This year’s Kelmarna Farm Dinner series sees a blockbuster group of Auckland chefs unite for a week of alfresco, farm-to-table dining in support of the organic farm’s valuable work in the community.
The pepino is a small, purple and white-striped fruit that tastes like a cucumber mixed with melon. It’s
Across seven non-consecutive nights from February 14-21 chefs from some of the country’s best restaurants – Kingi, Mapu, Forest, Mr Morris and Pici – will take turns cooking a multi-course meal inspired by the farm’s summer bounty, from heirloom tomatoes still warm from the sun, to edible weeds and flowers that can only be found at Kelmarna.
The organic farm was founded in 1981 and is home to vegetable plots, a thriving food forest of fruit trees, perennial herbs, native plants and paddocks where sheep graze, hens lay eggs and bees make honey. More than just a farm, the small team of Kelmarna employees run a variety of activities with the help of a large number of volunteers, including educational programmes for all ages and horticultural therapy for people with mental health needs or intellectual disabilities. The farm also sells produce to restaurants and the public through the Farm Shop and hosts workshops and community events. Funds raised during Farm Dinners will support Kelmarna’s work in the community, with 50% of proceeds going straight to the charitable trust.
Plabita Florence, chef and co-owner of Forest, has been involved in the series since its inception in 2019 when her award-winning restaurant was a pop-up in its infancy. She says her first visit to the farm changed the way she thought about locally sourced food and taught her to respect the ingredients she uses. “It gave me an education. They showed me heaps of different herbs and plants that you can’t buy anywhere else. I found it really exciting, and felt like this is proper local food, grown right here.”
Since then, her connection to Kelmarna has remained strong – their produce has always featured on Forest’s menus – and she looks forward to returning to farm dinners each year, especially to see the reaction of people who have never been to the farm, who she says are always wowed by its beauty and the fact that such a thriving food system exists in the middle of a densely-populated suburb. She says her menu will highlight the unique flavours found at Kelmarna – like the pepino; and Mexican Marigold, an edible flower with leaves and petals that taste like lychee.
Chef and co-owner of Kingi and Daily Bread, Tom Hishon, will also make a return to the event, teaming up with Giulio Sturla of Lyttelton’s six-seater restaurant Mapu (Giulio and his team will take over the kitchen the following night). Tom and Giulio have collaborated many times before, with a shared love of foraging and native ingredients, and their menu at Farm Dinners will largely feature wild proteins cooked over an open flame.
Head chef of Mr Morris, Georgia van Prehn, is a newcomer to Farm Dinners and says the invitation was an exciting opportunity for her. “It’s very on-brand for what I like to cook, a very seasonal approach. It’s really cool to be able to create a bespoke menu for an event using produce from the garden, I love it.” Georgia often applies creative techniques to vegetables to draw out different flavours and textures from one singular ingredient and looks forward to including some pickles and ferments of the season in her menu. She plans to adorn her dishes with more garnish than she typically uses to show off the edible flowers and herbs that grow there and infuse the oil with alexanders, an edible weed that tastes of lemon and celery. Her menu will be accompanied by an optional drink pairing by Michael Hanna of Project Hydrosol, who will gather botanicals from the garden to distil flavours of the farm into interesting infusions to complement and contrast Georgia’s dishes.
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The series will finish with two nights of hāngi, prepared by friends and colleagues Jono Thevenard – chef and co-owner of Pici and Ooh-Fa – and Kia Kanuta (ex-Ada), who will forage kawakawa leaves and fruit from the farm’s food forest, and utilise an abundance of courgette, pumpkin and tomatoes alongside a lush banquet of crayfish, paua, fresh fish and lamb.
During his tenure at Ada as head chef, Kia was acclaimed for applying traditional cooking methods and ingredients to his modern Māori dishes, and Jono says they will draw on some of these ideas for their menu to give people a taste of how good hāngi can be. “It’s an important part of our culture and celebrating our heritage, and a lot of people have only had a bad hāngi, so it’s about changing people’s perceptions too.”
Jono says he is a big fan of many of Kelmarna’s practices – such as permaculture, and regenerative agriculture – and believes it is important for people to see how their food is grown. He says one of the things we have lost in modern diets is biodiversity, and to have a space in the central city that celebrates and demonstrates how diverse a food system can be is something that should be treasured. “It would just be so sad to see spaces like these get sold to property developers, and the only way we are going to save them or keep them alive is by supporting them, and by the community getting behind them.”
Plabita agrees that a visit to the farm is enlightening and beneficial for everybody to see first-hand the amount of work that goes into growing food. “It’s important to respect how hard it is to grow things. When you go to a farm and help pick the things you are using, or you get to interact with the person who grew it – they are normally covered in mud or they are trying to trim roots off onions – it makes you really appreciate that someone does that job for you.”
This connection to the land where food is grown is what Farm Dinners are all about: the chance to enjoy restaurant-quality food picked only meters from where diners are sitting, nestled among the shambolic beauty of a working farm in full summer bloom.
The Kelmarna Farm Dinner series runs from February 14-21. For tickets and more info visit Humanitix. Prices start from $140
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