Melbourne Chef Peter Gunn Is Bringing His Baffling Dessert To QT Queenstown

Enjoy a taste of Australia’s culinary capital at this one-off degustation.

Chef Peter Gunn’s latest restaurant collaboration has him boarding his Melbourne-to-Queenstown flight with his own black boxes. These considerably more fragile chocolate shells form part of a signature dessert at Peter’s Melbourne restaurant Ides, and are easier to transport than make on-site.

The 12-13 ever-changing treats that go inside these small boxes (think teeny tiny biscuits, praline caramel, fruit gels, sherbets, honeycomb … Google it, if you missed the challenge on Masterchef Australia a few years ago … it’s dramatic), will be made on site, along with six other dishes that will work in harmony with six dishes created by QT Queenstown’s executive chef Ryan Henley.

The chefs are analogous, hailing from New Zealand before earning serious stripes in Melbourne working at the likes of, in Peter’s case, Ezard, the Royal Mail Hotel and Attica; and Henley at Vue de Monde. Ryan has been back in New Zealand for some time, but Peter calls Melbourne home and has put down serious roots with the opening of his fine-dining restaurant Ides in 2016 and last year, a bar next door, called March. Both chefs have a Japanese influence in their cooking.

“I have always respected the purity of flavour of Japanese food,” says Gunn, “but in Melbourne, people have a stronger palate, so we take that purity and simplicity but are heavier-handed with the ingredients to bring out more flavour.”

Their professional lives never crossed but, after meeting at Ides five years ago, they kept in touch and cooked together at a Beyond Blue event in New Zealand in 2019. Now Ryan has issued another invitation that Peter says he feels lucky to have received.

Ryan says: “Peter is a great dude and it’s an awesome opportunity to partner with someone I consider to be one of the best chefs in Australia. It will be great for me and the team to learn from Peter and show him what we’re getting up to here in Queenstown. These collabs are a great experience for our teams and our diners.”

It’s a fleeting three-day visit for Peter who must get back to plan Ides’ seventh birthday party on March 15 (it’s called Ides for a reason). Not that he’s stressed about that.

“That’s the beauty of such a small, dynamic restaurant,” he says. “Ides started out as a once-a-month pop-up whilst I was at Attica — as a way for me to create and define my own style of cooking and service; a group of friends coming together and sharing ideas in a low-risk environment. Ides was designed to be nimble and swift in whatever idea or objective we wanted to achieve, so we are always ready to plan anything at the drop of a hat.”

Ides is a small 30-seat restaurant with an even smaller kitchen only six metres long by three metres wide. It’s very intimate but dynamic. “Not what you would expect from a traditional fine diner,” says Peter.

The staff, the decor, the low-fi hip-hop music and the presentation of modern Australian food bring a lot of energy into the room. It’s quite electric and the team intend to inject as much of this as they can into the evening at Lil Red, which was also originally launched as a pop-up restaurant.

Ryan describes Lil Red as an “intimate 40-seat restaurant that serves high-end food in an occasional setting — think fine dining with a causal flair and our signature QT quirk.”

He also says they have exciting plans for the space this year and they are hoping that the collaboration with Peter is the first in a series where they partner with renowned chefs for one-of-a-kind evenings.

What to expect from the Peter Gunn x Ryan Henley menu