KEY POINTS:
"It's a bit like living the dream really," Steven Logan said.
He was talking about the latest venture he and business partner Al Brown undertook of travelling the length of the country filming a TV series, Hunger for the Wild, about hunting, gathering and cooking in the wild.
"We have just seen so much of the country and seen so many of the people and we're doing what we like to do, which is cook and eat and laugh and have conversations," Logan said.
After the series aired the friends wrote a book, with the same name, based on their trip.
During their tour the chefs, who spend much of their time in a pristine kitchen in their central Wellington restaurant Logan Brown, got dirty hunting pigs, were nearly swept into the sea catching crayfish and got slimy coaxing eels out of shallow drains.
Everything they caught they cooked, and they share their recipes in the book - making sure the ingredients they used were easy enough to find at the local supermarket.
Brown said it was important the food they cooked on the show was easy for people to get on their way to the bach.
"It doesn't have to be fancy French malden salt or mandarin flavoured oil from Italy."
The pair also wanted it to be a reference book that could be flicked through. "Something you can pick up, read it, put it down, spill coffee on it, draw on it, and that's what it's all about - a reference of New Zealand," Brown said.
Each area the two visited they spent the time gathering not just food but information about the place.
"It's something you put in the back of the car. You go where we went, meet the people we met, experience the history and culture of the place and have some food at the end of it," Logan said.
And nothing beats fresh food straight from the wild to the plate, they both said. People were getting too complacent with their food and settling for frozen fish fingers from the supermarket rather than going out with the rod and catching a fresh fish for themselves, Logan said.
"The early people in New Zealand, the Maori and the early settlers they lived off the land. They would have starved if they didn't catch birds or fish and cooked them up and eaten them.
"I think what's happened over the last two or three generations is people are moving into the city and they're losing contact with their rellies who lived on the land and they're missing out on a fantastic thing - a precious thing.
"We could catch a kawahai off the Overseas Wharf here in 10 minutes and smoke it or boil it or whatever you want and it's beautiful."
There was nothing like food being "seasoned by fresh air and good company", he said.
Brown added that anyone who hunted or gathered enjoyed the buzz of not knowing if they were going to get some. "But that's why you keep going and then you come onto the mother lode, or you get a great area of pipis and then you sit down and open a bottle of wine and cook them on an open fire and sit down and eat pipis with your kids."
However, the townies found that fending for themselves could sometimes be a dangerous venture.
Logan said crayfishing near Punakaiki on the South Island's west coast was a treacherous business.
It involved standing on the ledge of an enormous rock, 15 metres above a raging sea, lowering a cage with bait into the sea and hoping a crayfish would crawl into it.
"It was very slippery and very scary. There were birds flying everywhere and there was big winds and big seas and me throwing a rope over - I got the feeling of vertigo."
If you slipped, there was no coastguard waiting below with a dinghy, Brown said.
"We thought, 'Well bugger it, we have to do the show and we need some crayfish", so we crossed our fingers."
Now, Logan and Brown are safely back on dry land at the restaurant they started up 11 years ago.
They met in 1987 - the year Logan lost a $100 bet to Brown over the result of the Rugby World Cup. They worked together for a while and then went their separate ways for a few years before joining again to open the highly successful Logan Brown restaurant.
Logan attributed its success to its being owner-operated.
"We still come to work every day, even if we're not working the operational side of things, so that's the advantage over a lot of other places. They set up restaurants but they don't run them."
Brown said there were a lot of people who liked the idea of setting up a restaurant or cafe but they found out too late what hard work it was.
"We are a fine dining restaurant, but we're a couple of Kiwi blokes and we like doing things well," Brown said.
* DID YOU KNOW?
Trivia from Hunger for the Wild includes:
Most paua are haemophiliacs.
It is illegal to shoot female pheasants.
Crabs have cannibalistic tendencies.
- NZPA
