First Look: Chef Lucas Parkinson Opens New Restaurant Aryeh In The Former Piha Cafe

New Piha restaurant Aryeh will serve an all-New Zealand food and drinks menu, championing the best local and organic produce in a stunning natural setting.

“It’s been dizzyingly fast,” says chef and hospitality consultant Lucas Parkinson of the eight whirlwind weeks since finding the site for his new restaurant, Aryeh, to its opening on December 2.

Aryeh, an 86-seater restaurant with indoor and outdoor dining, will serve an elevated sustainable menu of local and organic produce that Lucas describes as “simple, refined and filling”. The restaurant on Piha’s Seaview Road has views of the beach and Lion Rock and is surrounded by mature native bush.

The outdoor Sun Deck is sure to be a major drawcard in summer, serving a more casual menu of fish and chips, Coromandel mussels and organic chicken wings, where you’re welcome to rock up in your jandals and boardies.

Lucas, who relocated to Piha with his family earlier this year, says it was a bit of serendipity that led to the opening of Aryeh, which is an ancient Aramaic word for lion, pronounced “Ari-aye”.

In September, he returned home from a stint as a cameo chef de cuisine at friend Nick Honeyman’s restaurant Le Petit Leon (The Little Lion) in the south of France. Nick, who is also chef/owner of Paris Butter, operates a seasonal model at Le Petit Leon, splitting his time between Auckland and France, which has been hugely inspiring for Lucas, as well as a reminder of the relentless pace of a busy kitchen after a couple of years working on his consultancy business.

“It’s busy,” says Lucas of Le Petit Leon. “Nick opens the bookings at the start of the season and it books out for the whole season. Every day you turn up for lunch and dinner, it’s going to be fully booked. The food is excellent. Nick’s one of these chefs where if you look at his food year by year, you can’t tell it’s the same chef and that’s what I really like. He’s very innovative and he’s very open-minded when it comes to cuisine and we get along really well.”

Despite this, Lucas returned home a month early, feeling the pull of home and missing his young daughter.

Inspired by Le Petit Leon’s seasonal model, he got in touch with the cafe’s owners to see if they’d be interested in a similar way of working.

“In France, how they run their seasonal towns is that your rent is tied to your revenue and you’re only obliged to open for the busy season, for summer,” explains Lucas. “The more revenue, the higher the rent is.” And vice versa with low revenue, meaning a busy week at the restaurant benefits both parties.

The owners, who had recently listed the cafe for sale on Trade Me, went for it. “They said yes, send us a business plan,” says Lucas. “I viewed it as a good opportunity to get in there and try something new that hasn’t really been done in this country before.”

Aryeh will welcome diners until the end of April, when it will close for winter and turn the space over for events and collaborations including pop-ups by visiting chefs, before reopening in December 2024.

Lucas has experience running a restaurant in a seasonal town, having opened his debut award-winning restaurant Ode in Wānaka in 2017. It garnered acclaim for its sustainable ethos and earned one hat in Cuisine’s Good Food Awards in 2019. Lucas has talked openly about the pressures of running a restaurant, which saw him rebuild Ode in 2018 after a devastating fire and which culminated in the restaurant’s closure after stressors from the pandemic in 2021. In the years following, Lucas has run a successful consulting business, Ode Hospitality, helping restaurants adapt to new economic circumstances, as well as collaborating with chefs and working on charitable causes, including work for Garden to Table.

At Aryeh, he plans to do things a bit differently. Instead of spending all his time in the kitchen, Lucas will work alongside two talented young head chefs, enabling him to manage other aspects of the restaurant when required.

“I want to be more of an umbrella over all of it; to see everything equally. I’ll be [in the kitchen] a lot, but if I have to step away to do something else, then the place can run without me.” Additionally, staff will work fewer but longer days, meaning four nights off each week and half the number of journeys for commuting staff members.

“I firmly believe we have some of the best produce across food and drink in the whole world,” says Lucas.

The menu will change often, but diners can expect to find entrees like sashimi with ponzu granita, finger lime, sunflower and kep emulsion, and slow-cooked wild goat shoulder with young zucchini, pickled zucchini and curry mayo. Mains are generous servings of protein like organic Mapri beef, or confit Cambridge duck leg, while on the side are crunchy beef-fat-fried jersey bennes with Piha oyster mushroom, black garlic mayo and foraged kawakawa salt.

Diners can order off the a la carte menu, or opt for three- or five-course set menus priced at $89 and $144 per person.

Wednesdays will be test kitchen nights, with a five-course menu for $89, when guests will be given a notepad and pen to leave feedback on chefs’ dishes. Lucas did something similar at Ode and says reading the feedback after a busy service over a glass of wine “was such a good team bonding experience and a learning experience and invaluable to what we do. It gave that opportunity for us to reflect on ourselves as creators and as contributors to the industry, and how we keep people happy”.

For the chefs, it’s a chance to be creative. “Too often in this industry, you’re training and you’ve got this energy and this buzz, and nowhere to let it out because you’re always painting someone else’s picture.” The best dishes and successful small tweaks to current dishes will end up on the menu, says Lucas.

How does he want people to feel dining at Aryeh? “I want people to feel relaxed. I want them to feel invited and I want them to have a sense of calm while they’re dining.

“First and foremost, I want the community to be excited and happy that this place is in their neighbourhood and it’s something we can all enjoy together.”

While Lucas might be feeling the pressure of opening a new restaurant, he’s focused and excited for a great summer season. “I have a very calm and still feeling about this. I’ve settled into the mindset that this [cheffing as a career] is my purpose in life, outside of being a father.”

Aryeh, 20 Seaview Rd, Piha. Open for dinner, 5-9pm, Wednesday to Monday (closed Tuesday) and lunch, 12-2pm, Thursday to Monday.