Lincoln Tan catches up with four local food heroes with inspiring stories to tell, from creating a Brazilian farm-to-table restaurant in Helensville to a Thai oasis in Ōtāhuhu, and more.
In a town 40km northwest of Auckland, Reginaldo Richard is living his dream — cheffing and running his Brazilian-inspired farm-to-table
Sit down for a chat and Reggie will tell you that his journey to realising his restaurant dream — since moving here two decades ago from Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil — has been an arduous one.
Arriving with little English and with qualifications as a professional football player, Reggie says breaking into New Zealand’s culinary scene and becoming one of its shining stars has been beyond his wildest dreams.
He will be one of four chefs whose accomplishments will be celebrated in a series of culinary events entitled The Feasts of Legends as part of Elemental AKL 2023.
The others include Nanam Eatery’s Jessabel Granada, Secret Thai Garden’s Aranya Clark and Heritage Cuisine of India’s Jaswinder Kaur.
Elemental AKL 2023 is Auckland’s annual winter festival, offering curated experiences celebrating the unique culture, cuisine and creativity of Tāmaki Makaurau.
It will run from July 20 to August 6 with more than 100 events featuring food, performances, visual arts, and live music that will transform historical venues, restaurants, and public spaces across the Auckland region.
Feasts of Legends organiser Bee Koh says the series will celebrate the achievements of the four “legendary” chefs and their journeys from “feeling like zeros to becoming heroes”.
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Advertise with NZME.The four-event series will feature performances and theatrical storytelling, feasts, dances and unique cultural culinary traditions and experiences.
“It’s incredibly tough to establish yourself or even find your footing in a new land when you’re a migrant, and I can say that from experience,” Bee says.
“But these chefs — some who started with absolutely nothing and have become stars by drawing inspiration from their homeland and cultures — are true legends.
“They are an inspiration to many and their accomplishments need to be celebrated.”
Reginaldo, who grew up on a farm in Ouro Fino, a city in the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil, always carried with him the dream of becoming a chef like his mother.
“My mother brings happiness to people through her food and I always had the dream of being able to do the same,” he says. “She could turn simple things we got from the farm into the most delicious food, like a magician in the kitchen. I always wanted to be like her.”
But life steered him in a different direction and instead, he became a professional football player. His culinary dream was shelved.
He moved to New Zealand in 2003 and got on with life teaching soccer to kids at Onehunga Sports as well as playing for Wellington United.
“It was hard, you know, when you speak nearly no English, but I never gave up on my dream of being a chef and owning my own restaurant,” Reginaldo says.
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Advertise with NZME.The opportunity came when he got a job as a kitchen hand at an eatery and was able to show his bosses that he could cook.
He eventually became a head chef, and went on an extended overseas stint working in the kitchens of restaurants in Australia, Hong Kong, Spain and Portugal.
Reginaldo returned to New Zealand, and now his skills are in demand, working as head chef in Odettes, Honey Bones, and being a consultant to several other popular restaurants.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, he chanced upon a building in Helensville and just knew it was a place where he could make his dream come true and jumped on the opportunity.
“I think being a chef is my calling and when I saw this place in Helensville, I just knew I had to do it,” he said.
Reginaldo brings his Brazilian tradition of cooking over fire and his farm-to-table dining ethos to his restaurant, called The Butcher Baker.
At the Feasts of Legends event, Reginaldo will cook up some distinct traditional Brazilian dishes he grew up with and share how he uses locally sourced ingredients in his cooking.
The first career choice for Nanam’s Jessabel Granada was serving in the military but, growing up in the provinces of the Philippines and influenced by her food-loving parents who were great cooks, she also harboured dreams of becoming a chef.
Both Jessabel and her partner Andrew Soriano are qualified as chefs in the Philippines and first moved to Central Otago where they spent six years before moving to Auckland.
While working as chefs in a Vietnamese restaurant, their boss suggested they should take over the place and turn it into a Filipino restaurant.
“We told him it was a crazy idea, as no one even knew what Filipino food was at the time,” she says.
But they trialled introducing Pinoy cuisine by selling their taco bao (beetroot buns with humba sticky pork, peanuts and assorted pickles) at the night markets, where they got a positive response.
With just $600 in their bank account, they decided to take the plunge and opened the first Nanam Eatery in 2015 in Royal Oak.
At the start it was incredibly tough, says Jessabel, with few locals daring to check out a new type of cuisine and some Filipinos were critical of their modern fusion style.
However, over time, Jessabel earned accolades from acclaimed chefs including Michael Meredith, Ed Verner and Sid Sahrawat.
