- Written by: Mona Biedrzycka
Thirty-three hours is long enough for a place to become abstract. By the time I land in New Zealand, the idea of it has completely thinned out. The journey erases expectation by sheer duration: Warsaw to Dubai to Sydney and to Queenstown. Whatever I thought New Zealand might be has been worn smooth by transit.
The first thing I register on the final approach is rock. From high above, the Southern Alps appear hard and closely packed, a field of grey angles rising without any softness. It recalibrates my scale way before the wheels touch the ground.
The descent slows until it feels almost suspended, the aircraft slipping between the ranges with a proximity that holds my breath and pulls me back to the window. Below, the Shotover River cuts through the valley in a streak of bright turquoise - unnaturally vivid, fast, alive. It’s the first moment the landscape skips my heart a bit.
Only after that does Lake Wakatipu open up, wide and steady, its surface shifting between deep blue and green as light moves across it. And then Queenstown appears - compact, tightly pressed between water and rock, arriving late in the composition, as if squeezed in and not allowed to grow high.
Queenstown has built a global reputation on movement and risk. This is where commercial bungee jumping was born, where heli-skiing was professionalised, where speed, adrenaline, and endurance became exportable skills. That culture sits everywhere, even in moments of calm.
People dress for comfort and weather: hiking trousers, fleece layers, and worn-in shoes. Outdoor gear shops dominate the shopfronts, doors open, racks pulled out onto the pavement. Pubs and cafés are busy, tables filling and emptying steadily. At Fergburger, the queue stretches down the block, accepted as part of the deal - people chatting, checking phones, waiting their turn without any impatience.
What strikes me is how overwhelmingly beautiful and peaceful the place feels. Lake Wakatipu runs directly alongside the town centre, and people naturally gather there. Groups sit on low walls facing the water, bottles of beer in hand, catching the sun. Others stand in loose queues for boat rides that leave from the centre, jackets half-zipped, sunglasses pushed up into hair. Couples walk slowly along the streets. No one looks in a hurry.
Movement here feels easy. The scale of the landscape seems to set the tempo. Mountains rise close and stay present. Sitting there in a waterfront restaurant and watching it all unfold, I notice myself slowing down, paying attention to small things like light on water, voices carrying, the rhythm of footsteps on pavement.
Only after that do Amisfield and Chef Vaughan Mabee come into view.
A Chef From Here, Looking for His Own Voice
Vaughan Mabee is a New Zealander — a Kiwi, as he likes to remind you early on. Big presence, direct speech, little patience for hedging. He didn’t return to this landscape in search of revelation. He grew up inside it. What shaped him, however, happened elsewhere, in kitchens that defined modern European fine dining from very different angles.
In Spain, he trained under Martín Berasategui, whose influence on contemporary gastronomy is measured as much in structure as in stars. At its peak, Berasategui’s restaurants held twelve Michelin stars simultaneously, sustained by an operational culture built on repetition, precision, and continuity. Standards were not personal achievements but shared obligations. Excellence had to survive scale. Discipline was drilled until it became instinct. Listening to Mabee talk about that period now, I hear how deeply that ethos has stayed with him, less as style than as reflex.
Copenhagen followed, and time at Noma during the years when the restaurant was actively reshaping how chefs thought about seasonality, fermentation, and the relationship between kitchen and landscape. Here, curiosity carried institutional weight. Techniques were provisional. Ingredients dictated direction. The contrast between these two environments proved decisive. One offered a framework hardened by repetition. The other taught him how to question frameworks altogether.
Returning to New Zealand did not resolve that tension. Mabee spent several years working in Auckland kitchens, operating inside a fine-dining language that was polished and respected, yet largely inherited. The food was technically assured, but the question he had carried back from Europe remained open: how to cook with seriousness and ambition in a country whose ingredients, seasons, regulations, and scale refused to behave like Europe’s.
