Chef’s table NZ

  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...

  My first knife was a Wüsthof, and it had a bolster. I bought it purely because it was beautiful — to my eyes at the time, it looked like what a "real" chef's knife should look like. Looks were the whole reason. It took years of standing at a bench, ten hours a day, before I understood what actually makes a knife worth owning — and it's not what most buying guides tell you. You don't need a block of twelve knives. You need one. One knife, not a set If you're starting out, buy one solid chef's knife and learn it properly. An 8-inch (20-21cm) chef's knife will get you through 90% of what happens on a home kitchen bench — chopping, slicing, mincing, breaking down most things you'll cook. Everything else is a nice-to-have you can add later once you know what you're missing. My Wüsthof was a 21cm chef's knife, all stainless steel — but it did have a bolster, and looking back, that's exactly what I'd tell you to avoid. Skip the bolster M...

 I'm not a bartender. I've never pulled a pour or built a cocktail during service. But after twenty years running kitchens, I've sat in enough P&L meetings to know exactly why a $22 gin and tonic and a $38 pasta dish are doing very different jobs for the same business. Let me explain it the way I understand it — from the kitchen looking sideways at the bar. What I Know About My Side  I know food costing down to the gram. A pasta dish costs me $8–9 in ingredients and sells for $38. That's about 22–25% cost. A steak is tighter — closer to 35–40% once you factor in the cut, and worse if the protein price spiked that month, selling anywhere from $48–58. A starter runs $4–5 in raw product, sells for $20–24. Around 20–25%. These numbers are tight. Every dollar of food cost gets scrutinised, portioned, yielded, and recalculated. I've spent entire afternoons building yield tables just to shave half a percent off a dish's cost. That's the world I live in. What I...

  I've opened restaurants before. I know how to negotiate a lease. I know how to design a kitchen that actually works. I know how to build a menu, manage food cost, hire a team, and keep a service running when everything is falling apart at once. I've done it. Just not for myself. That's the part nobody in hospitality talks about. The experienced ones — the chefs, the operators, the people who've spent decades inside someone else's business — are often the most hesitant to make the leap. Not because they don't know how. Because they know exactly how hard it is. And in New Zealand right now, the news doesn't help. Restaurants closing. Cafés shutting their doors. Pubs that survived Covid folding anyway. You read the headlines and think — why would I put my own money into this? But here's what I've learned from watching businesses succeed and fail from the inside. The ones that close usually made the same mistakes. They opened too big. They undere...

I've worked with hundreds of people in professional kitchens over the past two decades. Some of them were talented. Some were fast. Some could break down a whole fish in under three minutes or turn out perfect brunoise without thinking. But the ones I actually wanted to keep? They weren't always the most skilled. They were the ones who made the kitchen work. There's a version of this job that people imagine before they start. You show up, you cook, you learn some knife skills, maybe you get yelled at a bit, and eventually you become a chef. That's not how it works. The kitchen runs on people who do the things nobody asked them to do. Who see the low mise en place and fill it before service without being told. Who clean as they go not because the head chef is watching but because they understand why it matters. Who show up on time — actually on time, not walking-through-the-door-at-start-time — ready to work. That's it. That's most of it. Skills can be taught. I...

  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...