Inside Tala: How Samoan Tradition Shaped Henry Onesemo’s Michelin-Starred Menu

Auckland’s Tala is the world’s first Michelin-starred Samoan restaurant. Chef Henry Onesemo talks to Kim Knight about what it means to serve his culture, in every sense of the phrase.The glaze on the glass was the giveaway. The wine, stored in a regular refrigerator because Tala was not making “Once you pour, you see the glaze, and you know,” says restaurant owner and chef Henry Onesemo. “So you start talking and talking ...”Long enough, he hopes, for the temperature in that glass to rise just a little.Pull up a spreadsheet from this time last year. On a mid-August Friday, four people had booked dinner. On a recent equivalent Friday, Tala is expecting 52 with a double-figure waitlist. Diners will pay $215 a head for the 14-course chef’s journey. The drinks, now optimally chilled and served in delicately etched glasses, will be extra.Tala was a “slow burn”, says Onesemo. And now it is on fire.Michelin came to New Zealand in June. Queenstown’s Essence attained two stars and 14 other restaurants, including Tala in Parnell, Auckland, were awarded one star.Onesemo, wearing a red pandanus seed ula fala over a new Michelin chef’s jacket and holding the Samoan flag, broke down on stage. The restaurant he and his wife Debby had opened in 2023 had just made global culinary history.Tala had already been recognised in New Zealand – it was the Supreme Winner in 2025’s Viva Top 50 Restaurant Awards and held three hats from Cuisine’s Good Food Guide – but it was now the first contemporary Samoan restaurant in the world with a Michelin star.“When they call my name, I have roughly two minutes of confidence,” Onesemo recalls.“The closer I got to the stage, it started to unravel a little bit. Now they’re putting the jacket on. All the confidence is gone now, I’m just in vulnerability mode. When they said, ‘The first Samoan restaurant ...’, what are you going to do?“You try to be strong for the culture, so that you can deliver an eloquent thank you. And the speech that I’ve said perfectly 1000 times while taking a shower just wasn’t there.”One of six “presenting chefs” chosen to cook for the event, Onesemo had told his team it was likely a consolation prize: “We’re probably not going to get anything tonight, so enjoy it, don’t look sad when people are coming around, congratulate them ...”After the ceremony, “I was trying to call Debs. We couldn’t find each other. I was just losing it. I almost went home, I didn’t want to go back in there. It was just overwhelming.”Henry and (far right) Debby Onesemo at Tala's weekly manager's meeting. Photo / Michael Craig When Tala opened, the plates came from Kmart and there was no dedicated wine chiller. Now it has a Michelin star – and bespoke glassware. Photo / Michael CraigThe Tala story in two paragraphs: Onesemo, born in American Samoa and raised in Samoa, is from the village of Malaemalu in Falealili. His father was a grocery store accountant, his mother is a lecturer at the National University of Samoa. He failed high school and moved to Hawaii, chasing a career in the military and picking up extra work at a resort, before a dance audition took him to a job at Disney World in Florida.He meets Debby, a lawyer. They move to Samoa with plans to open an Italian restaurant. A visit to New Zealand includes a meal at Michael Meredith’s eponymous restaurant on Dominion Rd. Inspired, Onesemo requests an unpaid “stage” at Meredith’s and is ultimately offered a full-time job. More kitchens and more international travel follow, but all the while, he has plans for his own place: a fine-dining restaurant serving Samoan food.“The people that came before me have laid down the groundwork,” he says. “They’ve been through the dawn raids, they’ve been discriminated against at the train station ... People that have come before me have had to go through the struggle, so that it’s easy for me to just walk in and be like, ‘Oh, I want to open a Samoan restaurant in one of the expensive suburbs of New Zealand.’ Nobody batted an eye.“And so I find myself in a very privileged position to be able to dare to do something like this, and just go ahead and just do it. It might not be what they fought for, but the opportunity is available to me because of that struggle.”How do you make a Michelin-starred Samoan dinner? Begin by never forgetting where you come from.Tala chef and co-owner Henry Onesemo takes customers through his version of panikeke, the Samoan pancake found everywhere from school lunchboxes to church kitchens. Photo / Michael CraigRolling out the panikeke, freshly made for every diner. Photo / Michael Craig The Herald spent two days at Tala. We wanted to observe the restaurant in prep mode, sit in on the weekly manager’s meeting and consider the rhythm of a fine-dining kitchen against the traditional origins of its food.