Salvatore Cuomo – Interview
Hometown: Naples, Italy
In Japan: 27 years
Identity: Vice Chairman & COO & Executive Grand Chef della Y’s Table Corp.
On Feb. 11 Salvatore Cuomo, the man who brought the Neopolitan pizza to Japan, opened his new restaurant in Hakata: Salvatore Cuomo Market. This restaurant is Salvatore’s first venture away from his well known franchise and marks his return to the kitchen as the restaurant’s head chef. Of Italian and Japanese descent, Salvatore learnt his trade in the kitchens of some of Naples’ finest pizza restaurants, starting under the tutelage of his uncle at age eleven. After moving back to Japan at fifteen he decided to stay permanently following his father’s death and has since become a well known Celebrity Chef, riding the Italian food boom of the 1990s to create about 100 restaurants in his name and develop a TV personality in a country known for its cooking shows. In this latest edition of In Fukuoka, Fukuoka Now sits down with Salvatore to discuss his work, new life in Fukuoka and his latest project: Salvatore Cuomo Market.
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Interviewed on Mar. 9, 2015.
You’re a very famous personality here in the restaurant world in Japan and your story is quite well known. But can you give our readers a short summary? Let’s start with where you are from
I come from Naples in Italy. Actually I was born in Tokyo but after two months I moved to Naples. My family has a long history in Tokyo; four generations in Tsukiji, my great grandfather, my grandfather and my mother were all from that area. But my father is from Naples and came here in around 1968, met my mother and quickly made me! After a couple of months though we moved back to Naples and I grew up there. I started this job when I was 11 years old in my uncle’s pizzeria and I began to learn how to make pizza. After five years, my father made the decision to return Japan and we moved back here when I was 15. That was really tough for me, I didn’t know the language and people weren’t used to foreigners. I spent a year at school, but that was mostly doing sport, like judo. Then after that, I moved back to Naples by myself, and spent two or three years studying at culinary school.
My father then opened a restaurant in Tokyo in an area called Chiba but at that time the Italian food market wasn’t as established as it is now; it was all French restaurants, there wasn’t yet the boom of Italian cuisine, so it didn’t do very well. There were many problems, my father ran it like an Italian family business and let friends and family all eat for free, he wasn’t a businessman, my father. I was 18 when he died and the last words he said to me were ‘you don’t need to bring my body back to Italy’ so that was the point when I took the decision to remain in Japan. After he died it was very tough, we had no money and a lot of debts. I was 18 with younger brothers and we had to close the restaurant as we had no money to run it. We talked together about how we could work successfully in Japan, what was the reality of the business? What would our future be?
All three of us started working in the Japanese service industry and I began as a part-time dishwasher in the restaurant I’m in now, Y’s Table. I had no intention of getting to where I am now, I just needed a job and wanted to understand the mind of the Japanese customer. But it was here I met my business partner: Seizaburo Kanayama.
No one really made Naples pizza then, it was all about the Roma: very thin and crispy but, about four or five years after my father’s death, I opened my first pizza shop in Nakameguro in Tokyo. That was the first Salvatore. That was where we introduced the first Neapolitan pizza in Japan and that’s why people call me the pioneer of Neapolitan pizza in Japan. That was 1996. I was 23 and was working 20 hours a day to get it started. It was also the start of the boom in Italian cuisine so it became very popular, very quickly.
But for me it wasn’t just about the Italian pizza, I also wanted to create an Neapolitan atmosphere for the customer and meet their expectations. We made the right hairstyle, chose the right clothes. It was a crazy, crazy place but one of most fun restaurants I ever had. We only did dinner, no lunch, no afternoon, only dinner. You had to book a month in advance and we had queues of 200 people going down the street. We had to choose who could come in and who couldn’t.
At the same time I had some chances with TV, I met my management and began to do a few shows. That helped me become famous for Italian food in Japan. After a while I went back to Italy for two years and took a break from the business. I had a problem with my heart and so I decided to stop for a while. At the time, I had seven regular TV shows a week and was working for magazine and that was stopping me from doing my work as a chef. My body couldn’t cope with it. Seizaburo Kanayama the CEO of the Y’s Table Corporation (which owns the Salvatore Cuomo brand) was like a father to me. Even when I left the company we had a very good relationship and he gave me lots of advice on everything.. from finance to family life. In Italy, I decided to make the company public and it was Kanayama who helped me with this and it was from here that the franchise took off, with restaurants opening across the country. We were never aiming for success though, the business was always the first part, the first aim, success came second.
It was because of our good business, our good service, our good food that we succeeded. I was lucky to meet Kanayama though, he believed in me and in the restaurant, and I think that came from our family-like relationship. That was really important, because a business cannot just be about money, it has to be about the people and the help you give each other.