We spent quite some time talking about how difficult and far from smooth that period was for him. Mabee has spoken openly about doubt setting in, about questioning whether he had misjudged both the place and himself. The techniques he brought back from Europe didn’t fall neatly into place. Menus changed often. Ideas were pushed hard, then abandoned when they failed to land. The distance from global food capitals weighed on him. So did the suspicion that the kind of cooking he wanted to do might simply be too far ahead of its context, or too far outside it.
He kept going anyway. Not through revelation, but through repetition. By staying and cooking the next service again. By adjusting, tightening, and discarding. Ambition became heavier, more personal. Recognition arrived later, and when it did, it didn’t immediately quiet the internal pressure. Quite the opposite.
Amisfield grew out of that stretch. Not as a statement unveiled at the right moment, but as a body of work assembled slowly, under strain. What the restaurant would eventually become was shaped inside those years of uncertainty, by geography that resisted shortcuts, by regulation that imposed limits, and by a chef who chose to remain in place long enough for friction to turn into form.
The Land That Made Restaurant Possible
Early in the morning, we drive out from Queenstown and follow the Kawarau Gorge inland toward Central Otago. The river runs beside the road in flashes of sharp turquoise, fast and cold-looking, cutting deep through rock.
We pass the Kawarau Bridge, a narrow span suspended over the gorge — the place where commercial bungee jumping began, where risk was first formalised and exported. It’s a brief jolt of adrenaline in an otherwise steady drive, a reminder that this region has always rewarded nerve before certainty.
Beyond it, the valley opens. The mountains ease back. The land flattens and dries, shifting from postcard scenery into working terrain. Orchards and vineyards appear gradually, set into a broad agricultural basin beneath the Pisa Range, which sits heavily over the landscape and defines its scale.
We reach Amisfield, the vineyard, which dates back to 1988, long before there was any thought of a restaurant. John Darby committed to this site at a time when Central Otago was still considered a high-risk proposition for serious viticulture. Pinot Noir was not yet a regional calling card. Frost, low rainfall, sharp diurnal swings, and short growing seasons made consistency uncertain. The decision to plant here wasn’t romantic. It was calculated, expensive, and slow to justify itself.
The vineyard developed incrementally. Blocks were tested, replanted, and extended. Confidence followed evidence rather than optimism. Over time, Amisfield became a large single-estate operation — today close to ninety-two hectares under vine, farmed organically, with Pinot Noir at its core.
The wines are now known locally and internationally for restraint and definition. The Pinot Noirs are built on acidity and fine tannin, with aromatics that tend toward red cherry, dried herbs, and savoury earth. Rieslings and Sauvignon Blancs play a parallel role, shaped by citrus peel, wet stone, and saline drive, and made with ageing in mind.
What gives the place continuity is people. André Lategan, who has worked the Pisa site for roughly two decades, has been central to how the vineyard is managed, including the development of mid-row irrigation systems and wetland projects designed to improve soil health, water efficiency, and long-term resilience in an arid Central Otago climate. Sam Davies, the chief winemaker, working closely with Ben Leen, carries the estate’s style forward. Wine here is the result of accumulated decisions, repeated year after year, by the same hands.
When the restaurant project took shape in 2012, Vaughan Mabee joined Amisfield as executive chef. He entered a place already structured around long horizons. The estate could support a kitchen that would take years to resolve itself, without forcing clarity too early. Wine remains central to the meal for the simplest reason: it belongs to the same cycle of effort and constraint. Estate bottles appear at the table because they are part of the same system that feeds the kitchen.
Amisfield Restaurant did not arrive fully formed. It was made possible by a vineyard that had already learned how to think in decades.
Dinner That Refuses Rules
Back in Queenstown, or rather 15 minutes outside the centre, I walk up high, lit for drama, the stairs to Amisfield Restaurant. It's monumental and built from local grey stone. A large, ceiling-reaching, grey fireplace divides the dining room from the entrance hall. Heat moves gently across the space. Wood smoke lingers faintly. Kim (Chin Bao Bei) greets us with a wide smile, quick wit, and an ease that immediately puts you at ease.
