Monday

It’s very early morning and Lee and Tokuyama are driving north to Leigh to visit a supplier. It’s their day off.

Lee Fish supplies Cocoro with high-quality line-caught fish. Sam Birch, Lee Fish’s sales and marketing manager, grew up in the area. His dad caught snapper for the company in the golden days when Lee Fish first found success exporting to Japan in the 70s and 80s — hence the name-change from Leigh to Lee. With that market these days favouring Japanese-sourced fish, it’s Birch’s job to grow new arms of the business. He began working for the company in the US seven years ago, but for the past three and a bit years, he’s been back in New Zealand.

Lee and Tokuyama put on protective hairnets, booties and ponchos and follow Birch into the sorting area. There’s a cacophony of crashes and bangs as men in white gumboots sort fish into bins that are then sealed and labelled, ready for export. Each box displays the species of fish, the grade, the date and time of the catch, and the name of the skipper who caught it. Today’s boxes are all on their way to Whole Foods Market in the US, but Tokuyama singles out one gleaming blue mackerel and it’s reserved for delivery to Cocoro the following day. Part of the service Lee Fish offers to around 200 restaurants nationwide is a mixed box — multiple species of fish in one bin. The process relies on skilled graders, men like Rex Dryland, who was a Lee Fish fisherman for 15 years and now works shifts on the sorting floor, keeping an eye out for the very best fish for high-end restaurant customers.

It’s thanks to the company’s history of fishing for the Japanese market that Lee Fish produces seafood of such high quality. It taught the fishermen of Leigh the “ikejime” method of killing fish, a humane, swift spike to the brain that “sounds mean but kills [the fish] instantly”, says Birch. It causes blood to retreat to the gut cavity of the fish, leaving the flesh clean and perfect for sashimi, without the metallic flavour or aroma that fish often develops as it ages.

When Birch returned to New Zealand, Cocoro was his first port of call. “I asked myself, ‘Where’s the best Japanese restaurant in New Zealand?’ Straight away I went to Cocoro. I saw Makoto on the street outside the restaurant and I said, ‘I’m from Lee Fish, we’re ikejime-ing our fish.’ And he was like, ‘Really…?’ He explained that he preferred to pick the fish out himself, but I said, ‘Look, just give me one chance…’”

For Cocoro’s first four years, Tokuyama would begin each day driving between three fish markets in Auckland. “Seriously, how many hours I spent every morning, just to find fish.” He looks at Birch: “He changed a lot, a huge amount. After he came back, straight away I really trusted him.”

Lee and Tokuyama leave the fishery just after sunrise, taking the winding road that leads to Te Arai Point. It’s time for surfing, the first real sign that this is not a work day. Tokuyama first learned to surf when he was 19 and living in Miyazaki, on the coast of Kyushu, Japan, and he’s never stopped. Being in the water is his main source of relaxation, and when he can’t make the time to surf, he takes his kids to the pools in Newmarket.

“This is my favourite place,” he says, overlooking the dunes and the broad crescent of golden sand that stretches up to Mangawhai. “My kids always complain about the long drive, but they love to play in the rock pools.” There is an abundance of edible life around the point — sea asparagus (samphire) and sea banana, seaweed and kina. Tokuyama began to teach himself about foraging in New Zealand 10 years ago. When he first arrived in the country on a working-holiday visa, he didn’t know anything about our wild foods, but foraging was a staple of his childhood in Japan, and it’s big part of his identity as a chef.

Tokuyama pulls a long board from the back of his car, zips up his wetsuit and disappears into the foaming waves. For him, this is the beginning of his week, the last moment of respite before the rush of routine begins again — collecting his kids from school, taking them to karate class, making sushi with his family on a Monday evening. He will still make time to collect kina when the tide goes out, before he heads home. “There is no such thing as a day off from Cocoro,” says Lee, and Tokuyama agrees: “If you think of it as work, I recommend you don’t become a chef.”