Chef’s table NZ

  There's no secret ingredient. It's a handful of habits repeated thousands of times. We season harder than you think Restaurant food is seasoned in layers. Salt goes in the water, the protein, the sauce, and again at the end. Most home cooks salt once, usually at the table, and wonder why the dish tastes flat. We use more fat A sauce finished with a knob of cold butter turns glossy and rounded. Without it, it's thin. This isn't health food. It's food built to taste great in six bites. We have heat you don't A commercial burner puts out far more power than a home stove. High heat means proper browning, and browning is where most flavour comes from. At home, a crowded pan steams the food instead of searing it. We start with stock, not cubes Good sauces begin with bones simmered for hours. It's cheap, slow, and impossible to fake with a powder. We finish with acid A squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar at the end wakes a dish up. We also taste constantly, d...

  1. The steak is wet Moisture is the enemy of browning. Pat the steak completely dry with paper towel before it touches the pan. Wet steak steams and turns grey. 2. The pan isn't hot enough Heat the pan for several minutes, until it's properly hot, before the steak goes in. If you don't hear a sharp sizzle, wait. Use cast iron or heavy stainless steel, not thin non-stick. 3. It's seasoned too late (or too shyly) Season generously with salt. Salting about 40 minutes ahead, or just before it hits the pan, both work. Salting halfway through cooking doesn't. 4. You're cooking by time, not temperature Steaks vary in thickness, so timings are a guess. A cheap probe thermometer is the best tool you can buy. For medium-rare, take it off the heat around 52–55°C. It keeps climbing while it rests. 5. You skip the rest Give it 5 to 10 minutes on a rack or board before cutting. Cut too early and the juices run out onto the plate. Bonus: finish with butter In the last mi...

  A recipe is a set of instructions. A dish is what happens when someone actually understands why those instructions exist. Most home cooks — and a fair few line cooks — spend years following recipes without ever crossing into the second category, and it's not a knowledge gap. It's a different relationship to the food entirely. A Recipe Tells You What. A Dish Requires Knowing Why Follow a recipe exactly and you'll usually get something edible. Sear the protein for four minutes, reduce the sauce by half, rest for five. What a recipe can't tell you is why four minutes on this cut, in this pan, on this particular day. Pan heat varies, cut thickness varies, even the humidity in the room changes how something browns. A recipe gives you a starting instruction. A dish comes from knowing when to deviate from it. Recipes Are Written for a Kitchen That Doesn't Exist Every recipe assumes ideal conditions — the exact ingredient, the right equipment, a cook who's made it a h...

 Visitors ask this constantly — usually mid-meal, card in hand, unsure whether to add something extra. The short answer: don't. Tipping isn't expected in New Zealand, and understanding why explains a lot about how this industry actually runs here. It's Not Cultural Stinginess — It's a Different Wage Model In countries with strong tipping culture, base wages for hospitality staff are often set low on the assumption that tips make up the difference. New Zealand doesn't work that way. Everyone on the floor and in the kitchen is paid at least minimum wage regardless of how the night goes, and most experienced staff earn well above it. The price on the menu is the actual cost of the meal — nothing is quietly subsidised by an expected tip on top. Menu Prices Already Reflect the Real Cost This connects to something I've written about before — the real breakdown behind why a $44 main costs what it does . Labour is already priced into that number. There's no gap betw...

  You sit down, you order, the food arrives. That's the whole transaction from where you're sitting. From where I'm standing — behind the pass, plating your order under a heat lamp while three other tickets scream at me — it's a lot more complicated than that. Here's what I wish more people understood before they sat down at a table. Your "no onions" isn't the inconvenience you think it is Allergies, real intolerances — fine, always fine, we build around those without a second thought. It's the vague preferences that cost time: "can you make it a bit different," "not too spicy but still spicy," "on the side but also mixed in." Every modification pulls a dish out of the flow it was designed to move through. One modified plate on a Saturday night isn't a problem. Fifteen of them, all different, all at once, is how a kitchen falls behind. If you know what you don't like, just say it plainly. We'd rather hear ...

