June 1, 2002
Food:
A conversation with Tsunami's chef, Michael Andrzejewski
Food:
A conversation with Tsunami's chef, Michael Andrzejewski
by Bruce Jackson
Except for Toronto, Buffalo has more excellent restaurants than any city within three hundred miles. Cleveland and Toledo to the west don’t compare. Neither do Rochester, Syracuse or Albany to the east. Neither does Pittsburgh to the south. If you want surpass Buffalo’s culinary offerings in quality and variety you have to go to west to Chicago, north Toronto, east to Boston, and south to New York or Washington, D.C.Rue Franklin [he said] was a stunning difference from anything else. It had a real French style disciplined kitchen. Every plate had to be inspected, perfect, and checked. You did all your sauces at the beginning of theBuffalo's options recently increased when Michael Andrzejewski, who had been chef at Oliver's for the past 8½ years, and Tai Truong, who also operates the excellent Saigon Café on Elmwood Avenue and whose parents operate the Saigon-Bangkok on Niagara Falls Boulevard, opened Tsunami, a gorgeously appointed place on Kenmore Avenue, in the building that once housed Truffles Restaurant.
Any single tag about the Tsunami menu would be reductive. It's Pacific Rim fusion with a sea food focus, the sort of thing Andrzejewski was experimenting with Thursday nights at Oliver's the past year or two, but it's also much broader than that.
Andrzejewski has been cooking for 27 years. He began doing prep work at Salvatore's Italian Gardens, then worked at a dozen area restaurants, some big, some small, some very good, some better forgotten. He talks of them all in terms of what he learned at each. There was the Foxcroft in Cheektowaga, the Coachmen's Inn, Turgeon Brothers, Crawdaddy's (which so burnt him out he spent a summer painting houses and fishing to get things back in perspective). Then he started cooking at one of Buffalo's three finest restaurants, Rue Franklin.
day. It was a tough place to work but I learned a lot. Discipline. Expectations of yourself and how to make things better. How to put things together that really made more sense. from side dishes, vegetables, to presentation, to courses. I got a lot both personally and professionally out of working there. It took everything I'd done before and focused it, made me expect a lot more out of myself and the people around me too.
From there I went to Warren's, I worked with Mark Warren out in Tonawanda for a while. That was a different experience because we could do anything we wanted there. He'd take me to New York a couple times a year and we'd just go out on eating binges, go to the best restaurants, four in a day and eat and eat and eat. I got a lot more exposure to different things there.
After that I did a short stint at Biac's when Biaco owned it. That didn't last too long. I got a call from Henry at Oliver's one day. "Are you happy?" I said, "No." He said, "Why don't you come in and talk to me." I said, "Okay. There's not much I need. When can I come over?" That was pretty much it. I was there for 8 ½, almost nine years.
Why did you leave?
Tai and I had talked about doing something about two years ago. We looked at a couple of places and they were out of the question as far as finances and stuff like that. It kind of slipped or died away. I thought about it off and on, but I was really happy at Oliver’s.
I was driving down Kenmore here and I saw the “for lease” signs. I always liked this building. It's got parking, it’s free-standing, so I thought it was interesting and in a good location. I stopped and called and they said, “You want to take a look at it?” So we did. We made an appointment to come in. Tai and I came down and looked at it. We signed the lease four days later. In the matter of a week my entire life turned around.
We found it the last week in October, we got the keys November 1st, and we opened on the 14th of March.
That's fast.
It's even faster, considering we didn't really do anything until my last day at Oliver's, which was New Year's Eve. The Christmas time season there is 12 – , 14-hour-days, six, seven days a week. So we weren't doing anything here in that period.
Had you and Tai worked together previously?
He came over to Oliver's and worked a couple of nights and I went to his restaurants and played around, worked in the wok and did a few things. But not more than a night or two at a time.
You've been experimenting with seafood for some time. Every time I saw you at Oliver's you'd be telling me about some new fish thing.
I love the taste of fish. I love to eat it. I think it's a very creative thing to work with. There's an infinite variety of things to do, things to use. I started scuba diving and vacationing in Hawaii and learned more and more about the fish themselves, how it's treated throughout different cultures. It's incredibly interesting.
Part of it's an ego thing, too. I want to find the stuff that nobody else gets. Freshest quality, the best stuff, the most unusual. Obviously there's a market for it.
Can you describe the kind of cooking you're doing?
I think we're kind of like the ultimate in American food. We take from every culture.
Most Asian meals are one big spread. You get everything when it's ready. We take Asian flavors and ingredients and combinations of things, then present them in a traditional European-American fashion, appetizer-entree style. But we're still using those ingredients, the freshness of things so vital to those types of foods. The herbs, the fruit sauces, the chiles, garlic, the fermented sauces like soy sauce, fish sauce, black beans, all that kind of thing.
Where do you get the fish?
Locally, we use is Hayes over on Harlem Road. They're probably the top quality of anybody around here. I use a company in New York called Peerless Fish. And Brown Trading in Maine for lobsters, diver scallops, any of the Atlantic varieties – they're the best and freshest you can find. I can call in the morning by 9:30 and get it here by six o'clock at night.
