Yuichi Kamimura - The reluctant chef

A Japanese youth leaves for the US to escape the kitchen and ends up in Australia as the protégé of a famous chef. Fifteen years later, he wins a Michelin star.

YUICHI Kamimura practically grew up in his parents’ restaurant, a Western steakhouse in Hokkaido, Japan, and helped out on busy days. It is no surprise then that he ended up cooking for a living.

So it is unexpected when he reveals that he never wanted to become a chef.

“Working in my parents’ restaurant, I didn’t have weekends or summer vacations. So ever since I was a child, I didn’t want to be a chef,” he says.

In 1993, at the age of 18, Kamimura left for the United States “to study English to avoid being a chef”. He attended a community college in Washington and then worked for a year, selling luggage in New York’s 5th Avenue, mostly to Japanese tourists.

In 1998, he returned to Hokkaido and helped in his father’s restaurant. At night, he took another job to earn some money. After two years, at the age of 25, he obtained his chef’s licence. Strangely, he was still adamant that he did not want to be a chef!

Reluctant or not, Kamimura has now spent the last 15 years in the food business. In April last year, his eponymous restaurant in Sapporo was awarded one Michelin star for “very good cuisine in its category”.

“After that phone call (to inform him about the Michelin star), I didn’t open for business at all,” he says with a laugh.

And even with the Michelin star he insists, “I don’t want to be a chef but I don’t know what I want to be.”

“I grew up in a restaurant, so restaurant work is all I know,” he says. His parents, by the way, are still running their restaurant after 35 years.

Chance meeting

After qualifying as a chef, Kamimura decided to quit. He packed his bags and headed to Australia.

“Speaking a bit of English, I thought I could import and export food in Sydney. But I had no experience and no job offers,” he recalls.

An easy way to earn money would have been to walk into a Japanese restaurant and ask for work. But Kamimura hadn’t left Japan just to end up as a cook in Australia.

Then, an advertisement displaying a beautiful piece of marbled meat at a Japanese barbecue restaurant caught his eye.

He stopped by the eatery to enquire about the meat supplier, hoping to export the meat to Japan. Instead, he was persuaded to work there for three months.

Tetsuya Wakuda happened to dine at the restaurant one day. The Japanese-born Australian chef (who opened Tetsuya’s in Sydney in 1989) is reputed to be “one of Australia’s most original, creative and successful culinary talents”. His forte is Japanese-French fusion cooking.

Never in his wildest dreams did Kamimura think he would work for Wakuda. After his stint at the barbecue restaurant ended, Kamimura saw a newspaper ad looking for an apprentice chef at Tetsuya’s.

“I didn’t know what ‘apprentice’ meant. I needed a job, my money was running out,” he says.

When he did not hear from Tetsuya’s after two days, he waited outside the restaurant for three hours until a man came out. Kamimura explained his predicament to the stranger, saying he only had US$20 (RM61) in his pocket and would do any job at the restaurant.

As fate would have it, the man turned out to be Wakuda himself, who had had a similar experience when he first came to Australia 20 years ago.

Kamimura was later hired by Tetsuya’s but after a couple of weeks, he again contemplated quitting.

He was assigned to kitchen tasks that other apprentice chefs shunned. Despite being much older, he had no cooking skills compared to the 16- and 17-year-olds who were serious about cooking.

Kamimura, however, did stay on at the restaurant. He found that he had a special skill – he sharpened knives on stone while others used steel.

“My knife has a straight blade like a samurai sword; their knives have serrated blades like a saw. When I use my knife to cut things, they stay nice and beautiful. So cutting things into halves became my job.

“Eventually, a young chef asked me to teach him how to sharpen his knife and we started talking. I felt like part of the team and started to enjoy working in the kitchen.”

Tasting menu

Kamimura remained at Tetsuya’s for five years until April 2005.

He then returned to Japan and a few months later, set up his first restaurant, Kamimura Yuichi, which he describes as “a dream come true”. It was a 12-seater restaurant in Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido and also its largest city.

The restaurant was later relocated to Niseko, also on the island. His wife, Miyuki, helps out as the manager. They have a daughter aged seven and a son, three.

This year, the restaurant is moving again, this time to Shiki, a luxury ski resort in Niseko developed by the Low Yat Group, a premier developer and investment group, and one of Malaysia’s oldest business outfits. The 40-seater restaurant will open on Dec 1 while the resort will welcome its first guests on Dec 15.

For the moment, Kamimura is content with owning just one restaurant.

He jokes that he “can’t run two restaurants at one time because he can’t be in two places at one time”.

Kamimura likes serving up food in small courses.

“I want my customers to enjoy the time, atmosphere and not just the food,” he says, adding that he sometimes receives complaints from customers about the portion sizes but explains that the degustation menu is not for hungry people.

At Cilantro Restaurant & Wine Bar in Kuala Lumpur, the media got a sampling of Kamimura’s dishes when he was here recently for a three-day culinary promotion.

“Today, a customer asked about my signature dishes,” he tells us. “I just say ‘consomme’ because that’s the base of my cooking.

“But it wasn’t enough. The customer asked again, ‘Other than the base, what are your signature dishes?’ I say, ‘I haven’t come up with one yet’.”

With a tinge of regret, he says: “All famous chefs have their signature dishes but I’m ashamed to say, I haven’t got one yet.”

Kamimura’s cooking style is contemporary Japanese-French cuisine, similar to Wakuda’s – not surprising since, “I learnt my basic skills from Tetsuya”, he says.

Kamimura does not talk much in the kitchen, and he certainly doesn’t raise his voice. His focus is on his cooking.

“I don’t like a too-intense kitchen, like chefs yelling. I tell my chefs, ‘Do this, do this’. If they don’t do it, I say, ‘Do this way please, please’.”

Customer feedback is very important to Kamimura and he constantly asks his staff what the diners say about his food.

“I haven’t got too much confidence and worry about many things because whatever happens is my fault,” he reckons.

“I wish I had more confidence and could say, ‘This is my food, eat it’. But, no. I say, ‘Are you okay with this? Do you enjoy the food? Thank you very much’.”

Kamimura is all praise for his ex-boss and mentor, whom he thinks has a great philosophy.

“He wants to be happy by making the customers happy,” he says.

“Wakuda once advised me, ‘If the customer is happy, don’t worry about it, he’s already happy. If the customer is not happy, put lots of effort to make him happy’.”

That’s something Kamimura would like to emulate.

“I want to make customers more happy, then I’m more happy.”

Related Story: A taste of Yuichi