Save & Follow
Chef Daniel Calvert is telling me about his last trip to the UK, his homeland, on the line from Tokyo, and why he won’t be moving back anytime soon.
“I'm not a trendy guy. I'm not really bothered about new hot restaurants but I did go to The Sportsman which I thought was a fantastic meal. And I ate at Ikoyi, I ate at The Ritz. I ate at Bibendum which was wow, I was blown away by Bibendum. I used to joke all the time with a journalist friend of mine that there was one job I would move back home for and it was Claridge’s – a wonderful English hotel. But aside from that, the weather's shit, I'm not a big fan of English people in general… I quite like it over here.”
A call from Claridge’s aside, why would Calvert, who grew up in the unremarkable Surrey, Southeast England town of Woking, in the so-called ‘stockbroker belt,’ move back? Sézanne, the classically French restaurant he heads up at Tokyo’s Four Seasons Hotel Marunouchi, won its second Michelin star in late 2022 less than two years after opening and is widely regarded as one of the best restaurants in a city that is not exactly short of exemplary places to eat.
“The biggest achievement is that the restaurant's fully booked every day and the team is happy. That's the most important thing to me,” he says. “Then of course you have all the accolades and that kind of stuff and to be honest, I've achieved almost all I ever set out to achieve in my life – I was waiting for my second star. [The] third star is not something I think you really strive for, it's more a feeling and a point in your life where they feel you're ready for that. I'm not saying that it's going to happen tomorrow or next year, but I think if we keep doing the same thing we're doing eventually it will come.”
Starting his career at The Ivy in London before the famous celeb hangout was chain-ified by entrepreneur Richard Caring (for context, there is now a branch of The Ivy in Cobham, just a short drive from Woking), he then went on to cook at Per Se in New York, becoming sous chef at the age of just 23, before taking a step back to commis at Epicure in Paris purely for the learning experience.
It was at Belon in Hong Kong though that he really started getting attention, driving the restaurant to number four on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list. He is a vocal Hong Kongophile – “I love the food, I love the people, everything about it," but the lure of Tokyo was impossible to resist for the then 33-year-old.
“When you get an opportunity and somebody says to you, ‘Hey, do you want to move to Tokyo and open a restaurant?’ As a chef, it's very hard to say no, because Tokyo is the Champions League of restaurants. The quality of product is probably the highest on the planet and the most consistent as well. Not only that but being surrounded by some of the best chefs on the planet and really having to compete with them. And I felt that yeah, of course, I had success in all those cities in different ways. But if I didn't challenge myself to really make an impact in Tokyo, I wouldn't have felt that I had really, really achieved something.”
Calvert seems like the kind of chef that is always looking for the next challenge, whether it’s moving to a new country, moving down the kitchen hierarchy to build his skillset, or even scrapping a dish that may have had a lot of work put into it if he thinks he’s being influenced by social media.
“If I ever see something on social media that I think looks remotely close to what I'm doing in the restaurant, we change it immediately, that's the rule. You don't realise if you're subliminally influenced by these things. The most important thing to me is that the guest is having a dish that they can only have here.”
He’s also not against moving out of the kitchen or changing career entirely at some point in the future.
“I'd like to be able to be creative in different ways. I don't know exactly how that looks or what that is right now. But to be a creative person and have spent the last 16 years of your life looking at one medium, it would be nice and refreshing to look at other things and maybe become a restaurateur or a designer or something like that rather than just a chef. And I think that chefs always have such great attention to detail and they know what's right and they have great taste. I think that there are so many other things we can explore rather than just food.”
So where would a chef who’s worked in some of the world’s greatest food cities go next? I’m half expecting him to say he fancies a bash at the Nordics, but we come back to the UK in a roundabout way. Maybe he’s softened to the idea.
“I don't know, I've done I've done all of them,” he says, letting out a long, contemplative sigh.” I've done London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo. I mean, where's next? I did always want to own a pub or a small restaurant in the countryside in England, something like that. That would be about the only thing I would ever do. I would be very happy to cook there and have a very simple life outside of the big cities and you know once we're done with all this, all this other stuff that comes with all this circus, right… I think that it might be nice to just open a little pub somewhere.”
Maybe minus a beer garden, though, because you know, the weather.
Latest
