By Leigh O’Connor, Editor.
Commitment to craft with a single-mindedness that is enviable is one of the biggest lessons Attica Chef and mastermind Ben Shewry brought home from his recent visit to Japan.
An ambassador for Mazda, Ben and wife Kylie travelled to Hiroshima to visit the car factory and sample local cuisine from mochi balls to authentic chicken yakitori, cooked by a Chef in his seventies who had been serving guests for more than five decades.
"I take any brand associations very seriously,” Ben explains. "I wanted to visit Mazda’s headquarters and factory to try to get a better understanding of the brand and the mindset of how they build the cars, along with experiencing the culture.
"They were putting together cars with an incredibly high level of execution, like the sort of discipline you’d more commonly see in a kitchen – but here we were in a factory in Hiroshima, which employs a large proportion of the population.”
One of his culinary highlights could be found just outside the factory fence, where a beautiful older wooden building housed a restaurant the staff visited on a regular basis for lunch, along with the uniquely Japanese treat of sweet and savoury mochi balls.
"To be honest, I have never really loved mochi before and I’m not an expert on it at all, but it was mind-blowing – just delicious and interesting, not just the texture but also the flavour, the use of salt and something sweet.”
It was in Tokyo, that Ben and Kylie discovered a hole-in-the-wall yakitori restaurant where the owner has been serving locals for years – it wasn’t a recommendation from anyone and proved extremely difficult to find.
"When we got to the address we couldn’t locate the restaurant, after looking for 30 minutes Kylie asked a police officer and he sort of pointed her in the right direction. It was in an apartment building and we were literally walking across the front of people’s balconies before we eventually found it.
"This was one for the locals for sure, there was not a tourist in the place. The Chef was also a jazz drummer who performed regularly and he was just a yakitori master. It wasn’t a fancy place but every stick was just executed to an incredible level – the chicken neck was particularly delicious.”
It is this soulfulness of Japanese cooks to focus on one thing and do it really well – exemplified in a restaurant where the Chef had been making yakitori for years – that left a lasting impression on Ben.
"That’s something we don’t have here in Australia – I’m probably one of the few people who actually only has one restaurant that I’m completely and utterly focused on and dedicated to. I’ve been doing this for 18 years and there is no end in sight for me. This is not to go against anyone who has multiple venues, but that’s just not me at this point in time. My aim is to focus each day to get better at what I’m doing.
"That’s why I’m inspired by Japanese cooks in this way, there’s a dedication to the repetition of being elite at one thing.”
Presently developing new dishes to put on the menu at his 18-Hatted Melbourne dining destination, Ben never changes the whole menu at once as executing that at a level acceptable to him would not be possible.
"The menu changes as things come into season, as new developments are made – we have an idea that we work with daily for weeks, months and sometimes years before it is fully born to the highest level it can be, then it comes onto the menu.”
Confessing to feeling a creative urgency at the moment, it is not just the ingredients that matter; it is the art pieces that accompany the food such as handmade ceramic plates that also add to the diner’s overall experience.
One of his current favourite ingredients is honey, which he describes as endlessly fascinating and delicious along with being incredibly valuable both culturally and from a financial point of view.
"It is something that recently came onto the menu and it’s just served in a small teaspoon in its purest essence – there’s nothing I can do to honey to make it better than what it is, so I leave it alone.”
The past three years of COVID and lockdowns have shown this hard-working Chef you can never take your foot off the gas and get ahead of yourself – when you’ve been in the top 20 restaurants in the world, that’s something we should all adhere to!
