Audio version, still no time to fix the Spotify gremlins.

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Standing on the shoulders of giants

A thank-you story this week. I’m a little saddened that iconic Sydney restaurant Tetsuya’s is closing after 35 years.

For me, it’s a story of being helped far more than that helper could ever know. Over a conversation about crabs.

In so many fields, it’s hard to appreciate the work of early trailblazers in the context of what we take for granted today.

Australia has so many quality restaurants creating a fine-dining experience out of all the world’s cuisines. Easy to think: of course it’s like that, we’re blessed with so many cultural influences.

It was very much not like that when a penniless 22-year-old Tetsuya Wakuda landed in Australia from Hamamatsu, Japan.

The restaurant landscape was pretty barren. The few high-end places were mostly French or Italian, and took a pretty classic, conservative approach. The majority of restaurants were generic meat and veg.

The young Tetsuya learned those classic French techniques in his first jobs here. Then he fused them with Japanese methods in his own tiny shopfront restaurant. From the start, he was a star. Within three years he won the coveted 3-hat rating in the Good Food Guide, the local version of the Michelin Guide.

Since then he’s featured consistently in world’s top chefs lists.

A chat about crabs

At the time, I was doing a marketing degree. For the Market Research subject, students were given real-life projects from actual clients. I scored a brief from the Sydney Fish Markets to investigate the commercial viability of soft-shell crabs. They had not arrived in Australia at that point.

Crabs shed their shell as they grow, as often as six times a year, and grow a larger new one back. If you harvest them during that window, you can eat them as is, without the hell-task that is shelling crabs.

I’d been fortunate enough to try them travelling in the US. And I’d cooked in a seafood restaurant a few years previous. I’d shelled a lot of sea creatures. This new shortcut seemed attractive.

My theory was, if we could persuade star chefs to adopt them, the crabs would get a lot of PR, which would create demand further down the restaurant food chain.

So I contacted Tetsuya, a brutally-overworked guy holding his tiny business together, to see if he was up for a crab chat with a student. He was.

Encyclopedic knowledge, a deep love of his craft

We sat out the back of the restaurant for an hour as he spoke ofJapanese respect for seafood. He was a quiet, unassuming guy with encyclopedic knowledge and a deep love of his craft.

Did you know when you pull a prawn out of the water, it wriggles its legs around for hours? That stress creates lactic acid, the same as runner’s stitch. The acid has a slight taste that bothers prawn purists.

So Japanese seafood vendors pack king prawns in sawdust right away so they can’t move. They’re not stressed, so they stay fresh for longer and taste better. There were lots more of these stories, small details that separated the elite from the everyday.

As I walked away from our chat, I was tingling with admiration and gratitude for this unassuming genius. His obsessive devotion to quality, his humbleness, his willingness to share his knowledge with anyone who asked, was a far greater inspiration to me than any regular business person I ever met.

I feel quite emotional just writing about it now, as I realise it guided my approach in a lot of areas that have made my whole life better.

More chefs come to the crab party

Inspired by the Tetsuya chat, I hit up every star chef in town, figuring a small percentage would come through for the project. Every one of them said yes and was generous with their time. Neil Perry gave me 45 minutes on a day when he was expecting the birth of his daughter.

The lessons of those chef conversations remain with me to this day.

The importance of consistency, precision, delegation, teams that have each other’s backs.

Your grand vision and skills will amount to nothing if they can’t be passed down and executed by every junior team member. That won’t happen unless those juniors are inspired to buy into the big picture mission. None of this is easy. We did stray off the crab topic a bit.

Don’t look to the lizard-people for answers

I think an understanding of food, of hospitality and creating shared experiences, gives a deeper understanding of real human nature than many in the business world.

Look at cold tech lizard-people like Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg, who have no grasp of how non-tech humans feel or think. They command armies of tech disciples who regard food as “a time-consuming hassle and an engineering problem to be solved”. Solved by the human version of cattle feed pellets so they can get back to work faster.

Yes, they’re insanely rich, but only a few can get to that point. There’s little to be gained by thinking: how can I be more like Zuckerberg? And what kind of twisted life is one where you eat powdered meals to save time?

For the rest of us, running non-global businesses, it’s a daily battle to persuade all sorts of different people to do their best and to sign up for whatever plans you have in mind.

That needs the ability to understand when people need attention, resolving all sorts of conflicts, and creating an environment that makes people feel valued. In other words, hospitality.

I’m up for advice from people smart and dedicated enough to survive on some of the thinnest business margins you can imagine – on average, restaurants do 3-6%. While working under physical conditions that would destroy any of the white-collar Navy SEAL wannabes in your social feeds.

Trade-show Syndrome: everyone thinks the same

I really do rate inspiration from people well outside your own field. You tend to get stuck in that trade-show mentality of everyone talking to the same clients, competitors and suppliers. It leads to homogenised thinking, and that’s not how you get ahead.

Don’t feel bad for Tetsuya himself, the restaurant is closing because they sold the building for a lot and he still has restaurants in Singapore and Las Vegas.

So thanks to him and all the others who gave their time and knowledge to someone who could bring them little benefit.

They’ll never know how much I got out of it. It’s just part of the unconditional karma of being generous. So much appreciation for that.

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