Vaughan Mabee is an obsessed man. He is tall, burly, sports a mohawk, and is a New Zealander. So, I won’t be going overboard if I say he first strikes you as something of a Viking of the South Seas. I know, it may sound a bit trite, like the title of a pirate B-movie, but there’s a lot of truth behind it. His father was a professional yachtsman who won some important European races, and from his mother, he inherited a great deal of Scandinavian blood. And, yes, he is the chef of Amisfield restaurant in Queenstown, New Zealand. His obsession?
“I know my way. I think I’ve just been slowly evolving to create one of the world’s best dining experiences. And I truly feel that’s where we are now. Like, we do something different than anywhere else in the world, and it’s very unique. And, you know, it’s becoming very, very popular. So, it’s kind of cool. And I think, recently, when we started winning some awards in those world’s lists, it’s kind of put a little bit of a spotlight on us. And with that spotlight, you just want to keep refining and trying to perfect the consistency, and try to get better, to create a truly unique world’s best dining experience,” tells me Vaughan while we sit on the terrace overlooking picturesque Lake Wakatipu, shining in the bright Queenstown midsummer sun of early February.
Since my first trip to Australia long ago, I have followed The Good Food Guide, so naturally, I was also intrigued by The Cuisine Good Food Guide, which showcases a diverse range of unique dining opportunities across New Zealand. I began following Amisfield a little late, in 2022, when the restaurant was awarded the highest ranking of three chef’s hats—an honour held by just five restaurants in a country not covered by Michelin—on top of winning Restaurant of the Year and the Innovation Award, all from that guide. 
Then, in November 2024, I met Vaughan Mabee for the first time in Dubai at The Best Chef Awards ceremony, where he was celebrated as one of the world’s top chefs with a Three Knives merit, as well as receiving a special “The Best Dining Experience Award”. Immediately after that, we were both part of a small group of chefs and food writers who spent a week discovering Armenia.
During this week, we got to know each other a bit better, and I soon realized that underneath the seemingly rough exterior was actually a completely different person. The first thing that gave him away was a boyish smile, and by talking with him, I found that he was a very curious man full of gentle emotions—a man who likes books and art, even having painted and sculpted during his younger years.
And yet, although Mabee is ranked among the world’s top chefs, and Amisfield holds the highest rankings in the regional restaurant guide, as well as the recent title of “The Best Dining Experience Award” by The Best Chef Awards, he and his Amisfield remain relatively undiscovered by a majority of world-trotting diners. Is it because it still hasn’t been recognised by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants voters, despite being included in the 50 Best Discovery list, or because of New Zealand’s remoteness?
But lately, things are changing. Recently introduced direct flights from New York to Auckland have brought a visible influx of American tourists, and thus, visitors to Amisfield. It seems that, at least as far as the lists and discovery of the restaurant itself are concerned, Amisfield is set to rise rapidly among the best restaurants in the world. And I can now say so myself.
Namely, I recently received an invitation to visit Amisfield with a few colleagues and spend a week with Mabee, exploring New Zealand’s South Island, Amisfield’s food sources, and experiencing the restaurant’s Chef’s Menu. It was a nice opportunity to escape Europe’s cold temperatures and land into the heart of Queenstown’s summer, eager to finally visit the restaurant that had been at the top of my wish list for some time.
Queenstown is a resort town in Otago on the south-west of New Zealand’s South Island, and it is the seat and largest town in the Queenstown-Lakes District. Tourism is a large component of the Queenstown economy, particularly outdoor and adventure tourism activities.
The same day of our arrival, we met Vaughan Mabee at our place. He was in a good mood and arrived with Sun Peng Er, his Malaysian Head Chef at Amisfield. With them, they brought some spine lobsters (locally called crayfish) and half of a wild boar’s head—quite a sight to our eyes. These were grilled on the back terrace and served as tacos with three different sauces and coriander leaves, of course, totally informally and laid-back, with champagne and some delicious Amisfield Winery specialities. It was a relatively early night as tomorrow, we were about to visit the Amisfield Estate to learn about where the winery’s goods come from.
