Legendary Sydney Restaurant Tetsuya’s Is Closing

Legendary Sydney fine diner Tetsuya’s will close in August 2023. A post on the restaurant’s Instagram account explains that its current location – a beautiful Japanese-style house on Kent Street in the CBD – is slated for redevelopment. But this might not be the end for the eatery; according to the post, the team is currently searching for a new site.

Chef Tetsuya Wakuda opened Tetsuya’s in Rozelle in 1989, and the diner moved to its current location in 2000. Wakuda part-owned the site, and he and his fellow co-owners sold it for $53.5 million in 2018 to the billionaire Teoh family (patriarch David Teoh founded telecommunications company TPG).

Wakuda’s signature dish is confit ocean trout with kombu, celery salad and roe. Over the past 33 years Tetsuya’s has become a byword for upmarket fine dining in Sydney. The chef came to Sydney in 1982, learning the French techniques he would eventually merge with Japanese flavours at Tetsuya’s under Tony Bilson at Kinselas.

In June of this year, Wakuda opened a restaurant in Vegas with an eight-seat omakase room. It’s reported a meal there would cost about US$500 (at Tetsuya’s Sydney an eight-course degustation is $285). Earlier this year he also opened a restaurant in Singapore, and there are plans for more to open around the globe.

Tetsuya’s is slated to close in August 2023.

tetsuyas.com

Additional reporting by Sarah Norris.