GRAND MASTERS
Australia’s love affair with Japanese cuisine had complicated beginnings. MAX VEENHUYZEN talks to veteran chefs about the early days of the relationship.
Japanese cuisine hasn’t always been embedded in the Australian dining scene, writes Max Veenhuyzen.
Australia, one can confidently say, is crushing hard on Japanese food. From exclusive, seemingly impossible-to-book omakase restaurants such as Minamishima in Melbourne or Sushi E in Sydney, to regional styles of ramen and Hokkaido baked cheese tarts, Australia’s Japanese dining options deliver across the board. While this diversity is impressive, even more remarkable is how quickly Japanese food has established a foothold in this country.
Food historians believe Australia’s first Japanese restaurant was not a restaurant, but rather the Sukiyaki Room pop-up operated by Chieko Yamasaki in 1957, inside Dungowan Restaurant in Sydney’s Martin Place. The following year, she moved the restaurant to Kings Cross and, in 1961, rebadged Sukiyaki Room as Sukiyaki House.
Other establishments began opening throughout Australia with operations such as Brisbane’s Little Tokyo (1966), Melbourne’s Sukiyaki Licensed Restaurant (1970), Perth’s Sukiyaki (1972), and Adelaide’s Samurai (1972), each being the first Japanese restaurant in their respective cities.
(The popularity of Sukiyaki as a Japanese restaurant name, suggests chef Kozo Shigeyoshi of Perth’s longestrunning Japanese restaurant Shige, can be attributed to the English name given to Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto’s chart-topping song, “Ue o Muite Aruk¯o”).
Born in Amagasaki in Japan’s Hy¯ogo prefecture, kaisekitrained Shigeyoshi was one of many Japanese chefs that migrated to Australia in the ’80s: a knock-on effect of the two countries’ blossoming economic relationship. But while Shigeyoshi and his peers brought plenty of know-how to local shores, Australia’s limited range of Japanese products at the time caused problems for these recent arrivals.
Chefs only had access to selected brands and some products were affected by the long sea journey to Australia. Cost was another hurdle. A bottle of Kewpie mayonnaise in the late ’80s set cooks back $12: a sizeable chunk of their weekly $200 salary. Limited access to dry goods aside, fresh ingredients in Australia were also different to what was available in Japan.
“If you went to a vegie shop, all you could see was potato, onions and carrots,” says Toshi Nomura, a native of Kanazawa in Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture, who moved to Perth in 1982 to work as the Japanese consul-general’s private chef. In 1986, he opened Sado Island, another of Perth’s veteran Japanese restaurants. “If you were lucky, you’d see cabbage. There were no snow peas, green beans or anything. If I wanted broccoli, I had to make a special order in advance.”
This lack of ingredients led to some memorable early moments in Australian-Japanese fusion cooking. For
Nomura, these included recasting salami as part of the
otsumami (snack) course of his menus, and serving guests deep-fried gyoza filled with cheese. In Melbourne, chefs tell stories of using broccoli stems as a stand-in for fresh gobo (burdock root) and making yakisoba (stir-fried noodles) with packets of number five spaghetti.
One cornerstone of Japanese cooking that wasn’t so easily replicated, however, was the country’s seafood, both in terms of the quality of the catch – sardines, while revered in Japan and served as sushi and sashimi, were little more than bait in the ’80s and accorded little respect by fishermen – and the diversity of species being fished. Still, opportunity was in the water.
“Okay, so it’s not cold water, so the fish [in Australia] hasn’t got as much fat as in Japan,” says Tetsuya Wakuda, arguably Australia’s best known Japanese chef. While Wakuda’s credentials are well-established today, when he arrived in Australia in 1982, he was a 22-year-old student who spoke little English. “With a little bit of creativity, you can use olive oil and other things to give a little richness to the fish. It won’t be 100 per cent like what you have in
Japan, but there’s no point comparing the two [countries]. It’s learning how to work with local ingredients.”
While Wakuda is best known for his signature confit ocean trout, his seafood improv routine began while working for the late Tony Bilson at Kinselas. Bilson asked Wakuda if he could make sushi at the wedding of the daughter of business partner, Leon Fink, unaware that Wakuda knew nothing about making sushi other than what he had picked up as an observant regular at Potts Point Japanese restaurant, Edosei. (Edosei founder Keitaro Makuuchi also established Go-Shu, Australia’s first sake brewery). Nonetheless, Wakuda said yes and, in his words, “cheated a little” and made canapé-style sushi with lightly cooked rather than raw toppings. Guests loved it, sushi was added to the Kinselas’ menu, and the legend of Wakuda grew.
Somewhat fittingly, Wakuda’s rise mirrored the growing popularity of Japanese cuisine in Australia throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Japan’s strong post-war economic recovery led to heavy investment in the Gold Coast, as well as further immigration. (The 1987 opening of the Gold Coast International Hotel – now QT Gold Coast – and its in-house Japanese restaurant Yamagen brought chefs Satoru Nagashima and Mitsuo Yoshino to Queensland). Pioneering fishmongers such as Yuki Tabata of Sydney’s Nippon Seafoods and Yoshi Arai of Oceania Seafoods in Melbourne were hooking customers up with sashimi-grade fish, while distributors Jun Pacific and Japan Food Corp both established a national