Wines from the Edge
A bright and (not so) early morning one-hour drive to the Amisfield Winery in the summer sun revealed more of the South Island’s beauty. To clarify the restaurant-winery connection, it must be said that as an iconic cornerstone of Central Otago, Amisfield has grown into a world-leading wine and dining brand, shaped by the unique environment. The essence of Amisfield is intricately woven into the land, harnessing the ebb and flow of the seasons to craft wines and cuisine that speak of time, place, and purpose.
“These are the southernmost vineyards in the world, and if you go just a bit further south, growing wouldn’t be possible. That’s why we can say that we make wines from the edge,” says André Lategan, Amisfield Vineyard Manager of over 20 years, giving us the possible slogan for Amisfield wines, as well as an obvious title for our writings. André drove us around the blocks planted with Chardonnay, Riesling, Chenin Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Gris, and Pinot Noir vines.
Amisfield’s 200-hectare property, once a prominent high-country Merino sheep station, is one of the largest single-estate organic vineyards in Central Otago. Spurred by fond memories of childhood holidays there, Amisfield founder John Darby was determined to master this breathtaking yet often unforgiving high country, convinced that this dramatic landscape presented the perfect environment for cool-climate viticulture.
As no vineyard visit is complete without a winery visit, next was the task of delving into the intricate craft of Sam Davies, the winery’s Chief Winemaker, and his colleague Ben Leen. That craft, combined with nature’s own course, brought Amisfield the much-coveted New Zealand Organic Wine Awards as “Sustainable Vineyard of the Year” in 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024, as well as many points in the rigorous Wine Spectator and other ratings (Pinot Noir RKV often scoring in the high 90s).
The end was reserved for wine tasting in the Winery’s Barrel Hall, a beautiful place where wines are aged in French oak barrels, allowing the flavours to integrate and develop. Amisfield Winery is a specialist producer of Pinot Noir and aromatic white wines, where Pinot Noir accounts for over 60% of the production, with the balance made up of Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Gris, Chenin Blanc, and Riesling. So, naturally, the highlight of the tasting was Pinot Noir—two samples with intense plum, dark cherry, berry, and subtle floral and violet flavours. As we all agreed, seductively drinkable now, but with obvious cellaring potential, meaning it has the structure and depth to age gracefully for 8-10 years, possibly more, developing further complexity with time.
That evening, Vaughan met us at the Japanese restaurant Kappa in the centre of Queenstown. As I was the first to arrive, I had some time to talk with him about our visit to the Amisfield Estate.
“I think it’s a really important part of Amisfield that not a lot of people understand—the fact that we make so many amazing varietals of wine, in the vineyard which is separate from the restaurant, but we get to use them. It’s really cool to be able to showcase the wine that we make as well, because it’s giving you a true sense of where we are, because it’s not just the food, it’s also the wine, you know. So, at dinner, we can do a match that’s all of Amisfield varietals, but then we can also do a match that’s Amisfield against some of the best wines in the world as well. We’ve just changed the big menu recently, and we had our sommelier team there, we had the winemakers, and we all sit down, eat, and go through all the wines together, because there’s so much knowledge at the vineyard. We use that in the restaurant as well, you know, because the winemaker, Sam Davies, has worked all around the world, from Portugal to places in Australia, and he’s had seasons in France, so his knowledge is really deep. That way, we come up with some special, special connections and pairings,” Vaughan told me enthusiastically.
Mabee is also a big fan of Japanese cuisine, so the dinner at Kappa was no coincidence. It is one of the town’s best-kept secrets for over 25 years. Sitting on the terrace of this tiny first-floor restaurant, Chef and owner Naoya Higuchi prepared an outstanding omakase meal with fresh oysters, clams, wagyu beef, and perfectly cooked lamb chops. Of course, there was a lot of sake and Japanese beer as well.