  Being a great chef and being a great restaurant owner are two different jobs that happen to share a kitchen. I've watched brilliant cooks — people I'd trust with any dish on the pass — struggle the moment the conversation turns to leases, wage bills, and cash flow. It's not a lack of intelligence. It's that the skills that make you good at one barely transfer to the other. The Kitchen Rewards a Different Kind of Thinking A good chef thinks in seconds and plates. Is this seasoned right, right now? Is that pan about to burn? Twelve tickets on the rail, all moving at once, all solved in real time. That instinct — fast, sensory, present-tense — is exactly what makes someone excellent behind the stove. Running a business rewards the opposite instinct: slow, abstract, months-ahead thinking. Cash flow forecasting. Lease negotiations. Deciding today whether a supplier price increase in March still lets you hit margin in June. None of that fires the same part of the brain that...

People imagine a health inspection like a surprise raid — clipboards, torches, someone crawling under the fridge with a flashlight. It's not that dramatic. But it's also not nothing, and if you've never been through one, here's what it actually looks like from the chef's side of the pass. It's Not the Surprise Raid You're Picturing Anymore If you're picturing an inspector turning up unannounced with a torch and a clipboard, that's the old-school version. These days in NZ, verification visits under the Food Act are usually booked in — you get an email, you agree on a date and time, and the visit happens on that schedule. That doesn't mean it's an easy pass. You know the day, but you don't get to fake the fundamentals. A booked visit still checks the same things a surprise one would — it just means the standard has to be real on a normal Tuesday, not staged for one afternoon. What They're Actually Checking It's less about spotless s...

  You look at the menu, see $44 next to a piece of chicken, and think — that's a lot for chicken. Fair enough. From the outside, it looks like a markup. From inside the kitchen, it's closer to a math problem with very little room for error. Let me break it down the way I actually break it down when I'm pricing a menu. Food Cost Is Only the Start The rule of thumb in this industry is that food cost should sit around 28-33% of the menu price. So if that main costs $44, the raw ingredients — the protein, the veg, the sauce components, the garnish — should cost somewhere around $12-14 to plate. That already surprises people. Where does the rest go? Labour Isn't Just "The Chef Cooking It" That $44 main was touched by more people than you'd think: Someone butchered or portioned the protein Someone made the stock or sauce base, probably days in advance Someone prepped the veg and garnish The chef who fired it on the pass The person who plated it The waiter who ca...

  I already wrote about why a cocktail costs $22 . This time, let's zoom out to the whole bill. What you're actually paying for When a diner looks at a menu price, they see one number. What they don't see is everything stacked underneath it: food cost, rent, wages, power, insurance, compliance, breakages, and whatever margin is left over after all of that — which, in hospitality, is usually thinner than people assume. Auckland makes this harder than most cities. Commercial rent in the right location is expensive. Wages have gone up, which is a good thing for the people earning them, but it flows straight into the price of your meal. Supplier costs move constantly, and a kitchen has very little control over what produce costs this week versus last week. Roughly what things cost right now Prices vary a lot by venue and suburb, but as a general shape of what you'll find across Auckland dining in 2026: A casual weekday lunch — a sandwich, a bowl, a simple plate — tends to l...

  I've already written about whether culinary school is worth the money. Short version: it can help, but it's not the only door in. Plenty of chefs I've worked alongside — some of the best ones — never set foot in a culinary classroom. Here's the actual path, if school isn't the one you're taking. Step 1: Get in, any way you can Nobody starts as a chef. You start as a kitchen hand or commis, washing, prepping, watching. The title doesn't matter in year one. Getting inside a working kitchen does. Apply everywhere. Cafes, pubs, hotel kitchens, catering companies. Don't hold out for the fine-dining dream job on day one — you're not ready for it yet, and neither is your CV. Step 2: Show up early, leave late, ask questions This sounds simple because it is. Kitchens run on trust before they run on talent. The person who turns up fifteen minutes early and stays to help clean down gets taught things the person who clocks in at the buzzer never will. Ask a ch...