“Sure,” said Onesemo, who two weeks ago was named Chef of the Year at the 2026 Cuisine Good Food Awards. And then he served us the essence of his life so far.“So aumaga, in Samoa, are men that do not have chief titles, and they usually are the ones in the kitchen. I’m an aumaga. I don’t have a chief title. I don’t have any tattoos yet. I’ll forever be in the kitchen, forever be in service ... I like being where I’m at. My responsibility is different. I still feel like I’m serving Samoa, doing what I’m doing.”Tala’s multi-course degustation menu draws on the tradition of the toʻonaʻi, the communal Sunday feast that follows church.Toʻonaʻi is about service, says Onesemo, describing a kind of “best of” meal to which multiple families contribute. Unlike a restaurant, there is no printed menu.“We do what is called folafola meaai ... calling out all of the menu items that the community has brought in for the toʻonaʻi.”The language is highly respectful and the formal structure includes an apology and opening address, the acknowledgement of high-ranking guests, the proclamation of the food and, finally, a blessing and a call to eat. Onesemo remembers the first time he performed it.“I was around 16. It’s very nerve-wracking.”He imagines diners being able to experience this at Tala. And then, less seriously, “I don’t know how it would be for me to be shirtless in the middle of the restaurant ...”Prep day at Tala - Henry Onesemo and sous chef Sol. Photo / Michael Craig Senior chef de partie Melanie, dehydrating spinach leaves to accompany the panikeke course. Photo / Michael Craig On a Wednesday, the dining room smells like smoke and chocolate. It’s prep day. The kitchen is cleaning scallops, picking the individual pulp sacs from pomelo and dehydrating spinach leaves.Getting a new dish on the menu takes up to three months. Today, Onesemo is working on fa’ausi, a coconut and taro dessert that he makes with nashi pear.“In Samoa, you would get a hot rock, pour sugar on top of the rock and melt it into the coconut milk ...”The chef must convince himself customers are ready for dessert taro. He dices a Fijian pink. Next week, he’ll try a Tongan white, and then a Samoan pink. The best taro, he says, is from Niue. (I’m a palagi journalist on the other side of the counter wondering why I’ve never considered that – of course – there would be multiple varieties of this fundamental Pacific root vegetable. Later, I’ll sample the taro soaked in dark caramel laced with lime leaves. The texture is fudgy, the flavour both sweet and slightly bitter. Delicious. “I want to see how it is in the morning,” says Onesemo. “But, yeah, I think we could do this.”).The food at Tala is frequently described as a fine-dining take on the chef’s childhood favourites. That’s only partly true.“When people come in, they get a full spectrum ... some will be based on an ingredient, another dish will be focused on a cooking technique, or on Samoan tradition.”Farmed whitebait stands in for palolo - the floating reproductive "tail" of a sea worm, collected on rare annual spawning nights in Samoa. Photo / Michael Craig Tala's opening course stars raw fruit and an ice-breaking backstory. Photo / Michael Craig Consider the snack course, a multi-bite homage to Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent his final years in Samoa and was an important figure in the Mau movement that gained the nation its independence. When Tusitala (the “storyteller”) died, he was buried at the top of Mt Vaea overlooking Apia. Onesemo shares this history as customers eat taro with curry, pomelo and a “floating island” meringue.“You know why I tell you where he was buried,” says Onesemo conversationally. “To prove we didn’t eat all the white people.”He laughs and so does the customer. The chef does not want you to sit in reverent silence. The first thing you’ll eat here is raw fruit and a reference to impatient kids who pick it too early and dip it in Raro to make it sweeter. You may have to lick your fingers. Your napkin will definitely get dirty.