Restaurant Review: Inati Is The Bucket List Restaurant That Christchurch Deserves

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By Jesse Mulligan

Tuesday Feb. 25, 2025

Viva

The pāua, with lemon, pickled dill, smoked silver warehou and truffle, on the menu at Inati. Photo / Jerome Warburton

Cuisine: Fine dining

Address: 48 Hereford St, Christchurch Central

Phone: (03) 390 1580

Website: Inati.nz

From the menu: Trust the chef $129

Rating: 18/20

Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12 Disappointing, give it a miss. 13-15 Good, give it a go. 16-18 Great, plan a visit. 19-20 Outstanding, don’t delay.

How buzzy is Christchurch right now? I turned up at Londo at 5pm for a drink, and the guy who greeted me looked around the empty room rubbing his chin.

“You can have a seat in the window until 6pm,” he decided. “Then I can juggle some things around and get you on the bar until 6.30pm. But after that I’m sorry, there’s nothing.”

It was a Tuesday. Londo is an appealing, new-ish restaurant where handsome young men pour natural wine and cook food in front of you. It’s right next door to the more famous Gatherings in what I will bravely call the middle of nowhere, despite me having no geographical bearings even four days into a recent stay in the Garden City. Londo makes navigation even more difficult, with a website that doesn’t offer a street address. But people are finding it all right.

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“We had a little write-up in Food & Wine magazine, and a few other bits and pieces” the guy told me. “All of a sudden we’re full of internationals. I look down the reservations and all the numbers are +1, +61, +44 … it’s actually rare to see a New Zealand number now.”

The dining room at Inati has cosy booths, tables and a long bar. Photo / Jerome Warburton

I gobbled up a plate of cheese and then headed to my booking at Inati, a more established restaurant in another mysterious (to me) location. It has a reputation as the fanciest place in Christchurch but the only intimidating aspect is the height of the stools that surround the kitchen bar. It is a long way up, but worth it. When you reach the summit you have a great view of the busy kitchen and the other diners, most of whom looked like they were tourists too (not to say we don’t have elegant and glamorous people in New Zealand, but it’s rare to see all eight of them in one room).

The menu is arranged by Earth, Land and Sea (vegetables, meat and fish) and though each dish lists a number of ingredients, you can never quite predict what form it will take. I highly recommend you “trust the chef” and get six plates for a very reasonable $129 (the same thing costs $210 at The Grove, for example), with the option of matching wines as well: Inati is very connected to the spectacularly good North Canterbury wine region, and there’s a good chance they’ll have a bottle of something special open on the night you arrive.

The charred creamed corn with lime pickle. Photo / Jerome Warburton

The food was glorious, though I found it hard to keep up with what I was eating.

“Potato, fried egg, truffle, cured egg yolk, smoked beef,” chef Simon Levy would say loudly, over the din, when laying something in front of me. “Oyster mushroom, burnt lemon, caramelised whey, green peppercorns.”

A couple of times I asked him to repeat himself but it is hard for the human brain to process this many nouns, particularly when you’re a couple of wines deep. Sometimes there would be a nice story attached (“you go out for a few pints then you get a curry on the way home and the next morning all you can taste is the mango pickle” he said at one point. “This is my tribute to that moment”). But of all the fancy restaurants I’ve eaten at, this is probably the food I’ve found hardest to connect to intellectually. Of course, that doesn’t matter because you can turn your brain off and just experience it with your senses.

Most kitchens do as little as possible to an oyster but here they load it up – a little custard to double down on the late-season creaminess, then some brilliantly fresh granita – cucumber, green chilli and kiwifruit with summer herbs in an icy, tropical taste explosion. The pāua is completely indulgent, arriving in its traditional “foot” shape but minced and grilled so the surface crunches up and contrasts with the rich meat inside. In case that doesn’t sound decadent enough, chef Simon blankets it in sliced truffle and serves it alongside a shell filled with a light white wine and Dijon-based sauce.

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Yes, this menu is a lot, but it is the bucket list restaurant Christchurch deserves. I loved those oyster mushrooms, which were meaty, slick and properly spicy. The only dish I didn’t quite gel with was Inati’s signature duck trumpet cones. The parfait is as smooth as ice cream so you can see the appeal of the concept, but it is so full-on that, although the little cone is full of blackberry jam, you don’t get any relief from the parfait “scoop” until you’ve eaten almost all of it. I was dying for a glass of riesling or something to cut through it and my dining partner couldn’t finish hers, despite loving everything else.

The oyster mushrooms, with black pepper, burnt lemon and caramelised whey. Photo / Jerome Warburton

At the end of the dinner, I dismounted from the stool so successfully that I raised my arms gymnastics-style after sticking the landing, to impress the imaginary judges. My cockiness didn’t last long though – when my Visa was declined I remembered that my debit card was 1000km away at the bottom of my daughter’s school bag.

Thus it was while the international couples around him paid their bills and returned to their hotel love-nests, Auckland’s celebrated restaurant reviewer spent the rest of his evening doing complicated bank transfers on his phone repeatedly saying “don’t worry, I’m good for it” to Inati’s patient staff. Visit Christchurch, book ahead, bring some money. Let the locals take care of the rest.