Hiakai: Aotearoa's unique foods as fine dining

Monique Fiso serves up gourmet menus featuring ingredients like muttonbird and kawakawa, has rubbed shoulders with chefs like Gordon Ramsay, and her Wellington restaurant has even been recognised in Time magazine.

Fiso talked with Anna Thomas about being at the leading edge of a new wave of Aotearoa cuisine that values and showcases our native offerings, and what's still missing in the food scene here.

After initially training in New Zealand, Fiso worked in New York for seven years, including with Michelin-earning chefs Missy Robbins, Brad Farmerie, Matt Lambert and celebrity Gordon Ramsay.

Returning to Wellington, she started her Māori-Samoan inspired restaurant restaurant Hiakai, with a focus on bringing native ingredients back into the kitchen.

It opened in 2016 after initially starting as a pop up. And in 2019, Hiakai was named as one of the world's 100 most important places by Time magazine.

Sittings are on Fridays and Saturdays and the team runs a set menu, with Fiso keeping the focus local but with all the scope of her international experience.

"At Hiakai ... we've curated a kai menu that tells a bit of a story, so each course represents ingredients, culture, some bits of our lives," she said.

"A lot of the ingredients that we like to showcase are things that don't often appear on restaurant menus, for example tītī bird - which has just come into season, kawakawa, horopito, a lot of kaimoana, and a lot of different techniques as well - so we do a lot of fermentation, and just bring it together to create a really unique experience for our guests."

Fiso forages to collect wild foods once or twice a week, which is both "good for the mental health" and inspiring: "You start thinking about the plating and the service coming up."

Her focus on Māori cuisine was supercharged by a trip to show a friend from overseas the South Island, which highlighted how difficult it was to find Māori and Pasifika cuisine in restaurants.

"It sort of started out as a question that came about on a road trip: 'How come I can see all these other cuisines represented when I drive from the top of the South Island to the bottom, but I can't see a lot of Māori cuisine or Pasifika?'

"It just got me thinking about where the representation was, and also what am I doing with my craft? How can what I do as a craft answer that question too?"

The restaurant has garnered rave reviews and both established chefs and young chefs have written to tell her they are inspired by what she was has done and it has prompted them to consider how to present Aotearoa's foods themselves.

In 2021, Fiso won the illustrated non-fiction section of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her book Hiakai: Modern Māori Cuisine.

And she is excited that in recent years there has been a blossoming of businesses and books with a focus on Māori cuisine.

"I think it's great ... and I hope to see in a few years more of that, because there is so much out there - and I think that there's so much room for more Māori restaurants, and definitely more Pasifika cuisine.

"It's an exciting time and it's so cool to see people not considering Māori and Pasifika cuisine as something that's just for home or not being 'good enough' to be in that top echelon of restaurants, but absolutely seeing it as something that is beautiful and that can be shared and we should be proud of."

New Zealand cooks and diners have also become much more knowledgeable and adventurous in the kitchen in the last ten years, she says.

"That pushes us to be more innovative, because you have to come with an element of surprise, or you have to keep learning new techniques or new ways of doing things, so it keeps you on your toes. It keeps things evolving."

Access to ingredients is a problem holding people back from enjoying more native foods, she says. With access to the wide variety of delicious kaimoana one of the more frustrating things for her.

"It's a little bit troubling to me that as Kiwis we don't seem to have very good access to a lot of the kaimoana that comes from here.

"That's something I would like to see more of in the future. I work in the restaurant industry so I do have access to these things through our suppliers, but I do feel sad for the average person who wants to experience pāua, and they can't find it anywhere."

She says it's likely people would quickly embrace some of the more precious tastes of Aotearoa if they were exposed to them.

One of the treats on her menu is tītī muttonbird when it's in season, which she says is a special taste people love.

"If you're lucky enough for some crazy reason you've got the hookups and you have some freshies [fresh unsalted tītī, just put it in the oven as if you were roasting a duck or a small chicken and just eat it, and just experience it in it's natural state, because it's truly wonderful."

Running a set menu allows her to respond to what she collects foraging and to present a menu that is "hyperseasonal".

"It's a nice way to dine and it's a nice way to cook as well. It allows us to really refine what we're wanting to serve. It's highly curated, and we can switch things out as we need to when things change throughout the seasons.

"It also means that we work more sustainably, we know exactly how many guests are coming in, we know what their dietary requirements may be, and we know how much ingredients we need to order or prepare. So that by the time we finish for the week we're not left with a whole bunch of items as you would be if you were more of an a la carte restaurant where people are ordering as they choose."

Fiso said she was just scratching the surface of possibilities when it came to Aotearoa's foods.

"I feel like I'm on a journey and there's still so much to learn - I feel like we're only just touching the tip of the iceberg in terms with what we're creating.

"I'm enjoying learning more and more and more."