Visiting Queenstown’s Walter Peak: Steamboat Sailing On Lake Whakatipu & A Gourmet Buffet Set Ashore

Julia Gessler heads to Queenstown to experience Walter Peak high country farm, its Colonel’s Homestead Restaurant, executive chef Will Eaglesfield’s gourmet barbecue buffet, and the main mode of transport: the coal-fired TSS Earnslaw.

Walter Peak can feel like a buffet at the end of the world, or the beginning of it. That alone could be disqualifying for a lot of diners, but it is often what people travel for when they visit the 300-acre working sheep station, which you can access from Queenstown on a coal-fired screw steamer – the TSS Earnslaw – that made its maiden voyage in 1912. The restaurant, called, with some fustiness, Colonel’s Homestead Restaurant, is an effort not only for food but enough to fill the swathes of people in what was once a cargo ship. There is a come-as-you-are, eat-what-you-can bluster. Yet under executive chef Will Eaglesfield, it has also come to telegraph what buffets have long aspired for: taste and quality, prized from the earth with his own bare hands.

The Englishman’s story is a familiar one: Will came to Queenstown for a ski season, then never left. “I used to flit between the French Alps for skiing in winter, and the Med for windsurfing in summer,” he says. “Here, I can do it all in one handy location.”

Where he works, the location comes with beautiful wood wainscoting, bay windows that take in Lake Whakatipu’s south-western shores, and plaid and candles and highland cows redolent of a Scottish romance. Will describes the sprawling one-storey building as a “classic Kiwi homestead”. The restaurant orbits around an open barbecue kitchen, which is used for Southland grass-fed beef, contorni such as courgettes, and to blister cauliflower heads marinated in things like Sichuan.

A great buffet is a glutton’s game, a choose-your-own-adventure that delineates your needs and wants with elaborate sides and serving one’s self a pile of 20 prawns in a move both embarrassing and dignified. An ideal meal begins wherever you want it to, so I start with the salads: Beetroot and piko piko with manuka-smoked cashews; generously diced heirloom tomatoes tossed in an olive crumble; roast potatoes cooked alongside confit garlic and duck fat until they’re a deep, crunchy brown – that unmatched crisp skin. The meats read like a butcher’s inventory – beef, pork, chicken, lamb – and you’ll find more fish during the dinner service. On the day I visited, vegan Māori potato gnocchi was available on request.

The sticky toffee pudding is the star here. It is classic – a saucy cakelet served in a miniature skillet that you’ll pluck out of a sort of cauldron that keeps it warm. There is, blessedly, homemade vanilla icecream to have with it, along with plenty of other artisanal desserts to wade through, including chocolate tartlets with stonefruit and macadamia, chocolate beet brownies, and a light-as-air mochaccino mousse. Buffet aficionados will bring a Ziplock bag, or a napkin. Semi-obscured by the copious amounts of sweets is a shelf decorated with containers and copyright-complying labels: “baby fish”, “pineapple chunks”, “orange chocolate balls”.

That’s why they serve comfort food, says Will, but elevated with a little finesse. “None of the dishes should be scary to people, or intimidating.” He takes the approachability part of the assignment seriously, but it hasn’t limited him. Really, he works without limits: there is no set menu, and much of what his team cooks is dependent on what has been grown in their organic gardens on site, or on the seasonal produce they’ve purchased locally. “The great thing about not being committed to a menu that we’re publishing is that we can get 20kg of quince and make quince paste and use that for a day, a week, a single service,” he says.

The food is simple enough and fresh enough that you can pinpoint exactly what spoke to you because Will is adamant on it being authentic to the area. “People are able to taste the peas and beans from the plant, which is very different from when they’ve been picked and then chilled and transported, then left for a few more days, because within half an hour of being picked, they start to lose some of their sugars,” he explains. “I spend all my time doing ready-steady-cook with things that come out of the gardens.”

He also spends his time foraging. When we meet for this interview, on a dock on Queenstown’s waterfront, Will is holding a sack of watercress. He’d picked it earlier from around Moke Lake, and will bistro it into something delicious, like he does with the mānuka he finds growing around the back of his house. “I like using mānuka to make tea and then infuse that into the things that I make,” he says, adding that he can’t resist horopito and kawakawa either. “I have to hold myself back sometimes.”

The gardens, which were built in the latter half of last year, are overseen by horticulturist Paul Carr. Walter Peak wants to produce 10 per cent of its own produce in its first year with these crops, then 20 per cent in its second, and so on until it reaches 80 per cent. For now, they tend to finger radishes and kohlrabi, kale and a “feijoa alley”. The most productive trees are the plums, the first. The bees at the back of the orchard have bedded down for the winter, living on batches of sugar water sitting at the bottom of their hives in lieu of the honey Will’s team has tenderly harvested.

“We will never get to 100 per cent,” says Will, a catch of sorrow. Meyer lemons, one of his favourite ingredients, won’t grow well in the alpine climes. But he perseveres, and preserves: hulking jars of shelf-stable fruits and vegetables are scattered across the dining hall, balancing time.

Julia Gessler travelled to Walter Peak courtesy of RealNZ.

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