After leading Hong Kong bistro Belon to a record-high No.4 spot in Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2020, British chef Daniel Calvert took his leave to open Sézanne in Tokyo this June. As he launches the restaurant promising to be the pinnacle of an already glittering career, Calvert looks back to talk premature resignations, wooing the Rolls Royce crowd and how Thomas Keller taught him to hold himself like an executive
In January 2018, Daniel Calvert was ready leave Hong Kong. His resignation was drafted, printed and enveloped, ready to pass to his boss at Black Sheep Restaurants, the owners of Belon, a venue he joined as chef in 2016.
His time at Belon wasn’t going badly, rather just not progressing as quickly as he might have liked. He had taken over an empty restaurant with a poor reputation and set about rebuilding it from the ground up. He received a clutch of positive reviews, but it didn’t translate to a full reservations’ diary. Holding himself accountable and following disagreements with his superiors, resignation was the immediate solution.
Calvert arrived at work early, made coffee, turned on his computer, steeled himself for the meeting with his managers. Idly opening the restaurant’s email account to scan lunch bookings that day, he noticed a missive from 50 Best. The message informed him that Belon had been voted onto the list of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2018 – enough encouragement to ensure the waxy seal of the envelope was never broken.
Belon, the Hong Kong restaurant Calvert departed to launch Sézanne
“From the moment we received that email, the business changed completely,” says the 33-year-old chef, raised in suburban England. “I had never intended to stay long in Hong Kong; I actually kept my apartment in Paris.”
That alert from 50 Best saw Belon ranked No.40 in 2018, which marked the first in a cavalcade of accolades. Michelin recognition followed, positive reviews rained down and these were proceeded by the Highest Climber Award as part of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2019, where Belon rose 25 places to take the No.15 spot. In 2020, the restaurant peaked at No.4.
“When the guys in their Rolls Royces started pulling up outside, I knew we were onto something,” recalls Calvert. “There’s a certain bracket of the Hong Kong dining scene that is very elite and they are some of the most knowledgeable diners in the world. They’ve travelled to the top restaurants, eaten the world’s best food and enjoyed the finest wines. It was very rewarding to watch these people come in and sit at my counter to trust my food to be enjoyed with a $4,000 bottle of wine.”
Belon's pigeon pithivier, one of the dishes that helped make Calvert's name
The convoy of supercars didn’t arrive overnight. “Our little bistro probably went a lot further than anyone expected,” says Calvert. “There was a time when we would have just four covers on a Saturday night, which is very hard. It’s mentally very difficult to run an empty restaurant. I would look at my team getting ready for service every day, only to throw the food in the trash at the end of the night. I am a stickler for everything being fresh every day and I just can’t work in any other way.
“You just never know who is going to walk in that door and how that meal might change things. Imagine if I decided not to make the sauce fresh that day, the diner would know that and taste the difference; I could not live with myself. That, fundamentally, is what Belon was about: we weren’t shooting things out of rockets, we were just doing things correctly every day.”
Some restaurants capture a moment in time. For Calvert, Belon translated the zeitgeist of Hong Kong’s restaurant evolution in the 2010s. It was a city finding its feet as an international dining institution, with a kaleidoscope of culinary influences channelled by imported chefs and the ingredients they brought with them.
“Were we the most creative restaurant? Absolutely not,” starts Calvert. “I’m not the most creative chef, but I just love what I love, which is very classic, simple flavour combinations using great produce. And we were extremely consistent at that – which I think resonates with Hong Kong, because there are a lot of inconsistent restaurants here. One time you go to a place and it is great; the next when you bring your friends, it’s not very good. That’s embarrassing for people. It’s embarrassing around the world, but particularly in Asia.
“I think Belon touched a lot of people in a lot of ways. Of course, the food was great, the service was great, the ambience was great, but it represented a moment where everything really came together. I look back a few years on now and think ‘Wow! That was quite special’. Because when you’re in it, you don’t think of it that way. You just think about getting ready for lunch service.”
Pedigree for finery
At 33, Calvert speaks with the gravitas of a chef twice his age. He ponders meaningfully before answering questions, as if selecting a card from his mental Rolodex of experience before elucidating a point linked to his schooling as a chef. Indeed, he has some of the best formative kitchen experiences to draw from.
