Top New Zealand chef Vaughan Mabee is not impressed with how cold it’s become where he lives down south.

On unpredictable spring days such as this, when temperatures have plummeted during a cold snap in
central Otago, the executive chef at Amisfield bistro misses the place he calls home.

It was a balmy 15 degrees in Kerikeri when Mabee spoke to The Northern Advocate from the busy kitchen in which he serves up his creative genius.

The three-hatted chef and MasterChef NZ 2022 judge spent five years living in Kerikeri with his family, where he attended Kerikeri High School as a teenager.

He still thinks of the Bay of Islands as “home”.

“When I think of home in my mind, even though it’s been a long time, the north is where I consider home.

“I’ve got a lot of roots that are still left up there.

“My brother [Marcus] has a small farm in Kaeo, I’m up there every Christmas.

“I’m a northerner trapped in the south missing the north. But it’s a good trap.

“Yesterday at my house it was minus 10 degrees; I was missing Kerikeri then, that’s for sure.”

Mabee has worked at Amisfield, a Queenstown institution, for 11 years.

Along with Ed Verner, the chef-owner of Auckland restaurant Pasture, Mabee has made the prestigious top 100 chefs of the world list.

The winner of The Best Chef Awards will be presented in Spain from September 18 to 20.

Mabee reckons it’s “pretty cool to be representing New Zealand, a really unique food country”.

“I’m loving the ability to represent the beautiful food New Zealand has to the world,” he said.

“We’re so far away down here, it’s one of the most southern fine dining establishments in the world.

“I feel quite humbled that they’ve looked at us this year.

“But even though I’m nominated, it’s not really my award, it’s the entire team and Amisfield in general.

“Without my team and without this place and our relationship with the owners and people around us, it wouldn’t be possible.”

Mabee’s food has been described as “haute cuisine that utterly and uniquely captures the essence of New Zealand,” by Cuisine Magazine.

Cuisine editor Kelli Brett said his three- to seven-course feast “is one of the most spectacular meals you can find in New Zealand at the moment”.

Lunch, both degustation and a la carte menu, offer delicacies such as crayfish, lamb and kumara, spring bouquet, and blue cod on the open fire.

Mabee’s dinner menu – which includes dishes of “tactile delicious exuberance” – will set you back $290 per person.

His food has twice earned him the Chef of The Year award, in 2019 and 2020, as well as Restaurant of the Year 2022 Cuisine Good Food Awards.

Mabee’s style of cooking is using “what’s here that no one else can”.

“Our food represents New Zealand in ways that other people don’t do,” he said.

“We like to recreate visions of the wild. I’m interested in the thought process of hunting.

“When I’ve shot a hare, right before it died it might have been eating raspberries, so I’ll want to do something with raspberries and hare.

“I think about food from the direction of the land, it helps me create an authentic flavour of Otago.”

Born in London, Mabee was 18 months old when he and his parents moved back to Auckland, where he spent much of his early childhood.

As a youngster, he did a few stints washing dishes and working in kitchens in local restaurants.

Mabee headed to California in 1997 aged 17, and he worked in the United States for several years, reaching executive chef level in his mid-20s.

Hungry for knowledge, he moved to Barcelona in Spain, where he worked at Lasarte, a three Michelin star restaurant in the grand Monument Hotel, alongside renowned chef Martin Berasategui.

In total, Mabee spent around 10 years building his experience in big-name kitchens overseas, which also included Noma in Copenhagen, which topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list four times.

He never went to culinary school, instead training the “old school way” and completing apprenticeships.

“I trained in Michelin-starred restaurants and some of the best restaurants in the world.

“I didn’t return [to New Zealand] until 2011.”

Initially undecided about where he wanted to live, Mabee settled on the South Island – but not before considering the Far North.

“Before I moved to Queenstown, I was a chef without a home for about 10 years.

“I was always overseas but it was never home, it was a job.

“I always had a plan of coming back to New Zealand, I just didn’t realise I’d be overseas for so long.

“When I came back, I wanted to have a restaurant in the Far North.

“But there was no opportunity for me there after working in restaurants in the States and Europe.

“When I came back, and talking to people in Kerikeri…the going conversation was that the Far North at the time wasn’t ready for what I wanted to do.

“But definitely one day I’d love to be up there again.”

Now a keen hunter who kills mainly game birds and deer, Mabee was always out on the water catching kai moana during his stint growing up in the Far North.

His mum liked to fish, and his dad was a sea captain, “so like many Northland families with a close affinity to the ocean, freshly caught seafood featured prominently”.

When he visits his brother’s place these days, it’s mainly meat from the farm he enjoys eating.

“The food we eat is on my brother’s farm, he’s an amazing cook.

“Whenever I’m going there, he’s doing home kill with one of his wagyu cross cows. We’re eating things from his farm a lot.

“I love the seafood that’s available in the north, there’s so much beautiful product that we always dive into.

“Little tuatuas from Taupo Bay or catching kingfish or snapper off the rocks, or getting green-lipped mussels off black rocks…we’ve always got a place to gather everything.

“As kids, we knew all the spots.”