Chef Agustin Balbi, of Michelin-starred Andō, on the global journey that led him to Hong Kong and international acclaim

When his schooling was completed, he enrolled straight into Argentina’s top culinary school, The BUE Trainers. With three years of on-the-job experience already under his belt and a clear passion for the profession, he excelled. After he’d spent time training at renowned Peruvian-Japanese restaurant Osaka in Buenos Aires, the school sent him to the US to develop his skills further.

“It was the first time I had travelled by myself. I spoke no English, only Spanish,” he says. “It was a struggle.”

He worked at the highly rated, now-closed Stella in New Orleans, and did stages, as unpaid internships are known, at restaurants in Chicago and New York. He trained further at the respected Culinary Institute of America.

In the US, he came across ingredients he had never seen before, such as uni (sea urchin gonads) and species of fish that were new to him: “Argentines eat seafood, and of course lots of excellent red meat, but we eat very little fish, and I had never seen uni, even at Osaka,” he says. Never able to resist the lure of the new, Balbi began to specialise in cooking fish. His rebellious streak meant he set his sights on Asia, eschewing the well-trodden path of going to Europe as the next step on his chef ’s journey; the other few Michelin-decorated Argentine chefs all developed their careers there.

“For me, there are two countries in the world that are the best at handling fish—Spain and Japan. So I went to Japan,” he says.

Putting himself on the other side of the world, in a position where there was no way back or option to fail, was part of the plan. But it was far from easy. He spoke not a word of Japanese, and no one spoke English in the kitchen.

“In the first year, I wanted to cry every day,” he says. “No one made an effort to understand me—the attitude was, ‘You speak what we speak, or bye bye.’ So after work, I would go through books for three-year-olds to teach myself the language. I had to be super strong mentally, and just mimicked what the chefs were doing—not having the comfort of speaking makes you learn quickly.”

He spent five years in Japan, including working at two-Michelin-starred contemporary Spanish restaurant Zurriola in Tokyo, and now-closed Cuisine[s] Michel Troisgros. The restaurant that left the deepest impression on him, however, was Nihonryori Ryugin, the fiercely precise, three-Michelin-starred hotspot that was the one of the first Japanese fine-dining restaurants to accept foreigners in the kitchen.

There, he had to relearn everything. The way they organised the kitchen was different; the kitchen ticketing system was different. “Many young chefs only manage to last a day or two there,” he says. “It was challenging, but the attention to detail, the dedication and determination, the hard work, the focus on the guest—all of these things that I learnt at Ryugin and at other restaurants in Japan have greatly influenced me and helped define what I do today.”

In 2016, Balbi moved to Hong Kong to open Haku, the now-closed, globally inflected Japanese restaurant that was overseen by Hideaki Matsuo of three-Michelin- starred Kashiwaya in Osaka. Under Balbi’s tenure, Haku was listed as one of Tatler Dining’s Top 20 Restaurants of Hong Kong and Macau for two consecutive years.

In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, he opened Andō, his first restaurant as co-founder and executive chef. Here, he draws on his cultural background and his European and Japanese culinary training, coming up with menus that defy typecasting. “A French chef can cook French food, a Japanese chef can cook Japanese, but what does an Argentine chef cook? There isn’t really an Argentinian cuisine. We are, as a nation, a mix of things. As am I—it’s part of my DNA,” he says. “So I had to find my own identity.”

Balbi grew up eating at his grandmother’s house—his mother’s cooking, he says, was “horrible”—where she cooked the food she had learnt from her mother in Mallorca, Spain. Today he has a reinterpretation of a classic Spanish dish, arroz caldoso (brothy rice), on the menu at Andō in her honour.

The ingredients in Sin Lola (“Without Lola”, which was his grandmother’s name) change according to the seasons, sometimes including blue lobster, Basque sausage, duck confit, black truffles or mushrooms, but always with a beautifully complex and comforting broth that took him years to perfect, which he says includes a reverence for rice that he picked up in Japan. He serves it, family-style, at the end of the meal.

Also on the menu are more overt yet still non- traditional Japanese dishes, such as Departure, a selection of raw seafood including unexpected—and stunningly successful—combinations such as samegarai (roughscale sole) sashimi with a condiment of black olives.

He also serves highly seasonal produce—“when nature changes, we change”—such as sansei (wild mountain vegetables) and prized Kumamoto Wagyu. Drawing on his heritage, he also brings in the sought-after beef that is raised on “perfect pastures” in Cañuelas, 65km south-west of Buenos Aires, which he marinates in Spanish chimichurri and cooks Argentinian-style at high temperatures on a grill of mixed charcoal and cherry wood.

For dessert, he has paired an elevated take on the classic alfajor biscuit with Japanese black tea sorbet, and mikan (a citrus fruit) with white sesame and kinome (a minty green leaf) sorbet. Japanese and Spanish may seem very different cuisines, but to Balbi they are more similar than they first appear: while some cuisines are based on technique, others are based on produce, and Spanish and Japanese both fall into the latter category—the quality of ingredients is paramount.

“As I know them both well—one cuisine from the first half of my life and the other from the second half—and they share the same base, it’s easy to connect them,” says Balbi. “The beauty of a starting point that is outside of tradition is that there are no boundaries.”

Blending ingredients, approaches and techniques is how gastronomy evolves, he adds, giving the example of tomatoes, which originate from Mexico and Central and South America.

“Imagine how sad life would be without pizza,” he says. “With access to knowledge, we can do amazing things.” 

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