Tetsuya Wakuda: Zen-like visit to Canberra for 3 Seeds school

Tetsuya Wakuda is pure zen in the kitchen.

That's what Andrew and Catherine Haskins learnt last week when the celebrity chef arrived at their 3 Seeds cooking school to do a private demonstration for a corporate client.

Catherine Haskins picked five lucky volunteers from the cooking school's mailing list to help out in the kitchen on the day and says Tetsuya was generous, friendly and soft spoken.

"The moment he walked in he was really comfortable and relaxed. It wasn't like having a rockstar in your kitchen," she says.

"He spent so much time with all of us, everyone was really important to him. We had five volunteers working in the kitchen who were able to talk to him while he was cooking."

Andrew Haskins worked through the pain of a recent foot operation to welcome Tetsuya and said watching the great man cook with executive chef Kevin Mok was like "poetry in motion".

"That calm, gentle feeling in the kitchen - it's what it would be like cooking in heaven. It was subtle cooking, nothing aggressive, the whole thing was very calm and very smooth," he says.

"He was so captivating that even the hardest people in the crowd were taken in by his aura and it was - there was this aura for the day.He was very off the cuff and ended up doing eight different dishes."

Tetsuya demonstrated several showstopper dishes, was incredibly neat and organised and insisted on cleaning up after himself - no tantrums and airs there.

Haskins says he was keen to find out more about Canberra truffles, which have also been a recent obsession of Antonio Carluccio, and wanted to come back more to find out about the local food scene. Fingers crossed.