“There were tears at the beginning, lots, but the good words from these great chefs gave us the encouragement to carry on,” she says.
“We just really wanted to introduce our culture and cuisine to New Zealand, and some of the criticisms actually made us even more determined to push on.”
Nanam moved to its current premises in Takapuna on Auckland’s North Shore late in 2017.
Jessabel says she’s excited about being able to share her personal story, food and culture at her Elemental AKL dinner event, where she will be infusing traditional Filipino cuisine into contemporary dishes in a carefully curated menu.
The opening act at the event will be the Cordillera Ensemble Group playing “gangsa” or Cordilleran gongs, engaging participants in a cultural encounter with native Filipino tribal heritage and their music.
Deep in Ōtāhuhu, Aranya Clark has — against all odds — achieved her mission of not just bringing Thai cuisine but a piece of Thailand to New Zealand.
Aranya moved from her little village in Surat Thani in southern Thailand to Auckland in the 1990s after marrying a New Zealander.
They bought a property in Ōtāhuhu and transformed it into a Thai garden restaurant, complete with a boardwalk tunnel lined with tusk-like arches, little Buddhas, waterways and teak furniture imported from Chiang Mai.
Speaking little English, Aranya remained “invisible” and worked in the kitchen, leaving her husband Nobby to front and chat with customers at the restaurant, named Secret Thai Garden.
When their marriage broke up five years ago, Secret Thai Garden was sold. However, Aranya did the unthinkable and purchased the property back. Today she continues to live there and is single-handedly pursuing her mission.
Aranya tells Viva she has always been passionate about cooking, and losing the business would have meant “losing my dream and my mission.
“In Secret Thai Garden, I’ve put in my blood, sweat and tears to bring a little bit of Thailand here,” she says.
“I may have been out of my mind when I decided to buy back the property after our divorce, but I feel like my mission in New Zealand is not yet complete.”
At the Aranya’s Feast event, she will be showcasing a selection of dishes originating from her home village, from fresh oysters with Thai sauce, Kua Kling (a Surat Thani red curry dish) and Thai-style canape kranom piang nar goong.
“It will be like coming to experience dinner in my home at my village in Surat Thani, and just preparing for the event is making me feel a bit emotional and nostalgic too,” Aranya says.
Meanwhile, in Kingsland, chef Jaswinder Kaur is preparing a feast to show how far she has come since moving to New Zealand and losing almost everything she owned. Jaswinder’s first memory of moving to Auckland from Punjab was being financially duped by someone she considered dear to her.
She recalls standing on a side street, pregnant, practically penniless and wondering what she was going to do with her life.
Jaswinder believes that in her most desperate time, it was her prayers and the intervention of her late father that led her to meet a person who she regards now to be her “saviour”.
“I felt hopeless and useless in this foreign land, but this person believed in me,” Jaswinder says.
A fourth-generation restaurateur, she turned to the only skill she knew to survive — cooking.
With financial help, Jaswinder started an Indian takeaway in Ōtāhuhu and just before the pandemic, opened Heritage Indian Cuisine in Kingsland.
Business boomed during the pandemic as people sought food that was familiar as comfort food and the authenticity of Jaswinder’s cooking made Heritage the go-to for many among the Indian diaspora.
“I believe I am here today because of my ancestors, the cooking skills that my mother and grandmother passed to me, and the spirit of my late father for leading me to meet someone that really helped me find my feet again,” she says.
At Jaswinder’s Feast as part of Elemental AKL, she will be cooking dishes that are her personal favourites using cooking methods and family recipes.
In typical Punjabi celebration style, there will be energetic bhangra performances, folk dancing that was originally meant to rejoice in the harvest season.
Chris Simpson, head of major events at Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, says Elemental AKL is back for its fifth year and “keeps growing and getting better”.
He says, “It’s all about celebrating what makes Tāmaki Makaurau a unique region — it’s cultural diversity, creativity, and, of course, cuisine.”
Simpson says Auckland’s food scene is truly world-class and the festival celebrates that.
“It’s one of the great drawcards of the region that you can find food from so many cultures done so incredibly well.”
With the influx of visitors expected for the Fifa Women’s World Cup, Simpson says this year’s festival also presented an opportunity to “show off our sensational food scene to a global audience.
“Across Elemental AKL we’re showcasing the diversity and range of Auckland’s dining options to do just that. We’ve got everything from fine dining to pop-up food trucks. “This is a festival made for foodies of all kinds.”
Feasts of Legends kicks off on July 20. For tickets, visit Lincolnstable.co.nz. Viva has two tickets to each feast to give away. To enter, email Viva@nzherald.co.nz and tell us which feast you’d like to attend in the subject line.