A bit tired from the day full of experiences and with our bellies full, there was still some time to relax with a glass of Amisfield Pinot Noir.
Hunting with Vaughan and Duke
The next morning, Vaughan came to pick us up, and he wasn’t alone—he brought his pal Duke with him. It was a hunting day with the Chef and his dog Duke, a magnificently beautiful, lean, and muscular hunting machine, and cute as well.
Our destination was Glencoe Hunting Lodge, nestled high above the nearby Arrowtown. We first visited a garden from which Amisfield gets many of its vegetables and herbs. We were then prepared to be taken on a back-country journey, following the ethos of Chef Mabee and Amisfield Restaurant.
As we started to negotiate road bends, Duke, seated and securely belt-tied at the shotgun seat, started to grow restless because he smelled rabbits, as Vaughan told us. He calmed only when we reached Glencoe, where the long-eared smells were overpowered by a butterflied sheep roasting over hot embers, looked after by Amisfield’s Chef de Partie, the Korean Ivan Bae, soon joined by Vaughan. The two of them wrestled with the beast to find the best angle for finishing the roasting, changing its position several times, while the rest of us had to make do with champagne and wine.
Glencoe Lodge, constructed in the place of an old lodge. It is a modest but comfortably furnished single-storey house with a porch, decorated with hunting trophies and pictures of game.
After our break and a short lesson in safety, we went hunting for pheasants, meaning we followed Vaughan, appropriately dressed in his hunting gear, and watched the action.
“I do a lot of hunting, but not as much as I would like to. I think sacrificing something from the wild, for eating at home, makes sense. Of course, death is not something you should take lightly, but being able to create something for my wife and my son at home is much better than cooking something that was cage-farmed and had a poor life. And there is another thing. I think a lot of things I see when I’m hunting, things I find beauty in, are things that are impossible for a guest to see. I try to make that possible by creating that moment or a beautiful detail for the guest to eat. The fact that I am a hunter influences what I do quite a bit. I mean, I love hunting birds, and you’ll always find little details of birds on my menu which attract my eye, you know, whether it’s the claws of a duck, the beak of a duck, or, you know, making a pheasant Pithivier, like a bird flying out of it. Those are my favourite things to do, and it all comes from hunting. Now, to be honest, if I didn’t have my dog, I would have never done any of those dishes,” Vaughan explains emotively.
When it turned out that there were no pheasants in the area around the Lodge, we retreated to a lunch of sweet buns with delicious roasted sheep meat generously bathed in melted sheep butter. Mid-lunch, Vaughan disappeared with Duke in the direction we had arrived from, saying he would try his luck at one quiet spot. After half an hour or so, we heard two shots, and then another one. When he returned to the Lodge, two pheasants were hanging from his hunter’s belt, the third one getting away, he said. The prey would, as we would see, reappear three days later.
After a late afternoon rest at our house, the day ended in the nearby village of Arrowtown We had a very tasty burger and beer dinner at Slow Cuts restaurant.
At the End of the World: No Bluffing in Bluff
One can easily spend hours enjoying brunch on a sunny day at Jack’s Point, a luxury estate located 3.5 miles south of Queenstown, at the foot of The Remarkables and close to the edge of Lake Wakatipu. Famous for its Bloody Marys, Jack’s restaurant focuses on seasonal, local produce and is perfect for enjoying a coffee with Eggs Benedict, Salmon on 4 Grain, Breakfast Muffin, Kiwi Mushrooms, or, if preferred, Vegan Granola.
This was our pit stop before a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Bluff, the oldest European settlement in New Zealand. For a gourmand, it is important to mention that the region is home to the famous Bluff oysters – reputed to be the best in the world.
Bluff is the southernmost town on mainland New Zealand, and is colloquially used to refer to the southern extremity of the country.
