The trio helped make sushi an Aussie lunchtime staple – so how did their intertwined personal and business relations end up frayed – and in court?
One of Susie Wong’s favourite aphorisms is that the customer buys with their eyes. We’re at Wong’s seafood bar, Maguro, at The Glen, a large shopping centre in Melbourne’s east. The rich shades of colour that pop from Maguro’s delicately arranged platters are good enough to be in a Tokyo department store. A staffer in turquoise gloves is doing battle with a stubborn oyster, twisting his shucking knife until the mollusc snaps open.
You’d assume all this made Wong a very wealthy woman. But things didn’t turn out that way, after a series of events she now calls the “train wreck”. In 2019, after Sushi Sushi was sold without her involvement to private equity investors for the life-altering sum of almost $50 million, an aggrieved Wong took action in the Supreme Court of Victoria, seeking a 10 per cent share of the proceeds.
Anna Kasman, the 53-year-old “sushi queen” – a newspaper descriptor, it turns out, that is very much not to her taste – spots us and walks over, smiling. Kasman, who has invited us for lunch, is dressed entirely in black: dress, boots, stockings, bag, even the bands wrapped around her right wrist. One is a discreet Prada strap that makes electronic payments via a chip, the other a fitness monitor for her home workouts .
Halfway through lunch, after we’ve discussed Sushi Jiro’s expansion plans, the mood shifts. In our dealings to this point, Kasman has been reluctant to speak about the past, particularly Wong’s Supreme Court action and the fallout. It’s clear she regards it as traumatic. But now she’s willing to address the early days of Sushi Sushi, her close relationship with Wong’s ex-husband, Albert Lau, and how they fell in love and got married.
Soon after meeting, Wong and Lau started dating and were married at 19. Divorce followed at 21, but it was amicable – they used the same lawyer – and they made the unusual move to go into business together. “They were a great team,” says Wong’s sister, Cindy. After other ventures, they opened the first Sushi Sushi at Box Hill Central in early May 1998. Lau took the financial risk but promised Wong a 10 per cent profit share, according to the court evidence of them both.
Lau and Kasman had also split by then, and as part of their matrimonial settlement, $110 million worth of assets needed to be divided. That included Sushi Sushi and Fish Pier, a smaller chain of seafood shops Lau had started, and real estate. It took four years for the divorce to settle. “It was an ugly separation,” is how Wong put it in her Supreme Court witness statement. Lau described it as a “difficult period and emotions were running high”.
As sole owner after her divorce, Kasman brought in a new leadership team, including Meneilly from Retail Zoo to get it ready for sale. That led to a conflict with Wong, who felt she was being pushed out from her role of maintaining relationships with landlords and franchisees. “With Albert gone, I started to get very nervous about what would happen to my interest in the business,” Wong said in her witness statement. “By that stage, my relationship with Anna had become strained.
For those watching, it was like an unusually tense working-from-home meeting: Anna Kasman sitting in a high-backed chair in her home study in Toorak, a row of three polished ornaments on a shelf behind her, as Susie Wong’s barrister, Albert Monichino, KC, asked questions. The trial pulled back the curtain on Sushi Sushi’s operations, including the unusual relationship between its three main players.
Lau said he could not recall the Chadstone meeting and Kasman denied it ever happened. “If there was any reference to any third person being an owner or having a share in any of the businesses … I would remember such an We meet a slight, neat man in low-key designer clothes at the entrance of the busy Square One cafe in the Rialto building on Collins Street. Kasman, who has arranged the meeting, is standing beside him. Lau, 57, explains that he’s been in Asia for a few months. “Obviously, you guys have been chasing me … do I give up?” he says, disarmingly. “It’s good to have extra friends, I guess.
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