Australian lawyer and MasterChef winner Adam Liaw has traded in his pen for a sword, and will soon be treating Sydneysiders to Japanese delicacies at his very own izakaya-style bar. The serendipity of being offered a job in Tokyo instead of Beijing, and following his life’s passion of cooking reshaped his career, but it was never obvious from the start…

“I like Boxing Day Tests, and I go home to my families for Chinese New Year. Those are the things that I’ve grown up with. My family is originally Hainanese Chinese, on my grandfather’s side. He was a chef, and he moved from China to Malaysia. Around that time in the 1920s and 1930s, that was a really big period of innovation in Malaysian food, and there was a lot of new Chinese migration plus new British colonial influences. Dishes like Hainanese chicken rice, and char kway teow, and kaya toast, all those kind of things that are relatively recent, as in 80-100 years old in Malaysia, came from that kind of migration.

My family then went from Malaysia to Australia, and had to go through the same process again. Moving to a new place you’ve got to cook and eat different things. I remember my Grandma cooking steaks for us when we were young, and she doesn’t eat beef – and has never eaten steak, but when you’re in Australia people eat steaks, and there she was cooking steaks for us.

There were about three or four decent Japanese restaurants in Adelaide where I grew up. I’d been to them all quite a few times and I really liked Japanese food, but it’s hard in that environment where there’s only limited opportunities to be exposed to it to really get to understand what it’s about. So moving to Japan, and actually seeing what it was like, properly, was really eye opening.

I think food in Japan is more closely connected to farming than it is in a lot of other places. Half the time people in Australia won’t know where their fruit’s come from, or at the very most they’ll know it’s from Australia somewhere. It’s not until you see the sticker on an orange that you know that it’s from South Australia, or wherever, but I think in Japan people are a lot more aware of this apple comes from this region, or this beef comes from this farm. I remember my boss bought some peaches from a particular farm. He got them and they were not sweet enough, so he called up the farm and they said send them back and we’ll send you new ones. You wouldn’t do that in Australia. So I think the connection between the cuisine and the ingredients, and the ingredients and place is a lot closer in Japan than it is in Australia. In trying to learn more about Japan I was learning a lot more about food as well.”

After furthering his education in Japanese food at the globally renowned Tetsuya’s Restaurant, Adam is taking steps towards turning his hobby into a profession, with plans to open an izakaya style restaurant in Sydney. “I just went through all the dishes I liked at izakayas and wrote them all down, and tried to fashion that into a menu, but I think you’ve got to start with what the restaurant is first, and then build a menu around what you want the restaurant to be, rather than just ‘here’s a bunch of stuff that I like.’”

Mutsukari, a kaiseki restaurant in Tokyo’s Ginza district, is one of Adam’s favourites and provides a fine example of philosophy applied to cooking. “One of the chefs at Mutsukari is a friend of mine. He said that the cuisine is kind of vegetarian kaiseki, but it’s not vegetarian by any Western concept of the term. When I go there he’ll make dishes with meat, and dishes that use dashi, meat stocks and all that kind of thing. I was asking ‘well, why don’t you just serve meat then?’ He said that ‘well we think that you get a fresher taste, and a more consistent idea of the food when we’re not using a big piece of meat that overpowers all the rest of the other ingredients.’

It really surprised me that you would make that choice not because vegetarian was your philosophy, or that you couldn’t eat meat or you couldn’t eat certain things, it was just ‘this is how we choose to express these flavours.’ It wasn’t a rule, it wasn’t a hard and fast ‘I will never cook with meat,’ or ‘I will not use dashi.’ They seemed to have very clear philosophy at that restaurant, which was something I had not experienced before. That’s what intrigued me about it, and then I went and ate there – it was just extraordinary.

Kitchens can be very manic at times, and the kitchen at Mutsukari is all kind of just out there, and nobody’s rushing around, no one’s yelling at each other. It’s really interesting to be a part of the kitchen in that way. You get into these kind of management philosophies, obviously in business but also in kitchens as well I think. The French school of running the kitchen is very hierarchical, almost military in nature, and I think a more Japanese style kitchen is quite different to that.

Its about different things – trying to become the best at what you’re doing, rather than doing exactly what you’re told. I think the atmosphere in a more Japanese style kitchen, whether its somewhere that’s very austere like Mutsukari, or somewhere like a regular izakaya where people are cracking jokes and moving around, I think that kind of environment appeals to me more than something rigid, and more French in the style of running the kitchen.

There’s a lot in the lead up to [opening the new restaurant]. I’m the ambassador for the Malaysian Kitchen Program, which is a focus on Malaysian food that they do around the world, and I’m very happy to be the ambassador for that in Australia and New Zealand. My book’s coming out in March and April, so it’ll be busy on a lot of the book-type things through till about April, and then hopefully after that, as soon as I can, I can get the izakaya open and spend a bit of time focusing on that.

I’m really lucky that my business partners (Matthew Crabbe and Nathan Smith) already have a restaurant in Tokyo, and they’re based there. Its funny because Matt used to be the head chef at Tetsuya’s here, years and years ago. Then he was executive chef at the Hyatt in Shinjuku, and executive chef at the Hyatt in Kyoto, and then when he moved back to Tokyo, is when Nathan and their other business partner Eddie were setting up their restaurant. I helped them out when they were setting up their restaurant in Tokyo, and now we’re getting to do the same thing here in Sydney, its cool.”