What’s The Deal With Auckland’s Vegan Scene?

From restaurant pioneers to alternative protein entrepreneurs, the vegan movement in Auckland is on the up. Andrew Glenn, an accidental and sometime vegan, tracks a burgeoning and progressive plant-based food scene that’s consciously delicious.

In 2012, when I founded The Oyster Inn restaurant on Waiheke, we seldom had vegan requests from customers. When we did, the chefs would release a cacophony of groans and expletives as if they were tasked with creating something impossible. “They need to give us 48 hours advance notice!” they would moan, overwhelmed by the seemingly Herculean task of creating a dairy and animal protein-free meal that would look and taste delicious.

What a difference a decade makes. “Plant-based” is now part of our cultural lexicon. In the US, veganism has become big business, with powerhouse chefs like Matthew Kenney creating vegan restaurant empires. In 2021, Eleven Madison Park, the three-Michelin star culinary temple in New York City, sent foodie shockwaves around the world when chef Daniel Humm announced he was taking meat off the menu and going entirely vegan. A year later, Humm defied the critics and became the world’s first plant-based three-Michelin-starred restaurant.

Internationally famous musicians, actors and sports stars have adopted the vegan lifestyle — think Billie Eilish, Natalie Portman and Novak Djokovic — while closer-to-home TV presenters Samantha Hayes and All Black TJ Perenara celebrate a plant-based lifestyle.

My own vegan journey started in September 2019, after my husband and I enjoyed an incredible week of animal-free eating on Gili Air, a tiny Indonesian island off the coast of Lombok, where we found the best food came from several plant-based cafes and restaurants on the island. After 10 days, we felt lighter and never more energised and decided to continue this newly adopted plant-based lifestyle upon return to Auckland. I soon became obsessed with finding the best vegan eating in the city.

I soon discovered restaurants generally had a vegetarian dish that had the option of being vegan optional, which sometimes was extraordinary yet often lacklustre and what felt like an afterthought.

Viva’s dining out editor Jesse Mulligan, whose daughter is vegetarian, agrees. “I’d still want to check the menu before I left home to make sure I wasn’t going to be stuck with a couple of sides. We eat almost entirely vegetarian at home and when I think of the beautiful cookbooks and ideas we have access to, I’m surprised there aren’t more restaurants taking plant-based eating more seriously. Still, there are some bright moments — most new or progressive restaurants have at least a couple of great, tasty dishes in which meat doesn’t feature.”

While my strict vegan journey ended after 10 months — the challenges of lockdown brought it to an end — I try as much as possible to eat vegan at home. Nevertheless, in those 10 months, I searched high and low for the best vegan eating in Auckland. No week was complete without a visit to Little Bird Kitchen — created by pioneer Megan Natalie May and her husband, Jeremy Bennett — for their Vietnamese crepes, not to mention their detoxifying green smoothies that are legit and not loaded with the usual sugary fruit juices most venues tend to mix in.

Beyond Little Bird, I discovered some other local gems: Forest and Khu Khu Eatery and excellent vegan dishes at Three Seven Two, Cafe Hanoi, Ebisu, Mekong Baby, Onslow and a few other plant-forward operators.

At the same time, as a job as a hospitality consultant, I found myself developing an F&B programme for my client Sudima Hotels at their first Auckland city property. While trying to determine the culinary concept for the hotel’s main restaurant, I discovered that the hotel’s owners — the Jhunjhnuwala family — were lifelong vegetarians and serendipitously raised in Hong Kong, as I was. It was a “lightbulb moment”, and I suggested we go vegetarian. Six months later, we created East, a modern Asian “plant-powered” restaurant.

“I grew up in a vegetarian family and have followed the same ethos throughout my life. I was fortunate enough to grow up having amazing Asian vegetarian food in Hong Kong,” says Sudesh Jhunjhnuwala, chief executive of Sudima Hotels. “We believed there was a place in the Auckland market for this style of cuisine and wanted to share how diverse and exciting the flavours of Asian vegetarian food can be. I’m so thrilled East made the Viva’s Top 50 Auckland Restaurants for 2022.”

It was particularly exciting developing the menu, realising so many great Asian vegetarian recipes already had an absence of dairy, so there were many dishes to get inspiration from. Of course, there was the culinary hurdle of fish sauce — a staple in many Southeast Asian dishes — and how to replicate that intense, robust flavour. We soon found a fantastic ingredient made with mushroom fermentation that was a game changer.