  People use these two words like they're interchangeable. In a kitchen, they're not even close. The short answer A cook prepares food. A chef runs a kitchen. Every chef can cook. Not every cook is a chef. That's the whole distinction, and almost everything else falls out of it. What a cook actually does A cook follows the recipe, the spec, the standard that's already been set. They come in, work their section, execute what's been decided, and go home. That's not an insult — a great cook who's fast, consistent, and reliable is worth their weight in gold to any kitchen. Most of the people keeping a busy service running are cooks, not chefs, and it should stay that way. What a chef actually does A chef decides what the standard is in the first place. Menu, costing, ordering, training the team, tasting every dish before it leaves, taking the call when something's wrong at 8pm on a Saturday. A chef is responsible for the kitchen, not just for their own secti...

 Every few weeks someone messages me asking the same thing: "I want to work in a New Zealand kitchen — should I come on a working holiday or try to get sponsored?" There's no shortage of visa guides online. Immigration lawyers, migration agencies, travel blogs — they'll all give you the dates, the fees, the age limits. What they won't tell you is what actually happens once you're standing in a kitchen with that visa in your pocket. That's the part I can help with. Why I don't hire working holiday visa holders I'll be straight with you, because nobody else will be: most head chefs I know, myself included, actively avoid hiring WHV holders. Here's why. Your visa gives you twelve months in the country, but I only get you for three, maybe six, before you're legally required to move on. Training a cook properly — getting them fast on a section, trusting them with service — takes longer than that. By the time you're actually useful, you'r...

  I get asked this more than almost anything else. Usually by someone standing at a fork in the road — finish school and go to culinary school, or do something "sensible" instead. I'm not going to give you a yes or no. I'm going to give you what nobody gave me. The honest cost side Long hours. Weekends gone. Christmas and New Year's Eve — some of the busiest nights of your working life, not your personal one. Your feet will hurt in ways you didn't know feet could hurt. You will get burned, cut, and yelled at, sometimes all in the same service. The pay, especially early on, will not reflect the effort. I've written before about what chefs actually earn in NZ — the short version is that the title looks better than the payslip for the first several years. Relationships take a hit too. Not everyone understands a partner who's never free on a Saturday night. The honest reward side There's a version of satisfaction you only get from finishing a service w...

  Every few months someone messages me the same question. Usually it's a young cook, sometimes it's a parent worried about their kid's career choice. "How much do chefs actually make?" Google will give you a number. It's not wrong, exactly. It's just not the whole story. The numbers you'll find Search it yourself and you'll land somewhere around these figures: Commis chef / entry level: close to minimum wage ($23.95 an hour as it stands), maybe a dollar or two above it Chef de partie: roughly $25–$29 an hour on average, based on current job listings and payroll data Sous chef: roughly $29–$34 an hour on average Head chef: roughly $35 up to $49+ an hour, depending on the venue and city — a head chef salary of $85,000–$100,000 a year works out to around $42–$48 an hour on a standard 40-hour week Average chef salary nationally: sits somewhere in the mid-$70,000s to low $80,000s a year Those numbers are real. They come from job listings and payroll sur...

  Walk into any kitchen and I can tell you roughly how it's run before anyone says a word to me. Not because I'm gifted. Because after twenty years, the signs are always the same. The first thing I look at isn't the food It's the floor. Not for dirt — for how people move on it. Are people walking around each other with intent, or are they bumping into each other? A kitchen with a good rhythm has people who know exactly where everyone else is without looking. A kitchen in trouble has people colliding, apologising, resetting. The sound tells you more than the sight Before I look at anything, I listen. A healthy kitchen has a certain hum — pans going down with purpose, calls being answered immediately, not repeated three times. A kitchen under strain sounds different. Calls hang in the air. Someone's voice gets sharper than it needs to be. Silence in the wrong place — no chatter, no calls, nobody communicating — is often worse than noise. Silence usually means people h...

