Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Chef Tohru Nakamura in his namesake restaurant in Munich When Tohru Nakamura was a child, his parents imagined that he would grow up to become a diplomat. The son of a Japanese father and a German mother, the boy spent his childhood outside Munich with one foot in each world. “There was always this kind of slight idea of maybe using these two cultures, the possibility of growing up bilingual, and maybe becoming an ambassador or something, foreign affairs or whatever,” he recalls.
Instead, he became a chef. Though to be fair, he also has a photo of himself, around age 5, with both feet on a chair to reach the pots and pans on the household stove. He inherited his parents’ love for cooking and entertaining, and his trips to see his grandparents opened his eyes to more culinary possibilities.
But since this was decades ago, before it became “this shining glamorous world of when you talk about restaurants nowadays,” his family stuck with the diplomacy plan. They visited a friend of his father’s, who was the Japanese ambassador to Denmark, in Copenhagen. Young Nakamura found his way into the kitchen.
Chawanmushi with lobster, zucchini and horseradish “I was more fascinated by the chef who was at the embassy,” he remembers. “And at the end, I was cooking with him, the Japanese classical breakfast the next morning. And I was asking him all these questions about how he cooks this and this.
” And that was that. Wi.