“In Guangdong province, where I am from, Cantonese cooking often doesn’t require animal products, with key ingredients being chilli, soy sauce, spring onions, Shaoxing wine, black vinegar and the like,” says head chef Vincent Yan. “So we never have to sacrifice an ingredient for deep, deep, authentic flavour.”

In January, East began a new culinary chapter with the arrival of executive chef Stuart Marsden, who has worked in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Bali training under modern Asian chefs Will Meyrick (the Bali-based culinary impresario behind Mamasan) and more recently, Che Barrington (Blue Breeze Inn). Stuart joins a team of chefs that represent myriad Asian cultures and backgrounds. “I would describe the food we serve (modern-Asian) as new cuisine born out of diversity,” says Stuart.

Beyond the ethical dilemma, we can’t deny the environmental benefits to the planet if we all reduce our meat intake. A 2022 Oxford University study published in the journal Climatic Change shows that meat-eaters are responsible for almost twice as many dietary greenhouse-gas emissions per day as vegetarians and about two and a half times as many as vegans.

According to Bloomberg, the plant-based foods market could make up to 7.7 per cent of the global protein market by 2030, with a value of more than US$162 billion, up from US$29.4 billion in 2020.

“Once you price in the externalities and compromise on our environment and animals, intensive beef and dairy at scale doesn’t really make much ecological and financial sense to feed the world. Premium animal-based nutrition deserves to get a lot more expensive and niche,” says Alex, who spent years as an executive at Fonterra. “There’s also going to be another two billion or so people on this planet by 2050 and we have a responsibility to try and feed them (and ourselves) better.”

Some remain critical of “fake” meats like Impossible. However, in my mind, if we can mimic textures and tastes — and in the process, convert a generation of consumers that, in turn, reduces greenhouse emissions — we are making progress. A slew of fast-casual retailers has exploded on the scene — such as Wise Boys (2019), Lord of the Fries (2016) — democratising meat- and dairy-free options to a younger demographic, one burger at a time. Social platforms are creeping into our cultural zeitgeist; Meat Free Mondays ask us to eschew meat entirely on Monday and One Meal a Day — Suzy Amis Cameron’s initiative — encourages one plant-based meal choice daily.

READ: Jesse Mulligan: Where To Eat In Queenstown And Find A Decent Martini In Auckland

The rise of alternative milks is gaining steam, especially oat. In the latest Nielsen polls, oat milk was up 60 per cent year on year. Simon Coley of All Good Organics says in the cafes he distributes his barista oat milk — more than 750 in Auckland alone and more than 1500 nationwide — a third of all flat whites ordered request oat milk. “Unsurprisingly, taste is the deciding factor for choosing plant milks over dairy in the fight for the most delicious alternative flat white. Since childhood, our Kiwi taste buds have craved the velvety smoothness and slight sweetness of the fat suspended in dairy milk when it’s warmed and stretched, and its ‘milky’ flavour,” says Simon. “Oat milk is now the best-selling alternative to dairy.”

At this year’s Outstanding NZ Food Producer Awards, a health and sustainability message was loud and clear with 54 Kiwi-made products in the first-ever “Free-From” category (food made and marketed to meet the requirements of a specific diet, such as gluten-free, carb-free, keto, vegan or meat-free).

Flexitarians are the core targets of many “free” brands, with innovative entrepreneurs shifting the plant-based barometer needle in Aoteroa. In March, Christchurch manufacturer of plant-based delicatessen charcuterie and cheeses Grater Goods launched a crowd-funding campaign. At the same time, Auckland-based precision fermentation start-up Daisy Lab successfully closed an oversubscribed seed funding round of $1.5 million to scale up production of precision fermentation technologies to mimic processes that create cheese without using animal products.

Where to from here? If consumers can make the switch to plant-based choices for some part of their weekly diet, as a society we are making effective steps towards more conscious consumerism.

“There is still a long way to go for people to build it into their values system around consumption and what they are truly participating in with how they spend their money,” says Megan of Little Bird Organics. “We’re still very much a consumer society; getting people in the kitchen and garden, growing and making real wholefoods meals and consuming less processed and animal-based foods is still a work in progress.”