Jesse Mulligan adventures to Fiordland with a group of top NZ chefs to see how new collective WithWild is helping preserve the environment through the management — and delicious cooking — of wapiti venison.
You’ve heard, by now, that New Zealand has a pest problem.
It goes like this —
New Zealand’s predator-free movement is an attempt to get rid of these interlopers, to help restore our unique animals and ecosystems to something more like they might have looked like 1000 years ago (19th century “acclimatisation societies” are the obvious villain in our story but kiore rats that arrived with early Polynesian voyagers wrought their own damage).
Traditionally, to be on the side of native species is to be against almost anything introduced (there are noted exceptions: I’ve never met a local environmentalist who wants to exterminate honeybees), which makes New Zealand one of the few countries on earth where conservation is mostly about finding animals and killing them.
Things get tricky when the mammals we’re hunting are large, beautiful and provide food and sport for a significant section of the population, and wapiti deer fall into this category. A species unique in appearance, behaviour and (we will get to this) flavour, the wapiti have thrived since their arrival in Fiordland 100 years ago, and much of the local economy and identity are wrapped up in hunting, eating and, more recently, protecting them.
The Fiordland Wapiti Foundation (FWF) doesn’t want to exterminate this species, but nor are they anti-conservation. They have a nuanced view of the wapiti herd that defies easy categorisation but from my understanding boils down to: let’s deal with the nastiest predators first while keeping the wapiti population small and healthy (there’s also a contested but compelling theory that a managed wapiti herd plays a positive role in that it replaces the role of the browsing moa on local plant life).
“Healthy” means that a good number of animals are removed from the New Zealand bush each year but that hunters are deliberate in the sex and age of the animals they’re targeting — that creating balance within the wapiti’s own herd will have benefits for the local flora too.
I’ll leave the ethical context there before I get cancelled by Bird Twitter (in a just world there would be a social media channel exclusively for bird enthusiasts who got first dibs on the name “Twitter”) and move on to a crucial moment involving two of Auckland’s most respected and, it has to be noted, handsome chefs who saw, in the culling and management of the beautiful wapiti deer, an opportunity.
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Advertise with NZME.Cazador’s Dariush Lolaiy, the country’s most famous venison appreciator, and Kingi’s Tom Hishon, a Southland original and sustainability champion, both felt that ordinary New Zealanders should have an opportunity to eat this unique wapiti meat in a restaurant setting, and that animals despatched for the purposes of conservation should be honoured by providing protein for the world, rather than more food waste for landfill.
To help create a system where deer shot in some of the world’s least accessible terrain could somehow be retrieved, butchered, transported to the other end of the country and served in peak condition to grateful foodies, they enlisted the help of three other men working in the sustainable food space and together founded WithWild, an organisation that hosted me for a weekend in Fiordland where I saw some of the wapiti story with my own eyes.
With me on tour were a group of chefs representing some of New Zealand’s other great restaurants: Soul Bar, Amano, Sherwood, The Lodge Bar and Kapiti Coast’s 50/50. It was a rare treat for me as a food reviewer to spend some quality time with top-tier chefs, and though there was a moment I wondered whether the whole thing was a ruse to lure Viva’s restaurant critic to a remote location and despatch him like a wapiti deer, I survived the first day without incident and, at night, was a fly on the wall for some great kitchen stories. (“What is the worst dietary request you’ve ever had?” was a particular favourite conversation and though I was impressed by “hollandaise sauce without butter”, chef Matt Lambert’s recollection of a New York diner who wanted his steak “uncooked and sliced into one-inch squares next to a bowl of olive oil” may not ever be beaten.)
We took an early morning water taxi across an icy Lake Te Anau (water temperature 9.8 degrees, about as cold as it ever gets) to a Department of Conservation hut popular with deerhunters (DoC is a partner of FWF), and from there walked into the bush to check out some of the wapiti habitat.
It’s a beautiful thing to watch a chef, who works in one of the world’s most stressful environments and even at home worries, as one of them told me, “about the 60 people in my kitchen whose incomes depend on me”, mentally unwind as soon as he steps off the boat and walks into the wilderness, his city shoes crunching satisfyingly up the wet beach.
