Chef’s table NZ

  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...

 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 ...

  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 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...

  Let me be clear from the start. This isn't about young people. I've worked with twenty-year-olds who were sharp, resilient, and hungry to learn. I've also worked with people in their thirties and forties who fell apart the moment someone questioned their work. Age isn't the issue. How you were raised is. The kitchen exposes everything. There is nowhere to hide in a professional kitchen. The pressure is real. The criticism is constant. The mistakes are visible. And how someone responds tells you everything about who they are — not as a cook, but as a person. What I keep seeing is the same pattern regardless of age. Can't take feedback. Can't handle pressure. Nothing is ever their fault. There is always an excuse, always someone else to blame. The salt container was faulty. The ticket was wrong. Nobody told them. Two very different backgrounds. Same result. The first is the over-protected. Small family, only child, parents who solved every problem and never...

  Walk into almost any professional kitchen in Auckland. Look around. Count the faces. Then ask yourself — how many of these people were born here? In my kitchen, out of 20 staff, only 3 are NZ citizens — and of those 3, only 2 were actually born here. Two more hold Permanent Residency. The rest are migrants navigating visas, paperwork, and uncertainty just to show up and do the work. Without them, we don't open. It's that simple. Kiwis aren't applying. This isn't an opinion. It's what happens every single time we post a job. The applications from locals are thin. The interest is low. The follow-through is even lower. New Zealanders, for whatever reason, are not choosing kitchen work. Not in the numbers the industry needs. So we turn to migrants. We always have. And for a long time it worked. But here's the truth nobody wants to say out loud. Migrants are keeping this industry alive — but they're not always keeping it at the standard it needs to be. T...

  I've watched good people leave. Colleagues. Friends. People who were genuinely talented, genuinely committed, genuinely trying to build something here. One by one, they packed up and moved to Australia. And every single time, I understood why. This isn't just a hospitality story. Every industry in this country is feeling it. Chefs, nurses, tradespeople, engineers — the pattern is the same. Work hard. Earn less than you should. Pay more than you can afford. Repeat until you break or you leave. The money doesn't add up. Australia pays more. Not a little more — significantly more. For the same skill, the same hours, the same grind. A cook who crosses the Tasman doesn't suddenly become a better cook. They just get paid like one. And when you're working 50 to 60 hour weeks in a hot kitchen and still can't save anything at the end of the month, that flight to Sydney starts looking less like giving up and more like common sense. Everyone shops at the same places....

 I've worked alongside some exceptional chefs in New Zealand — people who've cooked in Michelin-starred kitchens across Europe and Asia. And almost without fail, when they first arrive here, they say the same thing. "You're an island nation. The seafood must be incredible." Then they cook their first service. And the disappointment is real. The Island Nation Paradox New Zealand sits in the middle of some of the world's most pristine ocean. By every logical assumption, we should have extraordinary seafood. The reality? Our fish counters are underwhelming, variety is limited, and what's available is expensive for what it is. It's not just seafood. New Zealand produces some of the finest grass-fed beef and lamb on the planet — product commanding premium prices in Tokyo, London, and Dubai. But local chefs are often left with second-grade cuts, inconsistent supply, and prices that don't match the quality. Dairy tells the same story. We're the world...

 I grew up in a world where music came on plastic discs. You'd scratch one and lose the song forever. Then one day, someone handed me an MP3 player, and just like that — the disc was dead. Nobody mourned it for long. Then came the smartphone. A camera, a map, a bank, a library — all collapsed into a slab of glass that fits in your pocket. I remember thinking: this is it, this is the peak, it can't get more surreal than this. I was wrong. I've been cooking professionally long enough to have seen trends arrive and die. Molecular gastronomy. The quinoa explosion. Avocado on everything. Food comes in waves, and so does technology. You learn to read the tide. But AI feels different. Not like a wave — more like the ocean floor shifting. We're already seeing it creep into hospitality. Reservation systems that predict no-shows. Inventory software that orders before you even notice you're running low. AI-generated menus optimised for margin. Front-of-house chatbots that hand...

People on the outside look at a professional kitchen and see the shouting, the ranking, the "yes Chef" culture, and they think it's ego. They think it's chefs on a power trip. They think it's outdated, toxic, something that needs to be dismantled. They're wrong. Let me explain what a kitchen actually is before we talk about how it runs. At any given moment during service, you have people moving fast in a tight space with knives sharp enough to take a finger off, oil hot enough to cause third-degree burns in seconds, open flames, heavy pans, slippery floors, and the clock running against every single one of you. There is no margin for confusion. There is no room for "wait, who's in charge here?" Someone has to be. Everyone has to know their place in the chain — not because of tradition, but because of physics. Because of the very real consequences when things go wrong. That's what the hierarchy is. It's not a power structure. It's a sa...