Former Hawaii luau dancer charting the ‘Samoan Way’ in fine dining

AUCKLAND, New Zealand >> A man his father’s age was weeping, and Henry Onesemo did not know what to do.

It was less than a week after Onesemo had opened his restaurant, Tala, in an affluent neighborhood of Auckland, New Zealand, in 2023. The chef continued dribbling water onto the man’s fingers and into a bowl, his version of the apa fafano, a hand-washing tradition that is an important part of Samoan hospitality.

The diner said it had brought back memories of doing the same for his parents back home in Samoa, before he moved to New Zealand to be raised by relatives. Onesemo had to learn to get used to the display of emotion. Again and again, his food would stir something in Samoan guests, leaving them in tears.

“The worst thing I did then was trying to fix it, when all they’re doing is having a moment,” he recalled.

The upscale restaurant with a moody interior is a world away from the backyard of Onesemo’s childhood home in Samoa, where the smell of smoky banana leaves, coconut milk and roasting meat or breadfruit permeated every Sunday. The family would work from well before dawn to prepare a feast in the umu, a ground oven forged of smoldering volcanic rocks. Food was at the core of family, community and life on the island, where anything purchased — tinned fish, corned beef or McDonald’s — was a luxury, but the land and sea provided plenty to feed everyone, including relatives, neighbors and the pastor, week after week.

After leaving home at 17 as a rudderless teenager to join the Hawaii Air National Guard, Onesemo fell into working as a luau dancer in Hawaii and Florida for more than a decade. At first it felt easy, and he excelled at it. But eventually it came to feel hollow, a commercialized version of his culture that he was enacting onstage twice a day, five times a week for giddy tourists at Disney World.

Now, at 45, after another set of unexpected pivots, he’s telling what feels like a more authentic narrative of his home through fine dining at his restaurant in New Zealand.

Tala and its growing acclaim — its latest recognition being a Michelin star awarded in June — has also meant a different kind of representation of Samoans in the country. About as many Samoans live in New Zealand as back home, but their cuisine had been relegated to takeout counters, night markets and greasy spoons. Onesemo wanted to change that.

“My job, for sure, was to peel away those prejudices that come with Samoan food,” said Onesemo, with playful eyes, his salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a bun. “My job is to tell the Samoan food story and put it in a place where it is respected.”

The tale he tells over a 14-course meal at the restaurant starts with early childhood memories of eating tart, underripe fruit, and meanders through Samoa’s history of German colonial rulers who brought canned corned beef, and indentured Chinese laborers who contributed their own flavors. It makes pit stops in the ocean and at a roadside barbecue. Sea worms known as palolo make an appearance, as does novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, who became enamored with Samoa and died there. Onesemo pays tribute to him with an amuse-bouche course served in a box made to look like an aging copy of “Treasure Island.”

Throughout, an umu built in a brick fireplace in the open kitchen emanates the scent of his home.

“The smell is so reminiscent, the big banana leaf smokiness,” said Sala, a Samoan guest who uses one name, who dined at the restaurant with her cousin on a Saturday evening in August.

The meal at Tala filled her with pride for her culture, which she only really remembered seeing represented in sports when she was growing up, she said.

“It was incredible having that experience in a fine dining context, just as recognizable and a taste of home, and without being alienating,” she said. They had been nervous about portions, thinking an upscale restaurant would have meager sizes compared with a typical Samoan feast, but came away full. She and her cousin suspected the chef may have sent a bit extra their way, she said. “Never felt better to be racially profiled,” she said.

Hankering for Flavors of Home

As a child in Malaemalu, a coastal village in Samoa, Onesemo, the third of five boys, mostly resented labor-intensive food preparation chores — scraping the breadfruit and taro, peeling the green bananas, squeezing the coconut milk, shaving the hair off the pig then running it over hot rocks to singe off the rest.

He moved to the United States in 1999 to join the military, as the only one among his siblings with a U.S. passport, having been born in neighboring American Samoa while his father was working there.

In Hawaii, a gig working as a nighttime security guard at a luau compound led to him joining the company. He performed the dances that most Samoan children grow up doing in school and church, but also learned Tahitian, Tongan, Maori and Hawaiian moves. In 2005, he auditioned for and landed a spot in the “Spirit of Aloha” dinner show at Disney World Resort in Florida.

The longer he was away from home, the more he found himself hankering after the flavors of his youth. He would try recreating dishes in an oven or on a stove top, scouring Asian or Latin American grocery stores for substitute ingredients, cooking with yucca in lieu of taro, cabbage instead of banana leaf. At the same time, he was growing weary of the stage performances that came to feel like a whitewashed version of his culture.

“It was damaging what is already, to me, a lost art form,” he said. “The stories that we were telling on the stage were not stories that would make my mom proud.”

It was around this time that he met the woman who is now his wife, Debby, a lawyer and a dedicated home cook with an extensive spice cabinet. Her kitchen opened up a new realm of possibilities. The couple began hatching a plan to move back to Samoa to open up a restaurant, envisioning a simple establishment serving pasta and burgers. He gave up his performing job and they left for the South Pacific, where Onesemo enrolled in a technical school to learn the basics, starting with knife skills.

A few months into their life back in Samoa, in 2014, a dancer friend who was touring with Bruno Mars invited them to a show in Auckland. There, the couple ate at Merediths, a high-end restaurant where Onesemo, who had almost no experience with fine dining, was amazed by the flavors. He was even more surprised when he saw that the chef, Michael Meredith, had Samoan tattoos on his arms. Seeing how inspired he was, Debby Onesemo sent an email from her husband’s account to Meredith, a Samoan-born chef, asking to work as an unpaid intern. When Meredith agreed, the couple packed up and moved once more.

Onesemo began toying with turning Samoan staples into dishes at Merediths, eventually nursing ideas of a Samoan fine-dining restaurant. Debby Onesemo began working for Meredith on the business side of the restaurant, building her own expertise in the industry.

In 2023, the couple opened Tala, which means “story” in Samoan, having poured their life savings into it without any investors. They knew no bank was going to take a risk on their idea. “You have no established track record, you’re doing something that’s really unconventional,”Debby Onesemo recalled. “We had no safety net. It forced us to hustle.”

It was a slow start, but from the beginning, the Samoan community in Auckland turned out to back one of their own. In its first months, the clientele was at least half Samoan, Henry Onesemo said.

“Tala survived for that first year and a half on the back of Samoans supporting it,” he said.

The unique vision and detailed storytelling eventually started getting noticed beyond the Samoan community, and then, beyond New Zealand. In March, Time Magazine put the restaurant on its “World’s Greatest Places” list. Then in June, Michelin launched its first guide for New Zealand — and at the unveiling ceremony, the first one-star restaurant announced was Tala. A tearful Henry Onesemo unfurled a Samoan flag on stage, holding it up with the Michelin Man.

The restaurant is now booked up well into the new year. Even so, Onesemo’s ideas, inspired by memories from home, haven’t stopped churning. He pondered out loud about how he might import Samoan wild bats, which his late father used to hunt regularly, past New Zealand’s infamously strict biosecurity controls. He would probably have to set up a small distribution operation to clean, freeze and package them, he said. They are best with a char, because the smoke masks a distinct odor that can be off-putting, he said.

“My favorite kind of food is, you know, something that has a little bit of risk,” he said. “I like dishes that either you’re going to really love or really hate. It invokes something in you.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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