Blair Strong has worked in kitchens since he was 15 years old, starting off washing dishes before training as a chef after leaving high school.
He trained in high-end restaurants in Auckland, later moving to Queenstown where he helped to start The Bunker restaurant in the 1990s, and also worked in Europe on super yachts and as a private chef.
He and his family moved to Dunedin in 2017 and in 2020 he founded a speciality Japanese knife store in Hanover St, but for the past year he has been overseeing the hostel kitchen and canteen at John McGlashan College.
Mr Strong said he had never really worked in the city’s hospitality scene: ‘‘I was trying to get out of the kitchen.’’
‘‘There’s no way in hell I’d go back to working in a restaurant,’’ he said.
‘‘Working in restaurants is horrible ... it’s what I did for a long time and it’s fairly thankless work.
‘‘Working and cooking for super-rich people — you don’t get any kind of pleasure from that kind of work after a while.’’
Mr Strong found himself living in Monaco for three years, working for a man who used to work for Ferrari and was very high up in the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.
Restaurants had pressure, but the super yachts he worked on had him cooking anything from 14-course dinners to family-sharing pastas.
His work also took him to Switzerland — ‘‘We used to do winters up there because the boss liked skiing.’’
He worked in chalets in France cooking up to 16-course dinners in the mountains and around the Cote d’Azur (French Riviera).
In London, he worked in a restaurant once partly owned by Nick Mason, drummer of Pink Floyd.
The places he had seen and the food he had cooked had been amazing, he said.
‘‘The rich and famous are a lot richer than what you’d expect — the famous people aren’t rich.’’
While Mr Strong worked at John McGlashan College fulltime, he continued to operate his Japanese knife store part-time.
The Hanover St business, WithKnives, was the only speciality Japanese knife shop based in the South Island, he said.
He began using Japanese knives more than 20 years ago but could not find them anywhere in New Zealand.
Realising there was a gap in the market, he decided to sell them himself.
He sold them around the world to customers including collectors, home cooks and professional chefs.
Japanese knives had always been considered the best and were nowadays some of the only ones still made by hand.
The cutting edge was much harder than that of Western knives, which meant they could be really sharp, Mr Strong said.
‘‘It’s a completely different kind of feeling when you cut with a Japanese knife versus a Western knife.
‘‘Sometimes you can’t even feel it — it just goes straight through.’’
Knives of similar quality elsewhere were also thousands of dollars dearer than those from Japan.
He imported them from Tokyo, Sakai, Nagasaki, Tosa and Hiroshima — sometimes directly from the blacksmiths who forged them.
There was the gyuto (chef knife), santoku (general purpose knife) and nakiri (vegetable knife).
Mr Strong said the business began with buying and selling Japanese knives to his mates in kitchens, which eventually morphed into a physical store.
Business was at its best in 2023, but sales had dropped about 20-25% in the years since.
He once offered knife-sharpening services, which he stopped due to time constraints, but still offered sharpening lessons.