Taking it public turned me into an owner-chef. If you’re just a chef, you lose everything, its all about the food and you never think of the business. But to be just an owner you forget about the things that make a restaurant good, and focus too much on the money. In my position I could do both, direct the business and make sure it works as a restaurant for the customers, not just for the business. But now I want to go back to being more involved in the kitchen. I started as a chef and that is where my passion is. I said to my wife, ‘If I die, this is what I want put on my box, a chef.’
When and why did you move to Fukuoka?
Before living here, my wife and I lived in Tokyo, but after the 3/11 earthquake we moved to Shanghai. After moving there I began travelling around Japan to see which city I really wanted to live in. I grew up in the center of the center of Tokyo, my business and family were there, but we got a little bit tired of that life. We discovered Fukuoka after one of my friends moved here, I had never thought about Fukuoka as a place to live before, I didn’t think it had the expat community that Tokyo had. But my friend was from Naples too and he said to me, ‘If you look at this place in a different way, I think you’ll really love it here.’ So we visited and stayed here for a bit, and in less than a week we decided to move here, to Momochi. It wasn’t just the city, but also the people and lifestyle, and we loved it, you have the sea, the mountains you can relax here. And the food.. wow! amazing, I knew I was in the top city in Japan after I got started on the food, it was much more original here. In Tokyo there is nothing original, none of the food is from the area, its all from outside. Here the culture is so mixed, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and that impacts on the food and the way it is served, it is unique. Fukuoka is my favourite city to live in and it’s the best place for my children to grow up in. The chef’s life is a tough one, especially with so many restaurants around the world, it is nice to finally settle down.
How is Fukuoka as a place to do business?
Business in Fukuoka is really growing, this is going to be the capital of Japan for links to Asia, it is so close to China and Korea. If you go to Kyoto, yes, you can see the history of Japan, but here has everything, the good Japanese food, the mountains, the onsen and the Japanese culture. I think anyone who discovers Fukuoka loves it, and as more and more people find out about it, it will grow, meaning the future of business here is good. It already has a reputation for food, and so for a restaurant it is exciting to be here. But the city needs to do more to encourage businesses, especially businesses started by foreigners, Fukuoka feels like Tokyo 20 years ago. There’s not much competition here for western restaurants which means it’s a paradise for a restaurant owner, but also means prices are high. In Tokyo there are 800 pizzerias alone which makes it much tougher, but also brings the prices down. Restaurants are also quite traditional, the chef makes the food and that’s it. I want to bring more entertainment and emulate some of the restaurants I have in Tokyo, to make sure the customer is relaxed and has a real experience. I want to create interaction between my customers and my staff, get them involved in the meal, and make them see it as more than just food.
Business for me though is simple, it’s about need. If you go to Niagara Falls and make a shop to sell water, no one is going to buy it. But, take the same items to the desert in Egypt, their value increases. So if you just do what everyone else is doing, sell the same food in the same place, no one will buy it. The business comes from making things different.
Tell us about here, your new project
The point of this new restaurant is to do something that is difficult to do. It is not a franchise, I want to create a restaurant that introduces something new to the customer. Our ingredients are different everyday, we have a contract with a local fisherman and other suppliers and our menu is based on what they bring us every morning. We want to be very transparent to the customer. Our kitchen is open to the customer, so they can see everything, see us preparing, cooking. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago, the Asian kitchen was closed, very private, but we want to create trust with the customer by showing them everything. And my own mindset has had to change to allow this to happen. I used to believe if I showed people how to make my food, they would copy it, but now I realise it is impossible to copy just like that. Our food comes from us being artisans, making it to perfection every time. You cannot copy the experience that goes into making that food, it takes years of training. I’m working very hard to educate both the customer but more importantly my staff. I want to make sure they know about everything that goes into the pizza for example how the colour of the tomato affects the taste and how that makes the pizza better or worse.
The ingredients are so important. We want to get the right ingredients, the freshest, the tastiest and the best value, so that our pizza is so much better than the cheap pizza you can buy from a store. We spend years selecting and choosing and even creating some of our ingredients to make sure they are the best, it took us maybe three years to get the perfect basil. But we’re also trying to be very flexible with which ingredients we use, we’re not reliant on the same ingredients all the time and change our menu with the season and availability to make sure we get the very best.
What’s your motto, your favourite saying?
Make possible what’s impossible.
Your family motto?
Happy wife, happy life.
Do you cook at home?
Yeah, sometimes! But my mother lives with us so she also cooks. But I complain a lot!
What’s your favourite dish to cook here?
I love experimenting, the dishes I don’t know are the best.
What do you do in your free time in Fukuoka?
I try to take my kids to the mountains and to farms to see as much of nature as they can.