As you must not arrive hungry at the last point before the South Pole, Vaughan took us for lunch at a local restaurant, Hayz. There, we indulged in delicacies such as the aforementioned fresh Bluff oysters, grilled lobster, mutton bird pâté (made from its liver and heart), local fresh blue cod fish & chips, langoustines, paua (local abalone), creamed abalone wontons, salmon, whitebait fritters, clams, and mussels – a seafood bounty that Haylee-Chanel Simeon, chef and owner of Hayz, calls “the taste of the South.” By the way, Haylee was recently named in Cuisine magazine’s 2024 list of the 50 most influential and inspiring women in New Zealand’s food and drink industry.
Wild paua (abalone) was once easily accessible to every New Zealander, featuring in dishes ranging from simple paua fritters to artisanal creations by some of the world’s top chefs. Now, however, they depend on the Faveaux Paua Aquaculture Farm, where you can learn how on-land aquaculture is putting paua back on the menu.
During our visit, just a short drive back from Stirling Point, we learned how the farm strives to create sustainable methods to meet the growing demand. Using the latest science and technology, they can grow ocean food on land in large volumes without affecting the natural population. Ocean Beach farmed abalone is raised in tanks on land in the clear waters of the Foveaux Strait. This process allows abalone to grow twice as fast as in the wild, thanks to a superior, entirely organic feed mixture (for comparison, Chinese farms have shortened the growth time to a quarter of the usual, but by using steroids and other chemicals). At Faveaux Paua, it takes five years for an abalone to grow from a tiny, shirt-button size to the size of an average palm. Thus, the high price of this organic product is easily understandable.
The next day, at our dinner at the Amisfield restaurant, we were able to taste how Mabee uses the Faveaux Paua product in his charcuterie programme – a paua salami.
“It was an idea my friend and I had for some time, and it happened by accident. In New Zealand, we make this thing called cream of paua. You basically mince some of the abalone and chop the rest into chunks, then sauté it in a pan. Some people add bacon and butter, and if you’re a real gourmand, you add a bottle of white wine and braise it. Then, heaps of cream is added, which is reduced until it thickens and turns black-grey due to the colour of the abalone. You serve it on crispy bread with a few drops of lemon juice, cracked pepper, and maybe some chilli flakes. It’s one of the best things in the world. So, my friend and I had the idea to make cream of paua sausages in pig’s casing, and they were amazing. I hung a bunch of links and put them on the menu. We actually made an aerated espuma, something like cream of paua, which was quite dark, and then we put this perfectly fried abalone sausage in the middle and garnished it with crispy herbs and some other garden items. One of the chefs then hung one of the links behind the shelf and placed ham in front of it, leaving it there for six months. These sausages were meant to be served right away because of the cream, which would spoil. However, it dehydrated over time, and when I sliced it up and tasted it, it was rancid cream with amazing salami in the background. I thought, ‘We should try this again.’ So, we did. Instead of cream, we used milk powder in the recipe and made it like a normal salami, but it took years to perfect,” Vaughn explains.
We concluded our trip to the south of the South Island with a visit to the Bluff Gin distillery, situated next to the Faveaux Paua farm. Their slogan, “Australia’s Best Gin. Made in Bluff,” is very clear. Distilled 12,000 miles from London, Bluff Gin is nevertheless the maker’s expression of a classic London Dry Gin. The bottle, however, is anything but classic.
We enjoyed gin and tonics at both the Hayz restaurant and the distillery, with co-founders Chris Fraser, Dave Nash, and Blair Wolfgram, who not only aim to create a delicious, premium gin but also hope to reinvigorate the local area.
However, we didn’t leave Bluff empty-handed. Mabee made sure that boxes of lobster and fish on ice were safely tucked into the trunk. Upon returning to our house, he made us a wonderful sashimi dinner starring lobster, abalone, and two kinds of fish – ling and trumpeter. What a perfect end to an unforgettable day!