“I could just sit here doing nothing for a couple of hours,” one of them told me later as he looked out at the lake, talking in the awed voice of a man who probably hadn’t stood for 30 seconds doing nothing for the entirety of his adult life. Studies show time in the wild is good for your physical and mental health, but the results are usually subtle and cumulative — these guys acted like they’d just taken all the benefits of nature in a fast-acting pill.
It’s easier to believe in a product if you believe in its story and though this group was made up of chefs who were already sold on wapiti, I don’t doubt that this walk into the bush will have forged a special understanding of this animal and its New Zealand story.
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Advertise with NZME.To see the forest floor thriving, to have pointed out to them the plants that make up the deer’s diet, to follow a line of heavy stoat traps that were lugged into the bush on the backs of FWF members in an effort to preserve and protect the local ecosystem — to see this stuff with your own eyes will, I’m sure, affect the way these chefs look at a leg of wapiti venison for the rest of their lives.
Soon we heard the sound of choppers and retreated back through the forest for a pickup on the beach. We squeezed into the back seat and hovered up over the bush we’d just examined by foot, then the choppers turned and whisked us up one of the primary hunting valleys and over the mountain tops and back towards Te Anau township.
These helicopters are expensive to hire, and they’re the only way of getting wapiti carcasses out of the bush. It’s an economic challenge the WithWild founders have worked hard to solve, and the support of individual restaurants and, occasionally, big customers like Burger Fuel has meant a workable business model is possible, even if the margins are tight.
But the culinary rewards are significant. Wapiti venison has a different taste, texture and appearance to farmed New Zealand red deer, because it’s a different species but also because it feeds in a New Zealand native environment, not on grass (this makes the meat distinct from wapiti served in other countries too).
Dariush’s dream is that New Zealanders embrace wapiti venison as a national dish alongside traditional roast lamb — both animals are introduced, but only one is raised on a local diet in a national park (in fact, Fiordland is a World Heritage site — and wapiti is arguably the only animal in the world harvested from such a site and available to eat in restaurants).
WithWild co-founder Scott McNeil told me, “I think there’s a big awakening coming with wild meat. New Zealanders are going to start asking: ‘Why aren’t we eating this?’”
Dariush says, “As a conservation-led business, we aim to take a pest problem, turn it into a product and invest a portion of the proceeds from every sale in conservation work to address the original problem.” As such, a whopping $3.30 from each kilo of meat sold goes back to FWF.
Back in Te Anau, Dariush and Tom hosted a wapiti cooking demo for locals where the message was to cook the meat quickly if at all, and not to overthink flavourings — salt and olive oil are best. Tom whipped up a venison tartare while Dariush provided butchery tips.
“My dad always says ‘the instructions are right there’,” he said of his technique, which is to find the natural divisions in the muscle and use a knife to gently pull it apart.
I took up my customary role — entering once the butchery and cookery was over and it was time to start eating. Tom’s tartare was impossibly fresh, then I tried their tataki dressed with raspberry and red vinegar, and finally a medium-rare roast fillet, sliced with a beetroot and buckwheat salad.
The wapiti’s texture is a feature with these fancier dishes, where as little as possible is done to the fillets. But elsewhere in town I found a wapiti pie — where big chunks of slow-cooked neck and shoulder taste so uniquely gamey, they couldn’t be any other animal.
That evening we gathered in Te Anau’s community hall for another feed of wapiti (sausages and burger patties this time) and to hear a few stories of life in the bush. I was gifted a merino jumper in camouflage colours (they didn’t say anything, but I suspect my red jacket scared off much of the wildlife earlier in the morning) and a long day finished sometime close to midnight when I trudged back to the hotel as snow began to fall silently around me.
In an ideal world we would all know the story of every animal we ate, though I wonder how many of those stories we would want to hear. In wapiti deer we have a story I’m certain chefs will be proud to tell. If you see it on the menu, take the opportunity to experience a taste of that story yourself.
