Henry Onesemo: Putting Sāmoa on a plate

Chef and restaurant-owner Henry Onesemo got his first training as a cook in the village in Sāmoa, helping to prepare the Sunday umu. But it wasn’t until he tasted the dishes of celebrated chef Michael Meredith, a fellow Sāmoan, that he was inspired to follow in his footsteps.

Now, he’s the owner of Tala, the first fine-dining Sāmoan restaurant in Aotearoa — one of only six restaurants awarded three hats by Cuisine magazine, making it one of the top restaurants in Aotearoa. Here he is talking to Dale about their mutual love of food.

 

Talofa, Henry. Congratulations on how your mahi’s been tracking of late. I’m not a foodie or a food critic or anything like that, but my sweetheart is a beautiful cook, and I love food — so that’s a good place to start.

It’s always a great place to start!

Good on you. I wonder if you’d be kind enough to share some kōrero about your names and how you came to carry those names, please, Henry?

My full name is Henry Lafi Onesemo. Lafi is my dad’s name as well.

We’re from the village of Malaemalu in Falealili, about 45 minutes from Apia, Sāmoa. And even though it’s a very small village, we had two churches.

I had a very happy childhood growing up there. We never wanted for anything. In fact, I didn’t know I was poor until I moved to the States.

Tell us about mum and dad and your old people. Have you got brothers and sisters, Henry?

There are five of us brothers, no sisters — and all my brothers are still in Sāmoa. My mum too. My dad passed away last year in September, so we’ll be celebrating a heavenly birthday this month.

My dad was the highest chief of our village, and he held the title Talauega. Right now, the family is trying to decide which one of the brothers the title should be passed on to. I think it should go to our youngest brother, Kent.

I really want to know why you’ve nominated Kent to be the whānau leader instead of yourself! What traits does he carry that you think would make him the right man for the job?

Well, he’s a faiāvā, which means he lives with his wife’s family in his wife’s village, and so he has to show service to that family, and at the same time, he has to serve our village and our family. He’s shown a lot of character, a lot of fortitude, a lot of resilience.

Even if the title was offered to me, I believe you have to be in the village and serve the village to be a chief. You can’t just expect a title, but then stay in New Zealand and not be in the village serving.

Kent’s very kind, very soft spoken, very humble, and very patient. And I think all those qualities make him well-suited to hold the title. He’s just been made a chief in his wife’s village, which goes to show how much he takes service seriously.

Ka pai. Thank you, Henry. What was it like growing up in Sāmoa?

I was born in American Sāmoa and raised in Western Sāmoa. My whole childhood was spent there until I was 17, then I moved to the States. I could spend a lifetime talking about growing up there.

We had everything to eat right behind us — we had bananas, taro, livestock, pigs. We had all the stuff, but for western things that were introduced to the culture, like education, we needed money.

One of the biggest chores for us as kids was collecting coconuts. Back in the day, copra was a huge industry, and that was one of the biggest ways for us in the villages to make money.

So throughout the week, you would collect coconuts, dry them, and then the copra company will come collect it once or twice a week, and then you get a little bit of money for that. That would go into uniforms and school fees, and things like that. And some would probably go to the faife‘au (the church minister) as well.

Another big thing in Sāmoa was preparing the umu for Sunday, and it’s not just a one-day thing. Throughout the week, you have to prepare those things. You get taro from the plantation one day, and then you might hear somebody in the village say, “Oh, so and so went fishing today,” and then maybe you can trade, so you can have the fish and get that ready.

As you munched down on that lovely home-cooked kai as a young fulla, Henry, did you ever have any inkling that food would play such an important role in your career?

No, absolutely not. Growing up, food always seemed like a chore to me, especially on Sundays when you have to wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning and start preparing the umu before the sun comes up.

In our village, you’re not supposed to have smoke on a Sunday once the sun comes up. So you had to have the umu wrapped up by around 6 or 7. It’s laborious and taxing doing the umu, so, as a kid, I just thought of it as hard work. Not really something I was thinking would become a career.

Being born in American Sāmoa, I had an American passport, so my parents always told me: “You’re going to join the military once you get older because you have the American passport.” So that’s where I was supposed to go. My focus was on joining the military, not having to do anything with cooking or cooking Sāmoan food as a career.

Well, it’s beautiful how it’s changed, Henry. You specialise in fine dining now, but perhaps we take for granted the delicacy of kai in our youth, and the taste and freshness of the produce, and what it takes to get that freshness, eh, bro?  

