Coming home from the world
Sometimes you have to travel the world before you realize your final destination is right in front of you.

That certainly was the story with Dan Forsyth, the owner and head chef at the Windjammer Restaurant in Arorangi,
When Forsyth was growing up in Auckland – the offspring of a Cook Islander mother and a Scottish father – he and his brother dreamed of one day migrating to Mangaia and living off the land. Life, however, had other plans for the Forsyth boys.
“As soon as we left school, it was a totally different story,” Forsyth says. “Because we couldn’t get a job to buy a ticket to go there.”
Faced with a bank account starved for funds, he took a job flipping burgers at Wendy’s in an effort to save up for a plane ticket. The realization soon dawned, however, that if he wasn’t careful, he’d quickly end up on the fast-food fast track to a greasy career demise.
It took the food and beverage course at the Auckland Institute of Technology for him to wake up and smell the marinade.
“As soon as I started my training, I fell in love with food,” he says. “I’m the sort of person that learns really well through practical experience: using your hands and all your senses.”
Another incentive for Forsyth was to use his new skills as a means to leave New Zealand.
“When I sat down and thought about where I wanted to be in 10 years’ time, I wanted to be travelling around the world,” he says. “At that stage, I’d never even been on a plane.”
Four years in various restaurants in Auckland served as a suitable apprenticeship. That was followed by six months working for Damien Pignolet in Sydney before Forsyth landed in London.
The exposure to English-style cooking was good. London itself? Not so much.
“I got pretty sick of London,” Forsyth admits. “In New Zealand, if you want to go to a beach, you just go out and, in five minutes, you’re there. (London) is just a concrete jungle, full of soot.”
Working 60-80 hours a week on salary wasn’t exactly putting the “see” in “see the world” and so Forsyth packed up again, this time landing on the Portuguese island of Madeira, where he set up his own kitchen for the first time.
Jobs in Auckland and Sydney eateries followed before, in an effort to stave off a bout of professional burn-out, he flew to Rarotonga for a holiday.
“I’d travelled all around the world but I’d never actually come to the place where my mom was born,” he says. “For the first time, in a place that I’d travelled to, I actually felt it was home.”
Forsyth manned the kitchen at Sails Restaurant & Bar for three years before the opportunity presented itself to take over the lease at The Windjammer, located on the grounds of the Crown Beach Resort.
This enabled him to continue merging his French- and English-style training with local ingredients.
“When I first started at Sails, I was really excited about cooking with local produce,” he says. “A lot of the stuff I’d never cooked with before: breadfruit and root vegetables like taro and arrowroot. I substituted some local ingredients with French preparation to experiment.”
The fusion obviously worked a charm. These days, The Windjammer is known for the quality and high standard of its food.
“I try to bring in the French influence with my sauces,” Forsyth says. “But I try to keep the flavours crisp and clean. People know that, whatever they eat here, they’re going to enjoy it.”
Even after five years of serving up delicious dishes, Forsyth still likes to tinker with the menu.
“That’s the brilliant thing about being a chef: you never stop learning,” he says. “That keeps the spark alive. Every plate you send out is a part of you.”
It’s all about creating what Forsyth calls a “food memory”.
“That’s one of the blessings about food,” he says. “Whenever you cooked it or ate it, and really sticks out in your mind, as soon as you have it again it takes you right back to that time. You remember it like it was yesterday.”
Asked for his favourite dish to prepare, Forsyth says he really enjoys the challenge of cooking with fish.
“Each fish is so different, and it’s better cooked certain ways,” he says. “And they’re all around us because we’re surrounded by ocean.”
After a long shift at The Windjammer, Forsyth says he prefers to prepare a simpler repast when he’s at home.
“I’ll just eat roast chicken or stews,” he says. “For me, I just try to eat healthy. I try to eat a balanced diet.”

A cut above
If, as the song goes, the first cut is the deepest, the second one can be just as nasty. Dan Forsyth found that out the hard way.
Forsyth was a trainee chef when Auckland’s Eden’s Café opened its doors for the first time in 1993. One of his first tasks that day was to chop parsley for the head chef.
“I was going a hundred miles an hour,” Forsyth recalls. “I grabbed up my knife and started chopping away. He started yelling at me again and while I was saying ‘Yes, chef. Yes, chef.’, I chopped the whole side of my finger off.”
After a quick visit to the nearest hospital, Forsyth returned to the kitchen to say the nurse had advised him to take two weeks off to let the wounded index finger heal.
“The chef said, ‘Dan, I’ll see you here tomorrow morning at 8:30 sharp.’ And I said ‘Yes, chef.’”
Forsyth returned the next day, only to this time take a chunk out of the index finger on his other hand. The routine was the same: hospital, a recommendation to take time off work, the chef saying he’d see him bright and early the next morning.
Forsyth spent the next month working through the pain, using masking tape to keep his kitchen gloves in place to protect his injured digits.
“(The gloves) were just full of blood by the end of the day,” he says.
Despite the grievous bodily harm, Forsyth says his career goal never once wavered.
“It only meant I wasn’t willing to give up,” he says. “The chef could see that as well. I was willing to sacrifice it all because I really wanted to be a chef. That’s how badly I wanted it.”

Herald Issue 463 10 June
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