Chef Josh Barlow on New Zealand’s Food Scene and What He Learnt Cooking in a Tokyo Restaurant

This article is presented by Steinlager Tokyo Dry, a Japanese inspired New Zealand beer. We explored the cultural similarities and differences between Japan and New Zealand in a three-part video series. You can watch the episode featuring chef Josh Barlow and read our interview with him below.

Josh Barlow is a leader of New Zealand's flourishing food scene. At 28, he has cooked under some of the world's most acclaimed chefs—Michael Caines, Claude Bosi, Simon Rogan—at a bunch of UK restaurants with more than enough Michelin stars to prove their worth.

Now back in New Zealand, and soon to be head chef at renowned Auckland restaurant The Grove, Josh was a semi-finalist in the prestigious San Pellegrino Young Chef 2016 awards. His dish? Wild venison haggis with artichokes in a smoked beetroot sauce and burnt cream.

We sat down with Josh to talk about his approach to food, why New Zealand is a force to be reckoned with, and how time spent cooking in a Japanese restaurant proved to him that food is its own language.

VICE: How did you first get into food?
Josh Barlow: From a very young age I've been interested in food, cooking, and being in the kitchen—from when you start baking with mum, basically. Once I had that interest in food, it was all about finishing school and getting deeper into the industry, and finding out what it's all about.

What do you love about it?
I love being creative, and playing with food, new ingredients and new techniques. You're never even close to knowing what you think you know. Even working in the same restaurant, every day there's a new challenge: there's a new dish to put on the menu, there's a new staff member to train, there's just something new to do. You're always getting excited about the next thing. It's always different, always changing.

When you came back from the UK, did you notice any big changes in New Zealand's food scene?
I've been back for two years now and I've actually had to catch up. In that time there has been so much happening: there's been such a massive focus on local, amazing produce, small growers, and farmers who are doing just a couple of things and doing them really well. In the last ten years New Zealand food has properly taken off. It's special now; it's unique.

What do you think sets New Zealand's food scene apart from the rest of the world?
We're very much shaped by the seasons here—because we're a small country we don't have the luxury of importing a lot of stuff. Every three months the season changes and we revolve our menus around that season, so the cuisine across the country as a whole is shaped by what's available at the time. Our industry is so young and that's exciting because it still has so far to go. We just need to be the ones pushing for it and gunning for more. At the moment there is nothing in New Zealand that is really on the world stage, nothing that's being recognised outside Australasia, but I honestly believe in the next couple of years that something is going to happen and we're going to get recognised further afield. It's exciting. Little old New Zealand.

You recently went over to Japan. How was your time there?
It was a complete culture shock, like nothing I've experienced before. All of your senses are proper overwhelmed. Then spending a few days with a local chef, Nori, and spending the night in his restaurant Shitorasu, you're completely overwhelmed by what's happening around you: the sights, the sounds, the smells, and the city itself, which is massive. By the time I had settled in, I was packing my bags and it was like, 'Woah, what happened?'.

What did you learn from cooking with Nori?
How similar we are, but how different we are at the same time. When it comes to our approach to food, we both want amazing fresh ingredients of the best quality, from a farmer or a fisherman who has looked after the product and really cares for it. When it came to the cooking side of it, he's produced something so far from what I would produce. I used a little bit of lime in my dish and Nori mentioned straight away that he wouldn't use it in that way, and I guess that comes from my background through cooking in Europe, where you're influenced by the Asian style but you use it in a way that fits in with, for example, a French-style restaurant I would be working in.

With similar attitudes to ingredients, how did we end up with such different cuisines?
Everyone has always known about Japan's history and how fixed they are in their techniques, traditions, backgrounds and family history. We've had the native Maori people here, but we've had settlers from Europe who've come over and they have such a different background to what Japanese people have. We're a much younger country and we've had to adapt and borrow bits from other cultures, and I think that's how we've created our culture and our cuisine and our unique flavours. We've taken bits from everywhere else and shaped that piece of clay into what New Zealand food is.

Despite not really sharing much language you and Nori seemed to get on pretty well.
Food is its own language. When you can cook and you know ingredients and how to work with them and work in a kitchen—which is like its own little country—you can get by in another country where you can't speak the language. Spending time with Nori in his kitchen, you do realise food is an international language. You can look at something or smell something together and be completely on the same page. You can both agree that something's fresh, beautiful, and special.