With relocation plans falling through, Tetsuya Wakuda’s iconic fine dining Sydney restaurant Tetsuya’s will close permanently at the end of July.
Due to relocate from its current Kent Street space due to the redevelopment of the building, the restaurant will now close its doors on the 31st, with guests able to make a reservation up until then.
Wakuda says it was a very difficult decision to end 37 years of culinary history by shutting the restaurant but sometimes things just don’t go to plan.
Holding an 18 Chef Hat rating from the Australian Good Food Guide, Tetsuya’s has been an institution on the Australian dining scene with its unique fusion of Japanese and French techniques.
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’.
Going on to gain worldwide recognition and regularly featuring in the world’s 50 best restaurants, the closure of the restaurant will leave an irreplaceable gap in this country’s fine dining repertoire.