The Best Dining Experience in the World
The next day dawned as a sunny summer Saturday, the day of our dinner at the Amisfield restaurant. We had the morning to relax and continue enjoying the beauty of Queenstown. I visited a nearby Kiwi Park, which houses over 20 species of native wildlife that are either part of a managed conservation programme or brought there for rehabilitation, for a reason of seeing at least one live kiwi bird. It turned out that I had the chance to see three of these quirky birds (out of the 10 at the facility), albeit in their rather dark Kiwi House, as they are nocturnal creatures.
Kiwi are incredibly unique birds, only found in New Zealand. Reportedly, those who tried to cook one (of course, as a roadkill) found it rather tough, meaning that preparing a kiwi bird requires a very skilled chef.
Well steeped in the local natural beauty and fauna, I was ready to dive into the Amisfield experience. After all, Chef Mabee honours nature in every single dish he offers, looking, smelling, and tasting like local nature.
The dinner started with a glass of champagne, on the lawn at the back of the restaurant in the last rays of the sun, a time which the locals, with full right, call “the golden hour”. The whole welcome made me soak up in the local scenery from which everything I will soon taste comes.
Before we delve into the menu, it must be said that Vaughan Mabee looks at it as a great movie, usually a kind of action movie from start to finish. The timing is essential to keep the guests involved and excited throughout the entire experience. It seems he doesn’t like mellowness (“A menu needs to be like the climate here. It’s harsh and almost violent, so it’s just bold flavours of New Zealand from start to finish,” he would say later).
At first, to me, it looked like the exciting start of a vegan menu – Guisante Lágrima; Corn, Wild Fennel; Tawaka; The Otago Summer; Zucchini; Daikon, Wild Thyme. This was actually logical for a restaurant that focuses on the wild ingredients, but surprising for a one well known for its seafood and meat. Many were shaped as flowers, even the one, for a contrast, perched on a thorny bush as well as well a tiny bouquet of wildflowers. The bow to the season was especially persuasive with the restaurant’s own refreshing herbal Otago Summer Juice.
But the true surprise were the amazing tastes and balances Mabee manages to pull out off these pretty miniatures. You would expect that from the vegan and vegetarian restaurants such as humus x horetense in Brussels or Tian in Vienna, but in that segment of the menu, Amisfield defiantly stands shoulder to shoulder with them.
After that impressive overture, we were led into the dark, candle-lit cellar to sample Vaughan’s wild game charcuterie – Rakiraki; paua Saucisson; Boar Snout; Jamón and Flying Salami, some playing with the faux parts of the animal, some combining seafood with boar fat, and some unusually prepared. Explaining the origins of his fascination with charcuterie, Mabee served us a dish called Duck Head, a masterful combination of textures and flavours, a bite melting in the mouth and causing a whirlwind of tastes. His charcuterie speciality paua Saucisson, a masterful sausage based on New Zealand’s abalone with translucent fat and amazingly grand marine flavour was a favourite of mine, although the most interesting story came about a process of curing New Zealand wild boar “jamon” during its serving as one of the highlights of his charcuterie program.
Jamón was obviously inspired by Spain. When Vaughan kills a wild boar, he hangs it in his hanging room, right by his house. It’s always a ham of a wild boar, because it is a great representation of the land. The taste is a little gamey, but not overpowering and it is surprisingly delicate. But the preparation has to be rigorous and it is time consuming. A wild boar is very hairy, so first you have to get the hair off. A lot of people burn it off and then scrub it, which adds a little bit of a flavour into it. Instead, Mabee uses a hair clipper and shaves all the hair off the leg. After that he takes out the elbow on top of the knuckle of the leg followed by a lot of massaging from the bottom to the up on the biggest blood veins, to massage out all of the blood, the procedure which prevents rotting. And then from that stage, he has his new recipe where he soaks it in Pinot Noir for one week. Pinot Noir contains a minimal amount of salt, because the process doesn’t work if it has no salt in it. And then, if the leg is about 15 kilos, it gets turned every day, covered in the ocean salt for 15 days. In the end, it’s hung for about a year and a half in the cellar, some even two and a half years if they are bigger.
