How Diego Oka’s Pandemic Pottery Hobby Evolved Into an Eight-Course Tasting Menu
During the coronavirus pandemic, Diego Oka, executive chef at Miami restaurant La Mar by Gastón Acurio, decided to learn how to make pottery. He bought a potter’s wheel and looked for YouTube tutorials, essentially teaching himself how to make plates, bowls and other dishes, drawing on his own Peruvian and Japanese heritage for inspiration. Oka quickly realized that instead of enlisting artisans to create crockery for La Mar, where he has worked since it opened a decade ago, he could design and create it to his exact specifications.
“One of the parts I really enjoy about opening a restaurant is selecting the china and how the restaurant is going to look,” Oka tells Observer. “To know what plates are going to enhance the beauty of the dishes.” In the past, Oka presented his ideas to other people, who made the dishes. That changed during the pandemic.
“I love art. I love design. I love architecture,” he says. “At the beginning of this year, I was starting to tell people from my team and directors in the hotel: Why don’t I do the plates?”
Things quickly spiraled, and soon, the Mandarin Oriental, where La Mar is located, had cleared out one of the guest rooms to become a pottery studio. Over the past six months, Oka has created 400 pieces, which will be at the core of a new eight-course tasting menu experience at La Mar called Amano by Oka.
Oka designed the pottery to augment the food, with each plate showcasing his cooking in a precise way. The 300-seat restaurant will yield 20 covers each night to Amano, which takes its name from the Spanish phase “a mano,” or “by hand,” starting on October 17. Not only has Oka hand-crafted the plates and bowls, but he has personally selected new glassware from Japan and wooden placemats. At the end of each meal, guests will be given one of Oka’s spoons to take home. These thoughtful features are essential for Oka.
“I’m all about details in everything that I do, in things that I buy, in things that I watch,” he says. “Uniqueness is in the details. Those touches make this experience unique. I don’t want to copy a tasting menu from another restaurant or from another country. We don’t want to turn La Mar into a fine dining, elegant restaurant. We want to have fun and to have a different experience in the restaurant.”
Similarly to La Mar, the tasting menu itself will encompass Nikkei cuisine, celebrating the fusion of Peruvian and Japanese food. Dishes will include a potato course that uses the traditional pachamanca method of cooking under soil, and a Korean-influenced version of carapulcra. A key inclusion is Oka’s take on tiradito, Peruvian ceviche with sashimi cut fish, which will celebrate land and sea. Unusually, the dessert will be savory, incorporating white asparagus, red onions, vinegar, olive oil, basil and quinoa.
It’s the first time in La Mar’s 10-year history that the restaurant has offered a tasting menu, so Oka wanted to push the boundaries and try something new. He admits that he does worry what diners will think, but feels he has to try anyway.
“In any career, you have to trust yourself first, and you have to be sure that it’s going work,” Oka says. “I am my worst critic. I tried and plated things so many times. I trust my instinct and my eyes and my feeling a lot.”
The guests have built trust in him over the past 10 years of coming to La Mar. “Maybe some people will say, ‘Oh, my God, this is so horrible,’” he laughs. “But in general, to create those types of emotions is very nice. I could go very safe, but I think that’s not fun. That’s why I wanted to go a little bit farther, to see the reaction of the guest trying something different, strange and new that in the end might be delicious for them.”
Launching Amano by Oka, which will run for as long as diners want to book in, has been a big undertaking. Oka has had to retrain some of the staff for the new style of service, and he’s understandably nervous about how his pottery will stay intact in the kitchen and dish washing station. There are 25 of each dish, which leaves space for some breakage, and Oka plans to continue creating in his hotel room studio.
“We are a high-volume restaurant, so the logistics of washing that many dishes is tricky,” he says. “I don’t know if I’ve complicated everyone’s lives by introducing this tasting menu, but we’re all having fun. It started as a very simple thing, and now it has become huge. We have a very old team here, and this job is more work and it’s a different style of service and cooking that they’ve been used to doing for so many years. But everybody is so excited. It’s like opening the restaurant all over again.”
For Oka, who plans to attend a pottery workshop in France in the coming months, the process has also sparked his creativity. It’s given him a new way of expressing himself, as well as creating something that lasts beyond a single meal.
“For many years, I’ve been making art that disappears in minutes, and now I’m doing art in minutes that could last for years,” he says. “A chef is not only someone who cooks delicious food. Being a chef involves many things—leadership, motivation, organization, creativity and customer service. I love going to the tables to talk to people and to create new experiences for them. I like to be involved in all aspects of the meal, from creating the cocktails to selecting the wine to plating the dishes. And now I can say I also make the plates.”
He stresses that the opportunity to design and launch Amano by Oka didn’t come by chance. He asked for it, urged by a personal motivation to keep pursuing new and different ways of presenting his food.
“When you reach the level of being in charge and being the boss, usually there is nobody to motivate you,” Oka says. “So you have to learn to motivate yourself and look for your own motivation. That’s why I love what I do now, because I can look for things that I’m really passionate about. And I don’t do that because I have to. I do it because I like it.”
Amano by Oka will be available from October 17 on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, with two seatings per night: early seating between 6:00 p.m. and 6:45 p.m., or late seating between 9:00 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. The tasting menu experience starts at $260 per person. It is available to book now.