The country’s top chef had the humblest of starts. Paris Butter’s Zennon Wijlens talks to Kim Knight about his transformation from high school menace to restaurant owner and mentor.
Recently, the tables at Paris Butter increased in size. The owners went to Bunnings, bought some ply and fixed it to
Fine dining. It’s just smoke and mirrors, right?
“It really is,” says Zennon Wijlens.
The head chef and co-owner of this Herne Bay, Auckland fine dining restaurant is literally not joking. Monday afternoon, and the room smells like a wood fire because the kitchen is smoking duck hearts. Later, they’ll be shaved over a disc of madeira jelly that will be balanced on an insanely rich duck liver parfait that has been piped on to a small dashi vinegar meringue.
The first bite of the first course of an eight-course “evolution” menu is a savoury rocket. It propels the diner to a place where a $210 per person bill (plus $150 for the drinks match) seems entirely reasonable. A $25 seasonal perigord truffle supplement? Bring it on.
Zennon grates the Riwaka-grown fungi over dry-aged duck breast, confit celeriac, yeast and sherry vinegar and grins: “Say when.”
2003. A Christchurch rapper Scribe has the country’s top-selling single, Judith Tabron is Auckland hospitality’s outstanding industry person of the year and Zennon Wijlens is a 16-year-old with School Certificate maths, English, drama and cooking. He walks out of Green Bay High School and into a job washing dishes at Titirangi’s Barossa cafe. The first time he tasted truffle, he hated it.
2024. Scribe will, reportedly, release his final album. Judith Tabron has ended a six-year break from hospitality and opened a brand new restaurant. Wijlens is 37, New Zealand’s Chef of the Year. In the Spanish countryside, with his fiance Catherine George and a bunch of world-class peers, he is carefully unearthing a fresh truffle, sniffed out by Spain’s only truffle-hunting pig. “A true ****ing wow moment,” he posts to Instagram.
Those moments have been coming thick and fast for Zennon.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.Last month, he was in Bali, cooking with business partner Nick Honeyman. In March, he was a guest chef at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. And last year, Paris Butter became one of just six “three hat” restaurants in the country (alongside Amisfield, Cocoro, Logan Brown, Pacifica and Sid at The French Cafe), as well as placing in Viva’s Top 50 Auckland Restaurants.
Meanwhile, 19,000km away, an accolade by association. Nick Honeyman, who opened Paris Butter as a classic French bistro in 2016, has his first Michelin star for Le Petit Léon - the restaurant he runs in France with wife Sina, while Zennon and Catherine (a marketing manager at Urgent Couriers) take care of business on Jervois Rd.
Nick: “When Zennon first came to me, he said that I would be his last restaurant before he did his own thing. He was excited about my plan to follow my true passion of fine dining and to flip the restaurant from bistronomy to gastronomy, which we pretty much did overnight.”
Three years in, and “things really started to click”. The chefs’ palates had aligned, and Zennon had some of his own ideas and visions for the Paris Butter menu. “The ball was in my court,” says Nick - give Zennon more freedom or let him do his own thing.
“It is only a chef’s ego that holds them back and it was the only thing I had to overcome. It was the best decision I ever made . . . My pressure was halved, my creativity was doubled and at what price? Only having to share the reins with him.”
It’s a year since Zennon and Catherine bought into Paris Butter. It cost “a little bit . . . it was a considerable amount, but it was nowhere near as much as we would have had to put into owning our own restaurant”.
The two chef owners video chat regularly. In Bali, they shopped together for the splashy abstract art that has radically replaced the classic giant fennel et al that hung in the restaurant for years. Zach Duxfield has been promoted to head chef to give Zennon more time out of the kitchen, “but I’m still there 85% of the time. Still running food, doing dishes, mopping the floor!”
Ask Zennon why he wanted to become a chef and the answer is more prosaic than you’d expect from the man who went from being a self-described high school “menace” to devising a bread course that must be delivered, tableside, with the assistance of a high-pressure syphon.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.“My mum’s got six brothers and sisters and, if I’m being honest, at the time I was leaving school, my
Aunty Brenda, who was a chef, had the biggest house and drove the fanciest car . . .
At Barossa, his mentors saw potential. They helped him into a job at Auckland’s rice, which he followed with a stint at Euro. He cheffed at Tetsuya, Etch by Becasse, Tomislav, Sean’s Panorama and Momofuku in Sydney, Spice Temple in Melbourne and spent time in Europe. Finally, in 2016, a return to New Zealand.
If he could be anything else?
“I didn’t really have a back-up option. I just went into the kitchen and I never had a Plan B. But I think being a cop would be really interesting. One of the reasons I love this industry is that not any day is the same. I think that would very much translate into law enforcement . . . or maybe it’s just because I’ve been watching heaps of true-crime documentaries lately?!”
He exercises daily, which he credits to Nick’s influence.
“I’d hit, like, 140 kilos. And when you’re working side by side with someone like Nick, who is a fitness freak . . . ”
Every Wednesday morning, Nick would take the Paris Butter team to CrossFit. Zennon says he found himself “really enjoying it” and now does his own thing at BFT Ponsonby, combining cardio, strength work and calisthenics with a personal nutrition plan. Restaurant work means long hours, late nights and irregular mealtimes. It’s not conducive to healthy living, but ask Zennon what he ate today, and he’ll tell you to the gram.
“For breakfast, 50g of oats and 50g of berries and a protein shake. Every staff meal, I’ve just got my steak or my chicken, my pasta or my rice and my veges. You might think because I’m a chef, I’d jazz it up. But if my nutritionist tells me ‘no oil in that meal’, then I don’t cook with oil.”