When we returned to the dining room, the menu journeyed into the ocean – Koura; Greenbone; Baby paua; Eel on Vogels; New Zealand King Crab; paua and Its Liver; Greenbone and Whitebait. Koura (Maori name for a lobster) was a straightforward beauty of appearance and sweetness of taste, while the King Crab was presented in all its wholesome glory and served in a knowingly balanced dish pointing out the sweetness of the crab’s leg meat to compare with the previous one of a lobster. Greenbone with a shoal of Whitebait and Beurre blanc was an example of the real rich and buttery taste and, on the other hand, Paua and Its Liver (“The Golden Hedgehog”) was the beautiful play of textures and flavors of abalone.
After that, the menu turned to wild game – Wicked Wing; Mallard Palamate; Hare; Wapiti in Velvet; Sweetbread, Tawaka Mushrooms; A Goat’s Tale; The Whole Beast and Deer Cheese.
While Wicked Wing was a spectacle of the presentation, the skill in which Amisfield exceeds, my favourite was Wapiti in Velvet (wapiti is an American Indian expression for elk, which is also used in New Zealand) where the elk meat is dry aged for 90 days and then mixed with pastrami of the animal’s heart and some of the elk liver. To eat it, the guest has to scoop the meat from the elk horns, put it in the French sorrel leaf (plant in the buckwheat family), eat it like a taco – and experience an explosion of a beautifully pungent, but elegant taste.
Another stand out dish was Sweetbreads with New Zealand’s native tawaka mushrooms, of which I enjoyed the deepness of the taste. After a Goat’s Tale, the meat section of the menu finished with a bang – The Whole Beast.
The variety of desserts ( not much sugar involved)arrived at the right moment. Of course, the star of this section was the already well-known Wild Putangitangi Duck (chocolate and hazelnut beak, duck liver ice-cream) presented by the pastry chef of the Amisfield restaurant in Queenstown (New Zealand). However, Deer cheese with wild honey from Central Otago, made with fudge and peanut butter, Sheeps Horn (actually, sheep milk ice cream) and Native chocolate sweet bite were not just plain afterthoughts, as too many restaurants do nowadays. It all ended in a dark space made to resemble a forest at night with coffee, tea, and some sweet bites of a (not-challenging) “snail” ice cream made from kawakawa (a medicinal plant endemic to the country). Altogether, a myriad of ingredients, tastes, textures of New Zealand, with many surprises directed by Mabee.
“There’s so many amazing things to show in New Zealand, so many little cool things that no one from around the world has ever seen before, things that you need to showcase in many different ways and many different little impressions on the menu. Now you have 30-something dishes within the tasting menu. It goes down to fewer courses, it goes up to more again, depending on product. Right now, we have many different vegetables around us that we grow, as you’ve seen the other day. So, at the start of the menu, there’s a big focus on that, different herbs and vegetables… But then, when the winter hits, that goes away, the menu shortens, and it focuses more on the ocean. And winter is when we use a lot of kinds of lacto-fermented plums and different pickles and pickled ingredients, pickled blossoms, and the vinegars,” Mabee will tell me later.
Amisfield offers two dinner menus: the standard one and the Chef’s menu (400 and 700 NZD), the latter being the most sought after and served only to 12 people a day, as it is more elaborate, with guests dining in different parts of the restaurant. The other 20 guests usually enjoy the Amisfield menu, which takes around three hours. The entire Amisfield menu is contained within the Chef’s one, which lasts about four hours. The Chef’s menu is also more provocative for most people, like his signature duck foot with the edible claws that he makes out of black truffle. That’s a very Vaughan dish.