One hundred percent. I mean, let’s say you have a recipe that says 250ml of coconut milk. Here, it’s easy. You just grab a can of coconut milk. But growing up, you’d have to climb the coconut tree, then you have to husk the coconut, then you’ve gotta scrape it, then you’ve gotta squeeze it, and then 30 minutes later, you have 250ml of coconut milk.

That’s laborious work.

There’s a sophistication in that food gathering that sometimes could be easily overlooked, and you frame it beautifully. I mean, there’s coconut milk and there’s coconut milk.

Exactly.

Well, you went into the military, and I’m assuming it was in kitchens, but maybe it was nothing like that at all. 

Yeah, nothing to do with cooking at all, unfortunately. I worked on weapons systems on F-15 aircraft. And the only thing that translated from my military time into cooking would be the discipline.

Well, that’s important too, eh?

It’s probably the most important. Being able to consistently show up to something even though it’s hard is probably the most important skill that I could have gotten out of the military.

Because discipline is important, especially in a career like cooking, where sometimes you rely on creativity and being inspired to do things, to come up with new dishes or to revamp ideas. Sometimes inspiration doesn’t happen, motivation doesn’t happen, but discipline keeps me going back into the kitchen.

I show up to work no matter if I have a good idea or even if I don’t have any ideas. I just show up to work. And if a good idea comes into my head, at least I’m in the kitchen and I’m ready to work on it. Nothing is worse than getting a great idea, and I’m sitting on the couch.

I love that. So you’re still inspired, you’re still creating and coming up with these ideas. Some people would craft recipes and then be satisfied, but you’re not resting on your laurels. You’re always on the search for something else?

Yeah, it’s a must for me to keep searching for ways to improve and ways to shine light into Sāmoan food. But you know, out of 365 days, you may have seven days where you have great ideas. But if I don’t show up in the kitchen and if I don’t keep moving forward, I miss those opportunities where those seven ideas might come out on the plate, you know?

Tala’s success has a lot to thank the US military for. I wouldn’t have thought of the connection, but there it is. It’s about discipline.

I noticed that you also have a strong interest in cultural performance and were involved in that for a long time. Tell us about your love of that cultural performance, and why you involved yourself in it proudly for as long as you did.

Growing up in Sāmoa, we always had a lot of performances at school. Every year, from year 1 to year 13, you’re involved in doing items and performances and things like that. When I moved to the States, my military pay cheque couldn’t support me, so to supplement my income, I worked as a security guard at one of the luau shows in Hawai’i. It’s called Paradise Cove Luau. The show director noticed me and asked if I wanted to audition.

So I auditioned for the show. And because I’d been performing school and church items since I was a kid, it came naturally to me — it was easy. I landed a role as a dancer there. Eventually, I auditioned for a show in the Polynesian Resort at Walt Disney World in Florida. And thankfully, I was one of the two people who got casting roles for the chorus line. And I loved it.

What I learned in that dancing role was how, in America, they love to group all us Polynesians together. So, in the luau show, you’ll start off with a Tongan number, then a Fijian number, a Hawaiian number, and then finish off with a Sāmoan fire knife dance. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it got me thinking about whether something very specific would work. Something that’s just a Sāmoan thing, or just a Tongan thing, or just Fijian.

So that’s what I’m doing with food. I’m just focusing on Sāmoan food, instead of calling it Pasifika food or Polynesian food, and just trying to see if being specific with one’s culture is a way to success.

Well, it seems to be working pretty well — there’s no ambiguity there, is there? We’d better mention Debby. Did your eyes meet across a crowded room, or did she see your oiled Sāmoan body on stage?

Haha, no. We met in 2011. One of my friends was at a party, which was held at a women’s-only gym, and he kept texting me to come over. He wanted to introduce me to Debby, but I didn’t know that at the time. And when I finally went, I met Debby, and we hit it off.

A beautiful thing.

Yeah, in the restaurant, it’s always the chefs who get the credit when anything good happens with the restaurant. We get the blame too if something bad happens to the restaurant.

But nobody really sees the work that Debby does on the business side of things. She’s the one who keeps the engine rolling. The work that she does for the business, whether it be admin, or building relationships with people and suppliers and hospitality people, sometimes it goes unnoticed.

And I always joke, but I know it’s true, that if Debby isn’t around, I give myself two weeks before everything falls apart, and that’s estimating it very generously. It would probably be a day!

Yeah, it takes teamwork, and, obviously, you’ve got a good formula.

That brings us to another proud Pasifika chef. You can’t help but notice Michael Meredith because he sort of stands out among the pack. Not just his look, but his attention to detail and his fine dining stamped him as a chef of note.