It’s made him enjoy restaurant food more, he says.
“And I’m not going to not confit a piece of fish in butter because it’s not as healthy. You’re coming here for a treat, you’re coming here for an experience. I’m not going to give you quinoa because that’s what my nutritionist told me to eat.”
Paris Butter “has to be delicious”, says Zennon. And his toughest critic is the woman he plans to marry (“We were going to do it this year, and then we bought into the restaurant . . .”).
Five years ago, the chef swiped right on a prospective Tinder date who had recently dined at The Fat Duck. The gastrobar in Te Anau? Or Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant in the UK? Catherine George duly sent back a photo from the latter.
“And I was like, okay, cool - she knows what she’s talking about.”
Catherine, it turned out, was heading overseas with investment savings and a plan to eat at as many of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants as possible.
“We kind of hung out and fell in love and she went to Europe and I sold everything I had and bought an engagement ring. We were actually at Mirazur, which at the time was number three in the world, and I proposed to her.”
Zennon says his fiancee’s palate is “brutal”. Read her travel blog and believe it. In the restaurant on a hill overlooking Menton, she has just found an engagement ring in her second dessert (saffron, almond foam, orange sorbet). Lunch has included oysters with textures of pear and champagne pearls and pork belly with pine fir. She writes: “You can’t fault a thing . . . however it didn’t pop. Well, except my now fiance popping the question”.
Ultimately, the pair visited 34 of 2018′s Top 50 restaurants. Standouts included Eleven Madison Park (New York) for service, and Central (Lima) for the food. Zennon says, “it’s not my ambition” to make such a list.
“Accolades are always cool, more so for the team and the image of the restaurant, but some of those lists are very clubby. You’re only going to get in if you know certain people or spend certain amounts of money. That’s not what we’re about.”
And the Michelin-star system?
From France, Nice notes Australia is currently debating the introduction of a Michelin Guide. “Our guides in New Zealand are top notch [but] . . . the Michelin star is world-renowned. All chefs and restaurants in New Zealand deserve to experience the power of the guide. It would be like telling our Commonwealth Games athletes that they can’t compete in the Olympics even if they were good enough.”
Zennon: “It would give people something to compare us to on a world stage . . . We’re so big on promoting tourism here, but there’s more than the Shotover Jet, AJ Hackett Bungy and Lord of The Rings. We’ve got arguably some of the best produce in the whole world. We’ve got some very, very, very talented chefs doing very, very cool stuff.”
The 42nd course in Paris Butter’s eight-course tasting menu is a fuzzy green circle, dwarfed by a large cream plate. This “lasagne” was born from a staff meal discussion. Ingredients include charcoal pasta, chive powder, lion’s mane mushroom and pancetta. It looks like a lily pad or a patch of astroturf; it tastes, simply, delicious.
“With social media, you’re seeing all this amazing stuff online,” says Zennon. “Expectations from guests have really risen and as a chef and restaurateur, you’ve got to match that . . . You read, ‘oh, fine dining’s dead’. But people still like to go out. People still like to have a celebration and feel special.”
Dinner and a wine pairing at the likes of Queenstown’s Amisfield will set you back $690 a head; Paris Butter’s cheapest food and drink combo is $245.
“Upfront, that’s a lot of money. Agree. You’re here for a good two to three hours, the table is yours for the night . . . You’re paying for an experience. Not the share plates, not the same crudo that every other place is doing . . . ”
Zennon abhors trends, saying they lead to “cookie cutter” restaurants (exhibit A, Karangahape Rd “every second shop is a wine bar”). He also recalls coming home, visiting the Viaduct and thinking “are people STILL doing eye fillet?” but, also: “Everything is trends, everything comes and goes in waves. Natural wine was big for a bit, you know? Part of being ‘fine dining’ is staying true to what you believe in and not following trends. Through that whole natural wine movement, we didn’t have any on the menu, because it’s not us”.
At the Cuisine Good Food Awards, when Zennon won chef of the year, he was praised for inspiring and encouraging other chefs. Initiatives like the “young industry” nights with heavy discounts for hospitality workers whose wages don’t stretch to scampi, collaboration dinners with top local and international restaurants, the deployment of staff around the country to assist restaurants hit by illness and shortages, and the “team projects” where staffers present ideas and works in progress, have all been noted.
“I think there’s way better cooks than me, but being the best leader - that was truly humbling. I guess, at a tough time for our industry, I took a different approach. We kept our foot on the gas. We didn’t slow down.”
Right now, two of his team are planning a collaborative menu with their counterparts from The Sugar Club and Apero.
“I believe in giving them the freedom to do that. That’s something Nick gave me straight away . . . I’d like to get to a point where I can nurture our younger guys even more, whether that’s getting involved in the schooling side of it, or pushing the apprenticeship programme or helping them be able to get into their own restaurants.
“To start a restaurant from scratch is so hard. Catherine and I did so many business plans and so many models - it’s hard and it’s such a big risk.”
Another recent “wow” moment for Zennon.
“I got invited back to Green Bay High School to speak to the students. Surreal. I never thought I’d be back there.”
The questions were predictable. How did he get into hospitality? Was it true he had to work every weekend?
“You either love it or hate it,” Zennon replied. “But if you love it . . . ”
The final course of that eight-course tasting menu was jammy hibiscus and rhubarb, frozen crumbs of cream cheese and rose and a layer of malt biscuit. It looked like breakfast cereal or a lolly mixture. Zennon called it a cheesecake. Customers have described it as “next-level Dippin’ Dots”. It tasted, simply, delicious.
Kim Knight is an award-winning lifestyle journalist with a Masters in Gastronomy.