“I even mess with that too, so the end of it’s a little bit chewy. Of course, I could make it so it just evaporates in your mouth, like perfect pork crackling, like chicharrones. I could do that, but I want the guests to eat the front of it and it’s really texturally amazing, almost like a Dorito chip. But then at the end, I leave this little bit of cartilage on it, because I want them to chew, to feel like they’re eating the foot and it’s actually really texturally annoying. But we’ve surgically removed everything out of it and put it back together so it looks real again. And I even cook the claws a little bit too much, so they’re quite brittle, a bit hard to chew. So, that’s like that little provocation that I like in my dishes. I’m joking with the guest in the background, in my own little way, laughing a little bit because I want to take them on that journey,” smiles Vaughan.
And what a journey it is! It places Amisfield in that rarified space of several of the world’s top restaurants, which offer the best dining experiences. It is a long-lasting experience, because the whole of the next day and even now, weeks later, I still travel through the intricate world of Mabee’s dishes, with joy and still wondering about its many nuances.
The next day, Vaughan took us to Winton in Ayrburn, New Zealand’s newest food and wine destination, located just outside Queenstown, where we had an unpretentious lunch of pizza and pasta.
That evening, we had the honour of visiting Vaughan and his family at their home for a dinner of whitebait butter toast, a beautiful pheasant Pithivier made with the birds from our hunting trip (prepared by Peng), followed by the most delicious and most appropriate dessert for the place we were at – Kiwi Pavlova. The evening at their romantic log cabin, high up on the Ben Lomond Alpine Road, was the perfect ending to our week spent with Chef Vaughan Mabee.
Before we said goodbye, I have asked Vaughan about the future of Amisfield. He replied straight away:
“I don’t think about it at all. I just go with the flow… The future of Amisfield I think about is the immediate one. I mean, we’re building a new kitchen. I’ve been working in a little, tiny kitchen which has been there for over 20 years. And it doesn’t have enough room for our team and it’s annoying. But overall, I think the future of Amisfield is that we are going to get more refined. I love what we do right now, but I always want to make it way better. And the next step is a new kitchen. It’s going to be beautiful. There will also be options to eat in the middle of it as well. Chef’s tables. We are going have better equipment, which will help us refine our practise and get even better. That’s the current future of Amisfield. What happens after that, I don’t know. As long as I’m happy and keep the interest and the love of what we do in this crazy industry, we will just keep pushing until we rise up into one of those places which will get us on everyone’s bucket list. And then when we’re there, I’ll be happy. Where do I see yourself in 15, 20 years? Retired, with beautiful children. On a farm, growing my own truffles, hunting constantly, spending the time with my beautiful wife. Here in New Zealand. I don’t think I’ll be in Queensland, I’ll be in the far north, where my heart is. Right across the street from my brother’s farm. That’s the dream. But I’ll always have a place down here. Because I love Queensland as well”.
In the meantime, Amisfield will stay one of the best dining experiences in the world, certainly for a long time. It is currently one of the most original restaurants in the world and can be classified in the same group as unique phenomena such as Koks in the Faroe Islands, Chilean Boragó, or Alchemist in Copenhagen. However, it is not really like any of these restaurants. The comparison is only made because Amisfield is truly unique. Vaughan Mabee’s individuality, his life experience, and his connection to New Zealand’s nature, make him a fascinating chef who succeeds in delving into the deepest parts of our hearts and souls, cultivating an unprecedented experience. Only great chefs can do that.
Amisfield Restaurant
10 Arrowtown-Lake Hayes Road, Frankton, Queenstown 9371, New Zealand
https://amisfield.co.nz/
What an incredible experience, wow! So jealous!
Going to Hiakai, Sid, Clooney, and Ahi this fall on a major NZ trip and DEFINITELY will try to add Amisfeld to my itinerary. I am so excited, the environment and the cooking both look stunning.