TenTo: The Japanese restaurant transported to Surry Hills

There’s a wonderful thing which happens in hospitality, and its likelihood of happening increases with each passing second. I’m talking about connections.

We connect with our customers every day—with our colleagues and our suppliers. But the most-innovative and most-interesting connections happen when two veterans of the industry combine their collective experience to connect and bring us something new.

This was the case with TenTo.

On one side you have Din Haikin, a hospitality lifer whose experience in running his family’s uber-successful Shenkin cafes has seen him learn everything there is to know about how to open and operate a successful business within Sydney.

On the other side there is Ryoto “Rio” Kumasaka, a Fukushima native with experience spanning across all facets of the industry, and now extending into the production of TenTo’s now famous ceramics.

Paired with Executive Chef Gabriel D’Agostini, TenTo has brought an offering that feels familiar, and yet altogether brand new at the same time. 

I paid the trio a visit at their tucked-away Surry Hills location, to talk about a venture years in the making that has finally come to life.

• Beginnings
• Bringing the authentic Japanese restaurant to Sydney
• Opportunities out of obstacles
• From TenTo to the future
• The clarity of circumstance

Beginnings

If there was ever somebody who could claim to be descended from pure-bred hospo stock, it’s Din Haikin. One of 5 brothers, all of which still work or have worked in the industry, his pathway to hospitality was laid out long before he was born, stretching back over generations of his family and spanning the globe from his birthplace in Tel Aviv, to Australia where he’s called home for almost 2 decades.

Din: “Hospitality has been in the family’s DNA for a really long time. My dad’s grandpa was a baker, I think that’s where it all started. In WW1 he was making muesli for the English soldiers.

“When we moved to Australia, we lived in Melbourne. I worked in a pizza place, I worked in a petrol station, I was doing anything just to experience Australian customer service. I spoke no English, I said ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘table’, ‘chair’. This was 17 years ago, so it’s not that long.”

This front-footed attitude is a trait shared with his dad and his brothers. There’s seldom an opportunity they have encountered that they didn’t grasp with both hands where most others would hesitate, and it’s an attitude that has paid off.

Din: “We drove past (the Shenkin Erskineville location) and my dad saw this shop that was empty. He pulled over, knocked on the door, and we’ve been there for 16 years.”

Bringing the authentic Japanese restaurant to Sydney

Din’s hospitality apprenticeship had begun under the stewardship of his father and would continue for over a decade which saw his family’s business expand across Sydney, most serendipitously, to include an espresso bar on Newtown’s popular King Street, below a Japanese restaurant owned by none other than Rio. 

Din: “We’ve been friends for a long time—11 years, something like that—and we were always joking, saying ‘one day we’ll do something together.’ And then, COVID came around. I was, at the time, looking to do my own espresso bar. We both started seeing what other things we could do to help our businesses. I said to him, ‘if I find something, I’ll let you know.’”

It’s a promise that’s been made between most hospo operators since the dawn of time, and one that is seldom upheld. We say it with the best intentions, believing in the moment that our journey into hospitality moguldom is just a perfect location away. 

Sadly, more often than not, these promises go unfulfilled, and dreams of an empire turn to dust as the passage of time chips away at our good intentions.

Thankfully, Din and Rio are not most hospo operators. When fate stepped in and the space for TenTo entered their radar, they were moved by its obvious charm and the cogs began to turn in their heads, shaping an unassuming annex in a Surry Hills laneway into something special.

Din: “My wife found this space. We came in and I was like, this is Kyoto backstreets. We need to do something in here.”

Opportunities out of obstacles

With business people like Din and Rio, they have a tendency to view the world through a slightly different lens to you or I. Where we would see problems, they would see opportunities.

I can make plates.

Din: “We had the first super-busy Saturday. We don’t have enough plates. We don’t have enough ramekins. What do we do? Rio came up to me and said, ‘I can make these plates.’ He ran downstairs, brought clay, we were sitting down here (TenTo’s service area) with milk crates, and we made 50 (plates) in 30 minutes.”

This was a very important step for TenTo, one towards creating an even more immersive experience for their customers. Already cut off from their bustling surroundings and transported to Kyoto thanks to its tucked away location, everything served to you at TenTo is unique to them, down to the very vessels their wares are served in.

Their customers reacted accordingly and chances were taken. A new adjacent company was founded and an extra revenue stream was discovered and dragged into being from the chaos.

Din: “We put it (our ceramics) online—Etsy—for the 1st time and in 72 hours, everything sold. We loved them but we didn’t know that everyone else really liked them. So we created the company TenTo Clay.”

From TenTo to the future

Din is both impressed and excited by Sydney’s hospitality scene and hopes to see it continue to be one of the most-eclectic, forward-facing scenes for years to come.

Din: “The industry is going in a very interesting direction. There are some unbelievable joints—some unbelievable places—that I haven’t seen anywhere in the world, in Sydney. I’m excited for the future of hospitality.”

With ideas and concepts which evolve so organically, it would be easy to gatekeep and not share wisdom gained over decades of experience, but that’s not who Din Haikin is. He wants the scene he and his family are so ingrained in to continue producing operators that can successfully realise their visions, keep the doors open and perhaps even grow.

Din: “You need 12-18 months—if not 2 years— to really know your business and really understand if you’re able to grow or not. Concepts take a while. You should not run before you learn how to walk.”

The clarity of circumstance

A lot has happened for Din Haikin over the past 17 years. The boy from Tel Aviv is now the man from Sydney.

A series of seemingly fortuitous situations are, upon closer inspection, shrewd decisions executed with clarity and confidence and they have paid dividends. The choice to stay and work in his family business when his brothers went off on ventures of their own. The fulfilled promise to a hospitality neighbour, Rio, in the following through of opening a business together. Rio’s ingenuity and Din’s support, seeing the birth of an unexpected sister company in TenTo Clay.

All of these moments have contributed to us arriving at the present day, with a thriving TenTo to enjoy, a piece of which we can own for ourselves in the form of their handmade ceramics, and signs of a local scene with forward momentum, bringing the delights of far-flung locations to our doorstep for us to enjoy.