  Every hospitality job ad says it. "Must be passionate about food." "Looking for passionate individuals." It's on every listing, every careers page, every induction pack. And every time I read it, I think the same thing: passion is not what gets you through a Saturday double. I'm not saying passion doesn't matter. It does, somewhere in there. But it's not the thing doing the actual work, and pretending it is has done real damage to how this industry treats people. Passion doesn't survive contact with a bad shift.  is what gets you into the industry. It's the reason you signed up for culinary school, or took that first kitchen job instead of something easier. It's real, and it matters at the start. But passion doesn't clean the grill trap at 1am. It doesn't stand you back up after you've burned your forearm and there's still two hours of service left. It doesn't get you through the fifth split shift in a row when you...

  People throw the word "chef" around like it just means someone who cooks well. It doesn't. Cooking well gets you in the door. Running a section is a completely different skill, and almost nobody explains it properly before you're standing there on your first solo shift wondering why you're drowning. I want to break down what actually changes when you go from "cook who's good at their job" to "person responsible for a section," because the gap is bigger than most people expect. Cooking and running a section are different jobs. When you're a junior, your job is simple: execute the dish in front of you, well, on time. That's hard enough on its own. But running a section means you're not just cooking anymore — you're managing a system. You're tracking six, eight, ten dishes at different stages simultaneously, predicting when tickets are going to stack, and adjusting before it becomes a problem instead of after. The cooking...

  Somewhere along the way, hospitality decided that exhaustion was a badge of honour. Sixty-hour weeks, no breaks, standing on your feet until your back gives out — and somehow the person who complains about it is the "weak" one, not the system that built it that way. I'm not writing this to be dramatic. I'm writing it because I've watched good cooks — genuinely talented ones — quit the industry entirely before they turned 30. Not because they couldn't cook. Because nobody ever taught them how to survive the job long enough to get good at it. Burnout doesn't look like collapsing. Most people picture burnout as some dramatic breakdown — crying in the walk-in, storming out mid-service. That's not what it usually looks like. Usually it's quieter than that. It's a chef who used to care about plating now just getting through the pass. It's someone who used to ask questions on their day off now just wanting to sleep through it. It's the slow ...

  Everyone wants to open their own place. Ask any line cook with two years' experience where they see themselves in five years, and half of them will say "my own restaurant." Ask them what it actually costs, and you'll get silence. I've opened venues for other people for over twenty years. Not my own name on the lease, but my hands on every single line item. So let me walk you through what the dream actually costs before a single customer walks through the door. The lease is just the entry fee A commercial lease in a decent location isn't just rent. It's bond, it's personal guarantees, it's a fit-out clause that decides whether you're allowed to touch the walls at all. Landlords in good locations know exactly what they have, and they price the risk of a first-time operator into every clause. You'll sign for a term longer than you're comfortable with, because nobody will give a new operator a short lease. That's five years of commitm...

  Everyone talks about the chaos. The screaming, the tickets stacking up, the pass looking like a war zone on a Friday night. That's the image people have of kitchens, and honestly, it's not wrong. But the kitchens that actually worry me are the quiet ones. I've walked into venues mid-service where nobody's talking. No calling out orders, no "yes chef," no chatter between stations. Just heads down, moving fast, saying nothing. Owners sometimes think that's a good sign. Discipline. Focus. A tight ship. It's not. It's a room that's stopped trusting itself. Noise Is Communication A loud kitchen isn't necessarily an out-of-control one. Calling out orders, confirming fires, checking in on a dish that's running late — that's the system working. It's how twelve people moving at speed avoid stepping on each other. When that goes quiet, it usually means one of two things. Either everyone's so overwhelmed they've stopped bothering...