“I love Chinatown,” says Kurt Zdesar, founder of Peruvian-Japanese fusion restaurant Chotto Matte. It’s perhaps the one notable area of the city you actually can’t quite see from the wrap-around roof terrace of the top floor of the No. 1 St. Michael’s building. Everything else is right there in front of you, from the town hall to the many towers sprouting at the bottom of Deansgate.
“So many of the chefs here seem to have uncles, brothers, cousins working there, or who used to own places there.”
He’s been in the city for a couple of months while the restaurant has been in the lead up to opening its doors, and he’s been exploring plenty. Not least to scope out some of the competition, as well as eating out as much as he can. He’s found himself beneath the Chinatown arch on Faulkner Street perhaps more than anywhere else.
“For me, the food is maybe better than [the Chinatown] in London.” A bold claim.
Asian food is something he knows exceptionally well. He helped launch Nobu around Europe, the billion-dollar upscale chain co-founded by Robert DeNiro and chef Nobu Matsuhisa, as well as Hakkasan with restaurateur Alan Yau and his own project, the dumplings and cocktail concept Ping Pong.
All the more impressive for a lad who left school with no qualifications at 13. He lied that he was 16 to get a job washing pots and prepping in a kitchen in London, and never looked back. Born in Sydney, he moved around constantly growing up, from Australia to London and then Austria, then back to Australia and back to London. There was a different school every year, sometimes more than one.
Conventional education wasn’t for him, so he got it behind the stove instead. It’s a message, if ever there was one, that a career in hospitality shouldn’t just be lumped in with the gig economy. It took him around the world, and after returning to London after a stint in Spain and Portugal, he was head-hunted to become the manager of Nobu on Park Lane. Not bad for a 24-year old. He grew the group from one restaurant in New York to 16 around the world over 10 years.
“I remember them saying ‘Kurt, we’re going to fly you to New York’,“ he says. “And I was thinking ‘they’re going to fly me to another country because of a restaurant?!’ I thought that was mad.“
Fast-forward to 2025 – via opening dim sum concept Ping Pong, which expanded rapidly to 13 restaurants in just four years – and he’s opening his sixth Chotto Matte restaurant, joining his others in London (Soho and Marylebone), Toronto, Doha, San Francisco and Miami.
Chotto Matte Manchester has been built in St Michael’s, the new development from Gary Neville’s Relentless group (its ground floor neighbour Circolo Popolare opened with a fair bit of fanfare over the summer) – decorated as much with traditional South American fabrics as it is with vibrant modern art.
Central to it is the fusion style of ‘Nikkei’, a fusion well over a century old, created by the Japanese diaspora which arrived in Peru from the late 1800s.
So you’ll see Peruvian influenced sushi and sashimi, alongside tostada and tataki, as well as flame-kissed wagyu and octopus on the robata grill.
“When you have 30,000 people migrating to a small city like Lima, you will see a big influence on a cuisine,” he says. “This evolution was two worlds coming together, the Japanese bringing their techniques and using local ingredients to try and replicate what they were familiar with.
“Currently, right now in the top 10 restaurants in the world, number one, number three and number five are making Nikkei cuisine. It’s now one of the fastest-growing cuisines. We’ve spent a lot of time in Peru, Jordan [Sclare, executive chef] and I have travelled every nook in Peru, from the Amazon up into the Andes, the cities, the seaside, learning ingredients, learning techniques to bring the authentic touch to what we do.”
“It’s not just raw fish and sushi, that’s what we kind of get categorised as, it’s a menu that’s vast – everything from raw, to cooked, to smoked, to fried.”
That’s all inside, while the huge outside bar, called Claude’s, has a vast range of mezcal to explore as well as comfy seating, heaters and – essential for Manchester – a retractable roof for the inevitable downpours.
More Chotto Mattes are in the pipeline too; in Tbilisi in Georgia and in the Middle East too. Now very much in the swing of expanding his own brand, after a lot of years working for other people, he’s now the master of his own future.
”I never wanted to be an employee,” he says. ”I kept looking at myself and thinking are you going to do this until you’re 70 for someone else?’”
Chotto Matte is open from 10 October. You can book here…
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