Tales by the fire - Tala
by Anna King Shahab
Im age by Manja Wachsmuth
Chef Henry Onesemo is about to put Samoa on the culinary landscape in a way never seen before, when Tala, the restaurant he is constructing with wife Debby Onesemo, opens in Parnell on November 2. The restaurant will seat 28 in the space that was formerly Pasture, plus a staggered launch will soon see the doors open at Inu, a bar and more casual dining space the couple are creating in the closed-in balcony space behind the main restaurant.
Tala is Samoan for story, and Henry’s approach is built around sharing a story of place with diners. The story starts in the formal entryway where diners will receive a little offering to commence the tale. The story is both Henry’s own, and the wider story of an island cuisine blending the endemic and the introduced. Born and raised in Samoa, the son of a high chief, Henry has worked in various places around the world including in the United States where he met Bostonian Debby at a birthday party in Orlando, Florida. Moving from Samoa to New Zealand to take up a hard-won position in the kitchen at Michael Meredith’s Merediths in 2014 was the turning point for Henry’s culinary career and he subsequently touched down in Apero, East Street Hall, and Gaa in Bangkok before flying off solo, launching the Tala concept as a pop-up at Bar Magda earlier this year.
He’s been itching to share Samoan cuisine with others, and it’s fair to say it’s about as fresh a concept as it gets, given that we’ve never seen Samoan cooking as a focus in a restaurant environment. There have been approaches that nod more broadly to the Pacific Islands – but to hone in on one island nation’s traditions has perhaps thus far been seen as too niche. Not for Henry. For him it just feels natural. “It’s not that I don’t respect the food traditions from other islands, but that’s not what I know – what I know is Samoan cuisine”.
And so he’s poised to tell stories from the kitchen here in Parnell. It’s a kitchen Henry knew about before the chance to occupy it came up, because Tala was due to stage a pop-up at Pasture and had been through a rehearsal, so Henry was well aware of the potential of the open woodfired grill at the heart of the space – cooking over fire and burying things in embers is going to be key to replicating the tradition of Samoan umu at Tala.
Other stories will come from the deep freeze, and is a nod to the culinary influence of a coloniser in Samoa’s history. “We didn’t get electricity until 1991 in my village, so my first experience of something really cold from the freezer was Wattie’s Mixed Veges, when I was 10 years old. I took a handful of them and it was sweet and cold and lovely. I’m going to use that memory in a dessert or as a refresher to a dessert – the carrot in a granita, the corn as a cream element, and the pea as a texture.
Something that diners new to Samoan cuisine may not notice is that the way Henry presents dishes is in fact not as far removed from the traditional as you might think. We tend to think of dishes plated with small components artfully arranged as rather modern, but for example, Henry’s sapasui will reference the way the dish is usually enjoyed – not as a big serving of the vermicelli noodles on its own, but as a dish with several independent components: the noodles, accompanied by a portion of taro and a piece of pork belly. “With taro, the artistic side of me wants to play with it”, says Henry. “The taro comes straight from the umu and has a caramelised skin. It’s going to be served in milk skin – looking a bit like a taco – with hung coconut yoghurt and fresh herbs. So the brown, white, green look of the dish replicates the colours of the taro plant. And that will come with the sapasui with lamb rib (or it could be neck depending what’s best) and a piece of pork belly”.
I ask Henry about the way he captions his own Instagram posts, contrasting quotes on the purpose of life with an imperative swagger by stoics Marcus Aurelius and Seneca with responses from a humble, practical ‘Second Mouse’. Second Mouse, he laughs, is who he’s learning to be. “I used to have a real ego and a fear of not being first. But I realised that I’d end up not trying things out of fear of being second place. So I just tried to peel that idea back and tell myself it was okay to be second. Don’t try so hard to be the top, especially when you’re working for yourself – no one is going to tell you when it’s enough and you’ll never be good enough in your own mind. So Second Mouse is a reminder that, hey, I think that’s good enough for today and tomorrow will happen as it should”. Ironically in opening Tala, Second Mouse will indeed be first.
