16 LISTENER JUNE 1 2019
through food. And we are spending more of
our income on eating out than ever before.
In 2014, we spent $4.3 billion in restaurants
and cafes. In the last calendar year, this had
risen to $5.6 billion, making it one of the
fastest-growing and most-competitive cat-
egories in our food sector.
Every time Fiso sends a dish out of her
kitchen, she aims to challenge herself and
her diners. “I say to my sous chef that if a
dish doesn’t scare us and we’re not nervous
about sending it out, then we haven’t done
our job.’’
Her green-lipped mussel ice cream is
served on a base of heirloom moemoe pota-
toes, which are prepared three ways: baked
in ashes, then chilled and diced; pureed
into a vichyssoise; and crisped. The dish is
finished with dehydrated mussel powder.
“It’s like everything you would normally
put with mussels; it’s like a chowder, but it’s
swapped around. And it’s cold.
“It was horrible at the start. I kept making
it and kept making it, then finally it was like,
‘Yeah, we’ve nailed it!’ I put it down on a
table and wonder what the reaction will be,’’
she says, recalling a customer who told her
as she ate it: “I’m so confused.”
THE MAKING OF A CHEF
Diners love the food, even if it is challeng-
ing. Hiakai includes a glossary of all the
ingredients on the back of the menu and
Fiso’s waiters know every dish intimately.
Although Hiakai offers fine-dining cui-
sine, Fiso’s version isn’t formal or stuffy – “I
grew up in Ascot Park, in Porirua” – and
she doesn’t mind if customers arrive in
Hawaiian shirts. “I don’t care what they’re
wearing. There’s nothing stuffy about me. I
spent my childhood running around Can-
nons Creek.’’
She developed her food repertoire in
Wellington and credits Martin Bosley with
opening her mind to the possibilities of
cooking professionally when she worked
in his eponymous restaurant. She then went
to New York, working for Kiwi chef Matt
Lambert at his Michelin-starred restaurant
The Musket Room. The 31-year-old says her
time in US kitchens taught her the value of
discipline, hard work ... and pain tolerance.
In 2011, she was working in a New York
restaurant when a fellow chef spilt a sizzling
caramel sauce over her left hand. She spent
two weeks in hospital and had a skin graft
using tissue taken from her right hip. Even
now, she struggles to feel sensations in the
hand. “When I walk with my nieces, they
don’t like holding my hand because I say,
“You’re touching my bum!’”PUSHING BOUNDARIES
Fiso’s face was seen on Netflix’s Final Table
series for eight episodes. She didn’t make
the finals, but the experience of cooking
alongside 23 global stars changed her life,
propelling her to international stardom.
In 2017, she was driving along Welling-
ton’s Tinakori Rd when she got a call from
Netflix. She thought she had forgotten to
pay her bill. With an expression of disbe-
lief, she tells the Listener she almost turned
down the life-changing opportunity to goto Hollywood and compete in the show.
Work offers have followed her appearance
and she has turned down many, including
her own television cooking show. However,
she has a cookbook in the works and she
is hosting a Matariki event in Wellington
in June, alongside fellow Final Table con-
testant, French-Colombian culinary artist
Charles Michel.
Fiso owes her success as a chef partly to
her refusal to do things by halves. She hired
her Hiakai team six months in advance of
opening, paying their wages as she trained
them. “It hurt my bank account, but not
to do that would have been fatal. It’s like a
sports team; you can’t expect everyone to
run on the field after not training together.”
New Zealand has a revolving door of chefs
enlivening our food scene, but also achiev-
ing acclaim overseas. As well as Lambert
gaining a Michelin star in New York, Wai-
roa-born chef Jessica Murphy was named
Ireland’s best chef in 2018 for her Kai res-
taurant and cafe in Galway. Waitara-bornEATING OUT IN NZ
1
“It was horrible at the
start. I kept making
it and kept making it,
then finally it was like,
‘Yeah, we’ve nailed it!’”