Aged 16, Calvert enlisted to cook for free at London’s theatreland grand dame, The Ivy. A far better restaurant than the sum of its newspaper gossip section headlines, The Ivy would serve fast-paced, high-quality bistro-leaning food to 500 covers a day. He also worked at one of London’s finest French fine diners in Pied à Terre and its sister restaurant, L’Autre Pied. In 2009 he moved to the US to join Thomas Keller’s genre-defining Per Se in New York, where aged 23 he was the youngest chef to ever be named Keller’s sous. From there, he moved to Paris for a stint at Le Bristol’s Epicure, considered by many as one of the finest archetypes of French fine dining in operation today.
New York's Per Se, where Calvert spent five years
It’s a venerable CV by anyone’s reckoning, but what did Calvert take from his spells at these seminal kitchens? “It was at Per Se where I really learnt how to work like a professional,” he answers. “Thomas taught me how to hold myself as a manager and showed me that cooking could be a white-collar job; he made you feel like an executive. You have your name on your chef’s jacket, you have your own email address, clean working was paramount, there was great emphasis on holding yourself upright and maintaining standards of poise and behaviour.
“The unashamed luxury in the place was insane. The volume of caviar was incredible and it was all about showing generosity to the guest. I’m a generous person and I’ve really tried to take that with me everywhere I’ve worked: it’s always better to give a little too much rather than to err on the side of caution as this is what the guest will remember.
“Although it was at Epicure where I really learnt to cook,” Calvert says. “It was ironic, because I was a sous chef before I left Per Se, but at Epicure I took a commis position. It really was sensational. We had the same number of cooks at Epicure as we did at Per Se but would only serve 35 guests [Per Se seats 100].”
Paris's Epicure and the turbot dish Calvert would prepare to order
“I worked at that restaurant for two years and not once did I see anything leave the kitchen that should not have. I would work the fish station and – I don’t want to sound like a hero or anything – but I cooked every single one of those turbot portions like my life depended on it. You had to cook the fish on the bone, carve the fillets and then make the sauce to order every single time. If a guest ordered extra sauce, you made it fresh. There wasn’t a pot of it available to reheat.”
Big in Japan
In search of a fresh challenge and a move back into a pure style of fine dining, Calvert finds himself in Tokyo. Sézanne, in the city’s outpost of the Four Seasons hotel, comes with all the trappings you might expect from a restaurant that has its sights set on the upper echelons of the 50 Best lists.
Cutlery is Christofle, glassware Baccarat. The ingredients in the kitchen are handpicked from the finest producers in Japan, with flourishes imported from artisans Calvert has met on his travels. “No one will ever get bored of drinking out of a Baccarat champagne flute,” he confirms. “I want guests to feel luxury across the board. I’m cooking a timeless cuisine in a timeless restaurant and I hope that it will be around for a long time. Is it traditional? Yes, I guess so, but I want people to feel my personality through my food. I was trained in these fine palaces of cuisine and I am ready to start doing some very fine things here in Japan.”
Okinawa corn sourdough with Normandy butter
How this finery will be reflected on the plate, we are just starting to get sight of. On Sézanne’s launch menu, local Shamo chicken is poached in yellow wine and stuffed with girolle mushrooms; Okinawa corn sourdough comes with Normandy butter; Miyazaki mango is paired with Chantilly cream – an idea of how Calvert will be fusing local products with international flavour. “I don’t want to start using abalone and similar ingredients just because I’m in Japan – if you use what’s conventional to you, your food will be better… In my view, European turbot is better than Japanese turbot, so that’s what I’ll be cooking. But when in-season and available to me, I’ll be making the most of the amazing Japanese produce throughout the menu.
“In terms of this seasonality, I view it as though I am an elite athlete. Taking Matsutake mushrooms as an example, I know that as a chef, I only have around 30 Matsutake seasons in my career. So I will do everything I can to make this season’s Matsutake dish a little bit better than the last.”
Miyazaki mango with Chantilly cream
For Calvert, each element plays into creating a restaurant which makes dining out an ‘event’. “I want to give people an occasion to put on a jacket and enjoy themselves,” he says. “The pandemic has been terrible for everyone. I want to create an environment where people can put on their best clothes, come out for dinner and really relish the experience. Today, the timing for that is perfect.”
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