Is Pasture New Zealand's most unique restaurant?

Bread that takes three days to make, food cooked over an open fire, Pasture is a dining experience unlike any other in New Zealand. And that's exactly what co-owners Ed and Laura Verner intended to create in their 20 seat restaurant in Auckland's Parnell.

Their six course set menu is served by the chefs who prepare it and, as Laura explains, it's a carefully curated food journey that will take about three hours to work your way through.

For Ed and Laura, the award-winning Pasture is a labour of love that defies traditions.

"We're creating our own category of dining," says Laura. The pair have identified their favourites part of sitting down to a restaurant meal and fused set menus and fine dining techniques with their own finesse in a relaxed, fun style. "It's its own special thing."

When Herald Focus reporter Tristram Clayton pays a visit, Ed, who won Cuisine magazine's Chef Of The Year, is busy at work surrounded by numerous cuts of pork.

He explains he's prepping the menu's new main course: "We're trying to be creative in presenting them in some awesome, interesting, delicious ways.

"Right now we're serving English crumpet cooked over the fire in the pig fat that we render from the pig. Then we cover it in a pig liver parfait and a cured pork cheek and that's followed by a second course of a piece of the pig, that might be the loin, it might be the neck. And on the side we just serve some slices of the ham from the leg."

He turns to the wood fire and points to a hanging cluster of blackened triangular lumps.

"You can see here we've taken the pig heads ... and hang [them] up there each night for a couple of days to smoke and dry. We'll probably make a broth out of it."

If that all sounds a bit complicated, a serving of Pasture's sourdough is the antithesis to such a concoction.

"Bread is such an important thing to us," says Laura. "It's very simple - only three ingredient's. But to produce a wonderful sourdough is actually days of a dedicated process ... for lots of people that's one of the highlights of the menu."

Served as its own course, diners have taken to calling into the restaurant just to buy a loaf.

As much as the open fire is an integral part of what happens at Pasture, so too is the focus on other traditional cooking techniques such as preserving and fermenting.

"You can trace [those techniques] back through thousands of years. And it's the same with fire. It's how we always used to cook. I think for Ed it's been a very creative process."
says Laura.

"For us, this is about challenging everything we thought we knew about food."

*Pasture was Metro Peugeot Restaurant of the Year Awards best new restaurant, Cuisine magazine's Best Drinks List and Ed won Cuisine magazine's Chef Of The Year.

Find out more and book in at Pasture here.