Gastronomy > Articles > New Zealand Food

It was once memorably said that if an English butler and an English nanny sat down to design a country, they would come up with New Zealand. And, more than many other countries, New Zealand lives and breathes the best and worst of such national stereotypes – snow-dusted mountain ranges, lakes like vast shards of scattered glass, fresh, unused air, rude health, a land that’s considered as wholesome as a bowl of hot porridge, and about as sexy. And, New Zealand food was, indeed, as if cooked by an unforgiving nanny in a Dickensian orphanage: meat and two veg, the former occasionally good, the latter best avoided.

"You have to remember," says Tony Astle, who’s the proprietor of Antoine’s, the longest-running high-end restaurant in New Zealand, "that forty years ago Navy cooks were all we had, there was no wine in New Zealand, only fortified sherry. We were told, for example, not to eat wild fennel because dogs peed on it."

However, over the past 20 years the New Zealand foodie scene has taken off like a rocket salad. And central to the new food ethic is an increasing appreciation of New Zealand’s fine edible resources. ‘It’s incredible,’ says Judith Tabron, NZ TV chef and proprietor of Auckland media haunt Soul Bar and Bistro, ‘until the 80s all of the fine calves liver and veal was going off shore, there was no concept of what to do with it. We were producing the world’s best wasabi for Japan, but you couldn’t buy it here.’ Happily, the popularity and use of uniquely Kiwi delicacies such as puha (a watercress/spinach cross), kumara (a sweet potato) and crayfish is increasing exponentially; green-lipped mussels, available all over NZ, are amongst the best of the world, as are the oysters (from Bluff on the South Island), and Kiwis are increasingly becoming emboldened to pepper their dishes with exotics such as horopito, a native bush pepper, and piko piko (edible indigenous fern tips).

Admittedly, Kiwis have no long-standing culinary traditions – no signature dish such as paella or frog’s legs – but what they do do well is culinary promiscuity. ‘We’re absorbers of other cultures and we’re great travellers,’ says Simon Gault, one of NZ’s best-regarded chefs, who was behind the renaissance of the Auckland waterfront dining scene during the 2000 America’s Cup yachting competition. ‘Increasingly Kiwi chefs travel to Europe and Asia as an education. When we come home we’ll take, say, tuatua, which is a native shellfish, and use a cooking technique from France, such as soufflé, serving it with, say, a Caribbean bean salad.’

The charismatic face of this confident international food fusion that’s been dubbed ‘pacific rim’, Kiwi-born Peter Gordon found fame as the co-owner of London’s funky Providores restaurant, and now consults for high-end restaurants Changa in Istanbul and Public New York. Remarkably, until the late 90s, no hotel restaurant in New Zealand had ever been run by a Kiwi chef. So Peter’s recent ambassadorial return to Auckland, to open flagship restaurant ‘dine’ at the Jetsons-style futuristic Skycity complex in central Auckland, has been hailed by some as a defining moment in New Zealand’s new culinary confidence. Peter’s menu for dine has an unmistakably Kiwi edge…crab-crusted hapuka with coconut broth on roast kumara, for example. But it’s intermingled with that undeniable soupcon of Gordon dementia – such as the miso, tofu and chocolate desert or yuzu, avocado and mango sorbet. If cooking is an art, you suspect that, under Peter Gordon’s tutelage, New Zealand is entering its Dali phase.

But New Zealand cuisine isn’t just about ambitious fifteen-word entrees and style venues playing the sort of musak-jazz that sounds like a cat scampering across piano keys. There’s also a disarming innocence that pervades the new food culture. A sense that New Zealand is still very much still a cosy heartland of bakers and farmers. Drive through the emerald plains of North Island on a crisp autumn morning and you’ll discover ‘honesty boxes’ – unmanned roadside produce stands where you can pick up a bag of exotic fruits such as pashi, persimmons and the fragile-scented feijoa (like guava), or the ubiquitous kiwi – and deposit your payment on trust. And well-to-do Kiwis migrate to their bachs (second holiday homes, often on the coast) at any given opportunity, where the country idyll is still very much alive… think freshly caught, barbequed fish and hearty hunks of bread chewed with blissful savagery by a river glistening like wet coal.

There’s also a renaissance in cottage industries – cheese-making is flowering (as the popularity of the cheese courses of ‘dairy maid’ Katherine Mowbray evinces), as are small operations producing pates, chorizos, truffles, olive oils and saffrons. These all hold promise of great gastronomic treats to come, and will hearten the Kiwi chefs who are tired of failed attempts to slip a ripe chorizo or jamon negro past the crashing brows of a militant customs official (the quarantine laws in New Zealand are famously strict).

Admittedly New Zealand food, despite managing to wash itself of the sticky custard stains of its British working class past, still has a long way to go if it’s to match the success of Kiwi wine. Cloudy Bay brought the world’s attention to New Zealand whites and the Kiwi ‘cab sav’ is now a staple of British supermarket shelves, despite having an industry less than half a generation old. Pinot Noirs are also receiving plaudits, New Zealand being one of only three climates worldwide where the capricious and complex pinot noir grape will successfully grow (see guide on Kiwi Pinots below).

But Kiwi cuisine – once somewhere on the wishlist beneath Buddhist bodyguards and crocheted condoms – is fast catching up. They will never have the rich culinary history of other nations, but, thankfully, they’re now no longer anchored to mother ship Britain and its histrionically vile cuisine – New Zealand now sails in very different culinary waters. And the residual traces of Britishness that do remain – for example ‘7.30’ syndrome, an exasperated restaurateurs term for the New Zealander’s refusal to adapt to later, Mediterranean-style eating hours – should mean that the New Zealand culinary culture remains immune from the worst excesses of dining pretension. And there is much to be said for a nation where a man can be free to dine in beige shorts at 6pm if he chooses. In its marriage of fresh, indigenous produce with the best of international cooking techniques, New Zealand is at the forefront of a movement that perhaps defines modern international cuisine – not that you’d find anyone in New Zealand claiming to have such lofty pretensions, they’d rather chase a fine freshwater trout than celebrity. Time, perhaps, to invest in a pair of beige shorts.

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