Executive chef Atsushi Yoshida, 37, recently joined Kirala Kitchen, a Japanese restaurant in Causeway Bay, from the one-Michelin-star Umu in London, where he was head chef for three years. He was noted there for incorporating European elements into a traditional multi-course kaiseki menu, and is developing new dishes to take advantage of the broad range of jet-fresh ingredients available here.
My father is a chef in Japan. While I was in high school, my grandfather got a serious illness, and the doctors said he would die that day or the next. We moved him to the hospital, and my father made some dishes. My grandfather couldn't eat, but he managed to drink some lobster soup, and after that he started to recover. He got his health back, and I was very impressed. Right then I decided that I, too, wanted to be a chef. I was 17.
After I graduated from high school, I went to Kyoto, where I worked for more than 12 years, then I worked for four years in Tokyo. After that I moved to London. In Tokyo, I was a sous-chef at a restaurant in Roppongi Hills [Roppongi Hills Club] that ran in co-operation with Hyatt Hotels. While I was there, I went to Singapore and also to Beijing for two-week visits as a guest chef, and I became interested in the different ingredients that were available and the different techniques the chefs were using. I wanted to discover more and realised in order to do that I would have to go outside Japan. Then I got the offer from London.