By Leigh O’Connor.
Landing in Sydney in 1982 with nothing more than a small suitcase and a love of food, Tetsuya Wakuda had no plan and no place to stay.
"I got in a taxi and said ‘the city’ and the taxi driver drove me to the corner of Oxford and Bourke Streets. I was 22 so I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I just wanted to visit Australia – that was a long-time dream,” he recalls.
A chance encounter with a nearby real estate agent would change the course of his life and eventually lead him to cooking, something he had never done professionally in Japan.
A few years after he arrived in Sydney, Tetsuya attended a friend’s birthday party at an upmarket Sydney restaurant. The dress code was formal and when he turned up without a tie on, he was turned away at the door.
In 2000, he entered the restaurant again, this time as its new owner. It was the second restaurant he had opened – the first was in 1987 with a friend – and the second site for an establishment he had named ‘Tetsuya’s’ – now AGFG’s highest Chef Hat at 19.
Growing up under the snow-covered slopes of Mount Taranaki, Ben Shewry has always been in tune with the New Zealand outdoors.
A province on the West Coast of the North Island, Taranaki is more known for nurturing All Blacks than world-renowned Master Chefs, a fact not lost on this 18-hatted Attica mastermind.
Ben’s early memories of Taranaki revolve around life on the family farm, the overwhelming shadow of the mountain and taking advantage of everything the province has to offer – including starting his culinary career as an apprentice at 16 in the kitchen of The Mill restaurant and bar.
Funnily enough, this restaurant was across the road from the newspaper office where I – also a Naki native - was a journalist and the home of Friday after-work drinks for the journo crew. Ben jokes he probably served me a prawn cocktail!
South Africa is not for faint-hearted – a fact well-known to Adelaide Chef, Duncan Welgemoed. Now the man in charge of the city’s coolest restaurant Africola, Duncan grew up in Joburg in the 1980s, where a number of savage events prompted the family to move to Mozambique.
It was there at an evangelical Christian school, he found a love for punk bands Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, leading to his expulsion for Satanism and worshipping the ‘Dark Lord’.
South Africa’s loss is Australia’s gain, with both Duncan and 13-hatted Africola at the forefront of the country’s culinary scene for several years.
It’s always hot in the kitchen when Lennox Hastie is playing with fire.
Born in the UK to an Australian father and a Scottish mother, Firedoor Chef Lennox Hastie's cooking background was essentially technique-focused classic French before a trip to Spain saw him land a job at Michelin-starred restaurant Asador Extebarri.
This small asador with a strong tradition of wood-fired grilling, pushed the limits to what could be cooked over an open flame and Lennox was exposed to a completely different form of cooking – beautifully complex, yet simple – highlighting ingredients in their most natural state.
It was a turning point and captivated Lennox so much as a Chef, that on his return to Australia he opened the country’s only fully wood-fueled restaurant in Surry Hills.
At age four, Peter Kuruvita and his family embarked on a six-week overland journey from London to Colombo in Sri Lanka. His engineer father, Wickremapala decided it was time to move his pregnant wife Lilly and two sons back to the ancestral home – which was no mean feat.
Wick purchased a former television production van – used on the set of The Thunderbirds – for forty pounds and fitted it out as a campervan for the journey. Conscious of Lilly’s pregnancy Wick offered his wife a sea passage to Colombo, but there was no way she was missing out on the road trip of a lifetime.
Finishing his apprenticeship just before his 21st birthday, two days later, Peter was off backpacking through India and Nepal, recreating part of the journey.
Now at his 13-hatted ALBA by Kuruvita restaurant, providore, pizzeria and Chef’s Kitchen in Noosa Heads, Peter reproduces dishes from his childhood expressed in a contemporary manner, including his signature Sri Lankan snapper curry.
