Chapter 5: Zero to Five
From Tanegashima to the World — Chapter 5 of 7
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Chapter 5: Zero to Five
We arrived in Sydney in 2007.
No contacts to speak of. Minimal savings. A country we had chosen because opportunity existed there, not because we knew anyone who could help us find it.
I had a philosophy, a set of skills, and a method for thinking about problems. That would have to be enough.
Choosing the Space
Before I cooked a single dish in Sydney, I spent weeks walking the streets.
Not looking at menus or neighbourhoods in the way a tourist might. Looking at floor plans. At lease rates. At foot traffic at different hours of the day. At the relationship between square metres and potential revenue.
My father had taught me this, in his way. The restaurant business is not only about cooking. It is about real estate, cost ratios, timing, and the discipline to choose the space that gives you the best chance before the first customer walks in.
I compared rent per square metre across many available properties.
I chose a small warehouse space. Not glamorous. Not in the most visible location. But the numbers were right. The lease structure gave us room to survive the early months.
Most restaurants fail in the first year because they are paying rent that assumes they will be full from day one. I was not willing to make that assumption.
Opening Day
One table of customers.
I remember standing in the kitchen after service thinking: the work of telling people we exist has finally begun.
Not disappointment. Not panic. Just the clear understanding that the restaurant was not yet known, and that known was something we would have to earn.
What Yachiyo Became
Slowly, then steadily, the restaurant filled.
We appeared in the Good Food Guide’s Under-30 list. Every year.
The rent-to-revenue ratio reached 5%. The industry average is 10%. This was not luck — it was the consequence of choosing the space carefully at the beginning, and then running the operation with the same discipline my father had taught me and Chef Abe had reinforced.
We expanded. Five venues, over time. We catered for the Japanese Embassy. We cooked at the Sydney Opera House for JAL events. Yachiyo became something the local community depended on, which is the best version of success a restaurant can achieve.
What the Numbers Taught
During those years, I was learning something that I could not have understood from the outside.
Scale is not just a product of quality. Quality gets you started. But scale requires systems — ways of doing things that do not depend on any single person having a great day.
A restaurant that runs because the head chef is extraordinary is not a business. It is a performance that can only happen once, in one place, with one person.
I wanted to understand what it would look like to build something that could run well, consistently, without depending on a virtuoso being present every day.
The seeds of Otogo were already growing, even then. I just did not know that yet.
A Note on Selling
In 2017, I made the decision to sell the franchise operation.
What happened before that sale — and why it changed how I think about building businesses — is the subject of the next chapter. It is the story I am asked about most often. And the most important one.