“And now all bets are off – we’re in this together,” says Onesemo.In Samoa, there is no toʻonaʻi without an umu.The above-ground earth oven where food is cooked on superheated rocks and under a thick layer of leaves is a labour-intensive undertaking. Coconut husks and firewood must be gathered; banana and elephant ear leaves harvested. The fire that heats the rocks is lit before dawn; cooking must be underway before church starts.At the heart of the Tala kitchen is the fire, used to cook umu chicken and smoke fish frames. Photo / Michael Craig A final flame from senior chef de partie Melanie before the "roadside barbecue" hits the pass. Photo / Michael Craig “Usually, you kind of slowly start prepping for it from Thursday,” says Onesemo. “There’s a harvest day at the plantation to get taro, bananas, maybe breadfruit. The Friday job would be collecting all the coconuts, talking to the neighbours to see what they have, especially if they are a fisherman – can you stop at us tomorrow?”You might need to make an arrangement for a bread or ice delivery via the supakako (“it’s a guy, you’ll always see him hanging out of the bus while it’s going like 80 miles an hour”). He is, literally, the supervisor of the cargo, taking coconuts to market, and bringing essentials back to the village.If you want fish?“If you’re in town, you go to the market. If you’re in the villages, the people who fish will drive around in their truck, going beeeep-beeeep-beeeep. You just got to chase it down, and hopefully they will have some good stuff left, and then there’s usually a deal done right on the bed of the ute ...”As Onesemo talks, a sous chef fillets kingfish, ordered online and delivered in a styrofoam box. Behind them, the fire burns with black wattle and sometimes mānuka, pre-chopped and delivered by Country Woods.The heart of Tala is the umu chicken, prepared from scratch in front of the diner.Onesemo splits the raw bird down the breastbone and lines its inside with herbs. The fire was lit almost an hour earlier, and the rocks he sourced from a friend (“it seems like a shady deal – we met on K Rd, in a parking lot, and she’s giving me this crate of rocks ...”) are red hot. He places one in the cavity of the chicken. It spits and smokes, and he works quickly to wrap it in banana leaves, before placing it back on the fire and smothering it in burlap.Two metres along the bench, the senior chef de partie spreads a fermented carrot and tomato puree on an acetate sheet. She too must work quickly – that liquid is about to set to a crisp snap. Molecular gastronomy versus elemental flame. The chefs are working at opposite ends of the cooking spectrum, and neither has margin for error.“Still to this day, I get so nervous that it’s going to come out raw,” Onesemo says. “You’d have to figure out a quick solution; the guest is not going to stay around for you to light up another fire. That takes an hour.”Twice a night, he unwraps a chicken slick with steam, and holds his breath. Could he make life easier?“One hundred per cent. We could actually just cold smoke the chicken as part of the brining process and roast it in the oven. But I just can’t get the flavour of the banana leaves to come through. Lack of talent is why we’re not doing it over there,” says Onesemo, gesturing to the oven. “I just can’t accomplish that flavour that we get from the umu anywhere else.”(Not that everything about this dish is traditional. “Free-range here is not free-range in Samoa. The chickens there have muscle. I joke, but you need to cook it for a couple of days. That chicken’s been up the mountain a couple of times!”)Henry Onesemo, chef and co-owner of Auckland restaurant Tala, with the roadside barbecue course featuring (towards the rear of the platter) umu chicken finished with fai'ai ula and kumara crisps. Photo / Michael Craig Tala is a tutorial in people and place. Dinner, but not as the fine-dining world has seen it before. The moment this becomes abundantly clear has brought some diners to tears. At a certain point in the chef’s journey, your hands will be washed. This is very different to washing your hands.“Gratitude is now a shared sentiment,” says Onesemo. “Instead of just us being grateful that they are here and having us be of service to them, you can sense the gratitude from the guest – the respect that they have for the culture is now shared. I like that a lot.”Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016. She is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk and has a master’s in gastronomy from AUT.More food & drink