Agustin Balbi has sort of the story we all like to hear about how someone became a lauded chef: a small-town boy ends up, through a series of chance events, in a professional kitchen and finds his true calling. After years of hard work, he opens his own restaurant, which is adored by critics and earns a Michelin star within six months of launch. Three years later, it is selected as the top restaurant in town, and he’s ranked at 46 in the global Best Chef Awards ranking.
But what makes Balbi’s tale extraordinary is that his restaurant, Andō, is in Hong Kong, on the other side of the world from his hometown of Ramos Mejía, Argentina, and that this Argentine born into a Spanish-Italian family cooks Japanese-meets-Spanish cuisine, are the result of his long-held drive to explore the world and experience its diverse culinary cultures.
“As a young man, it was my dream to travel around the world and cook. Everyone needs to eat, and I’ve always wanted to get to know different cultures. I liked the romance of it—to know the world through your job,” he says.
Even before realising that he would build his career in the kitchen, Balbi’s destiny was dictated by geography. One summer as a teenager, he was stuck at home due to his father’s work commitments, when all of his friends had gone to the beach for the holiday.
A family friend’s restaurant down the road was looking for help; his mother suggested he sign up so he’d have something to do while his friends were away. He started out doing deliveries by bicycle, but when a staff member called in sick, he was brought in as a dishwasher. There, he could watch the kitchen at work and was captivated by the buzz and the camaraderie. He soon moved to chopping vegetables and making salads.
When the summer holidays ended and he had to go back to school, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. He continued working at the restaurant, quickly finishing his homework after school before heading to the kitchen.
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
