Episode #64: Vaughan Mabee

Vaughan Mabee is the chef of Amisfield in Queenstown on the South Island of New Zealand. It’s an out of the way restaurant in an already out of the way country. Yet, it seems like he is on to something. Everyone is always looking for the next big thing in fine dining. That restaurant that can bring an element of surprise. An extraordinary experience in an extraordinary place. And New Zealand has all of that and then some. It has pristine oceans, forests, mountains, and plenty of endemic flora and fauna. Vaughan is a hunter and forager and uses a lot of wild foods, so we end up talking a lot about strange ingredients he encounters, like the Pūkeko, this wild pheasant with frightening claws and tahrs, a sort of wild goat from the Himalayas that has populated the area. The presentations of his dishes evoke the original animal, and he occasionally gets shit for allegedly glorifying hunting on social media. So, we talk about that and his idea of honoring the animal in this way rather than buying from factory farms. This is a guy that you are probably going to hear a lot about in the coming years. See a full transcript and subscribe to the newsletter at New Worlder.