I know that you gravitated towards him and, in fact, worked for free to understand some of his attitudes towards fine dining. Can you just reflect on that? What did you learn from him? How important was it to the sort of chef you’ve become?

I owe a lot of gratitude to Michael Meredith.

The original idea for me and my wife was to move to Sāmoa. We were going to open up a restaurant there. So we left the States, and we stayed for a couple of months at my parents’ house until we got our own place, and then we started looking for a place for the restaurant.

And then, in our seventh month in Sāmoa, we came to New Zealand to visit a friend. It was the same friend who was trying to hook us up together at the beginning of our relationship — he was touring with Bruno Mars here in New Zealand.

So we’re like: Okay, let’s take a break from island life, go and watch the concert, and meet up with Ryan, our friend.

And while we were here, we ate at Meredith’s. I have never experienced dining like that, ever, in my life before. It was something new to me. It was mind-blowing.

This was 2014. I remember the first thing that they served us was two meringues. One had a tomato filling, and the other was beetroot with a duck liver parfait. Those meringues just disappeared in your mouth, and you got this flavour explosion. Intense flavour. I knew from that first bite that this was going to be something special.

We went through the dinner, each bite just getting better and better and better. And it was just like: “Oh my gosh!” Just when you think this can’t get any better, it got better.

Oh, wow.

And then, towards the end of the meal, the chef had come out to talk to one of the guests across from us, and I saw that he was Sāmoan. I saw the Sāmoan tattoos, and I was like: Oh my gosh. This is next level. An actual Sāmoan chef who is doing mind-blowing things that I’ve never seen before.

I knew then that I was gonna move to New Zealand. So, me and Debby went back to Sāmoa. And I asked her to write an email for me. I’m not very good at writing in English or even speaking in English [laughs]. It’s my second language, and I got up to high school as far as education is concerned, so I always relied on my wife to write things for me.

So I told Debby: “Oh, could you please write the email? Pretend it’s me, just requesting some time in the kitchen to learn from chef Michael.”

A little time went by, and then he finally replied and said: “Could you be here next Tuesday?” I think it was a Wednesday the week before, and we packed up everything in Sāmoa and moved to New Zealand, not looking back.

And then I worked in his restaurant for free for about three months.

But when I came to Meredith’s restaurant, I realised that I was way behind as far as skill. The learning curve was just huge — I was at a huge disadvantage. So not only was I working at Michael’s for free for five days a week, I then got a chance to learn for free at the Sugar Club, and this was under chef Peter Gordon. So I was working six days for free, just to pick up and soak up all this knowledge, and it was a great time for me.

Eventually, Michael offered me a job, and then it felt like I was getting paid to learn, which was amazing.

I really respect that you were prepared to work gratis to build up your skills. But, you know, now you’ve created Tala and you’re able to refine some of this and even celebrate the fa’a Sāmoa with the kai, which is wonderful, isn’t it?

It must be really neat to be able to put ingredients together like that and be proud of your origins and the origins of the food that you’re serving. Does it give you a great sense of pride that you’re able to now emulate what Michael was doing all those years ago?

Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot more to the Sāmoan food culture that I haven’t been able to implement in the restaurant yet, and I’m still working on ways to put that in there. But I just have to make sure that I do it correctly.

For instance, in Sāmoa, before we eat, we have what is called the fōlafola mea‘ai, and it’s such a huge part of the Sāmoan culture that I need to find the best way of doing it so that I don’t make it seem kitsch. Because I worked at a Disney World show before, I know what kitsch looks like, and I don’t want Sāmoan food to come off as like a Disney show.

The fōlafola mea‘ai is a formal announcement of the food. It’s usually done by one of the ‘aumāga — the young men of the village who don’t have chiefly titles yet, and they’re practising their lauga or how to make a speech. And one way to do that is by doing the fōlafola mea‘ai. I know in the western world, the menu comes in a paper form, but for us growing up, it was actually spoken out loud, with pride.

It starts with an introduction, a welcoming, acknowledging the guests and those who have prepared the food, and then you honour the food.

That’s one of the things that I really want to include. Hopefully, one day I’ll be able to do it.

I love that you’re celebrating your Sāmoan heritage in every morsel that you put together, Henry. It’s a great vehicle for acknowledging your love of your land and your people. And alongside Debby, you’re creating this opportunity for people not just to savour food, but to feel part of whānau as they come to your restaurant. So it’s not just kai, it’s more of an experience.

Thank you so much, Dale. Fa’afetai lava. I really appreciate you guys giving me a chance to talk about Sāmoan food.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

E-Tangata, 2025