Somebody said to me once, "Never eat fish in Buffalo on Monday because you're getting Saturday's fish. Or Friday's fish."
Possibly even longer. That's not a bad rule to follow. But if it's not really fresh I won't serve it. We get a delivery on Saturday afternoons that'll go through Monday and the stuff is right off the boat. That Monday it's fresher than any place else you'll buy it.
The other big fish purveyor we use is Garden and Valley Seafood in Honolulu. They use priority FedEx to us overnight. It takes six hours less time for the fish to get here from Honolulu than it took me with an $800 first class ticket.
When you order from Honolulu, how do you know what you're ordering?
We started hanging out with a couple of chefs in Kauai from Roy's restaurants. Roy Yamaguchi. is one of the founders of what they call Hawaiian regional cuisine. It's a blend of Pacific Rim cultures and food, using natural things and local stuff. I had a couple of real good meals there, so I bought a couple beers for the guys in the kitchen and they came out with a bottle of wine and we sat there talking until three in the morning. We ended up being real good friends with them. Every year when we go back for vacation we always go to that island to spend a couple of days with them and I'll spend a night in the kitchen with them cooking and showing me stuff.
They got me the fish catalog from Garden and Valley Isle Seafood that really explained the fish. They called up Dave at Garden Valley and said "This guy's going to call, why don't you take care of him. Do us a favor." That was about four years ago when I was at Oliver's. And I've been getting more and more fish ever since.
Then I spent a day in Honolulu and went to the auctions, went to the fishing boats with the guy that owns the company, so I got to see first hand how it's graded, where it comes from, what to look for. That was really interesting.
The fish auctions? When they come in?
Yes. Off the boats. It's crazy. Did you ever see it on tv, with the guys screaming and pushing each other out of the way, fighting over the best tunas for the sushi bars and stuff? You get out of the way or you get run over. They wouldn't think twice about hitting you with a forklift or anything. I'm not kidding. There were huge sharks, wahoos, opas, mackerels and everything from yellowfins to smaller bonito tunas. It was amazing.
It must have been beautiful to see all those.
The fish themselves are beautiful, but takes place in a loading dock area with a bunch of grubby guys shooting dice out back. I thought it was like something out of an old book. It was like something that would be in a Hemingway book. Guys kind of eyeing you up as you're walking through: "Who's the new white guy?"
If you were telling someone who'd never been here what the food is like in this restaurant and wanted to pick one or two dishes, what would you say?
The tiki shrimp in the appetizer, that's the flaming shrimp on the cocoanut. That's pretty basic preparation but it's cool to look at, it's fun, and it's a little bit different. It reflects what we're trying to do. We're not really breaking any new culinary ground, but we want people to come in here and have fun and feel a little excited about it, and try something different once in a while. And the dim sung is pretty neat because it's a lot of different things in one presentation. For entrees, my favorite would probably be the ahi tuna with the calamari, black bean sauce and the lobster reduction.
Every night at 4:30 I walk through here and make sure everything's set, talk to the servers. It doesn't matter if you've got 20 reservations on a Tuesday or 150 on a Saturday. You get this feeling in your stomach: is everything going to be all right? You double check reservations. Once you start doing it, cooking, and you know pretty much immediately whether it's going to be a good night or a bad night. You just do. How things are clicking and how things look. It's 27 years I've been cooking now.
Did you go to cooking school?
No. I went to Villa Maria for business management. I started in cooking as a busboy at Salvatore's Italian Gardens. It was my first job. I lasted about three weeks. I wasn't very good at it. I suggested going in the kitchen and Russ said, "I think that would be a good idea, young fella." I got back there and I thought it was really cool to be back there. It's like this whole other world. It was like a club. More like a gang.
They put me at a table, put a case of parsley down there and said, "Make sure it's clean and chop it." About four hours later my hands were just about bleeding and it was done. I just went on from there. I really liked it. I felt like I fit in there. It was a lot different situation than being in school or sports. I knew I belonged there right away.
A friend took me to a restaurant in Paris, one of those small neighborhood places with six tables. Maybe five tables. And the guy who ran it was huge. He had been a sailor. My friend said, "He got the call." I said, "What do you mean, 'he got the call?'" He said, "One day he just realized he was meant to be a cook. A chef. And he quit the sea, opened this restaurant and started cooking." By the time I got there, he'd been doing it for 15 years. I asked him about it. "What happened?" I said. He said, "I just knew I had to cook." And he became a cook.
That's pretty much how it is. Tai went to RIT for finance and international marketing. He graduated maybe third in his class. Moved to Boston, got a real good job there. He lasted six months, came back here and went to work in the family restaurants. He threw up his hands, put everything in storage and said, "I'm going back to cooking."
You look happy.
I'm pretty beat, but I'm really happy. It's thrilling. I love cooking.
Tsunami is located at 1411 Kenmore Avenue, Kenmore.
Phone: 447-7915.
They serve 5-10 M-Th, 5-11 F&S. Closed Sundays.—B.J.Copyright ©2002 Buffalo Report, Inc.