The menu opens with tawaka, and it wastes no time being polite. The native fungus is smoked over matagouri, then served on the same spiky branches among which it was found. Shaped like a flower, delicate in appearance, but with the flavour landing with force. The base is made from dried tawaka. On top sit sautéed and puréed mushrooms. The petals are formed from turnip, fellow deer ham, and a chenin blanc and malt gel. The taste is unexpected and deeply savoury, closer to roasted chicken than anything vegetal, layered, intense, and insistent. Like Hitchcock, the menu begins with a slap, not to shock, but to make a promise. From here, the direction is set.
Next, thin slices of pickled pumpkin shaped into tulip petals are placed on the metal pole, then on the table. Each flower is filled with goat’s cream, pumpkin seeds pipian, tomatillo, green chilli and elderberry. Umami, crunch and acidity mix perfectly. Alongside it, pumpkin juice is poured, clean and remarkably satisfying.
White asparagus follows, lightly blanched in seawater, then briefly charred and split into thin strands. The spears are tied with chives into a flower and served with fresh asparagus jus, wasabi, and yuzu. Heat, salinity, and acidity stay in balance.
The second movement remains in this room, and it is still maritime. Greenbone and baby pāua arrive with mineral depth and firmness, ocean flavours that hold their shape rather than dissolving.
Steamed in seawater, butterfish (greenbone) arrives topped with whitebait and finished with beurre blanc. It is soft and rich, tasting of fat and salt, coating the mouth without blunting attention. New Zealand king crab follows, clean and sweet, its natural richness held in check and left largely alone. Curing, drying, and fermentation sit quietly behind these dishes, shaping their structure and intensifying their taste.
Then the restaurant asks us to move.
We walk up the stairs to the charcuterie room. Vaughan welcomes us himself, smiling broadly, fully in command of the room. Once an office, now serving as a private dining room, is darker and enclosed, sealed behind heavy doors, with small tables pushed close to the walls. Hanging meats line the walls. Game birds wait overhead. The air smells faintly of smoke, fat, and time. This is where the menu pivots inland. Lamps are lifted, light tightened. Vaughan introduces dishes with his loud laugh and vivid stories.
Tui wicked wing of Rakiraki duck comes first, dense and savoury, the flavour deepening as it warms. Wild boar snout follows, a thick-cut mortadella served on a sanguinaccio crumpet with liver butter. It is dense, rich, unapologetic, a study in texture that slides, grips, and releases in sequence. The flavour stays long after the bite, leaving an intense taste of very mature blue cheese in my mouth. Almost too much.
Back in the main room, Mānuka-smoked eel arrives on a dense, seeded bread inspired by Vogel’s. Made using local pumpkin, sunflower, poppy, harakeke, and sesame seeds. It is finished with a reduction of Amisfield Pinot Noir 2019. Sweet, smoky and savoury.
Only at the end does the night step outside. The terrace is cold and fully dark, heaters glowing, blankets pulled close. Fire takes over as the primary element. Sparks lift and vanish. Smoke clings briefly to coats and hair. Beside the open-fire kitchen, the final game sequence arrives — mallard, wild hare, the logic of the whole beast made literal. The meat tastes of flame and restraint, edges charred, centres yielding, fat rendered just enough to carry flavour without softening it. The demi-glace sauce is intense, dark, and concentrated. The cold sharpens the wine. The fire sharpens everything else.
Desserts come strong. The Putangitangi duck-head ice cream cake follows, a dish often referred to as New Zealand’s “illegal” dessert. Spiker red deer’s milk ice cream arrives shaped as a horn set on a bare skull, poured with a dark, blood-caramel sauce. A final course carries five senses of the north, and the shape of Pupurangi “the kauri snail”.
When we finish the last sip of wine, we leave feeling full, warm, slightly smoky, and alert.
The Point of It All
What ultimately separates Vaughan Mabee from the global noise is not extremity, but intelligence applied without fear. His cooking is brave because it is reasoned. He understands exactly how far to push, where discomfort becomes expressive rather than gratuitous, and when pleasure needs to be earned instead of delivered. This is not instinct masquerading as genius; it is judgment sharpened by years of friction with land, regulation, distance, and doubt.
Mabee’s seriousness lies in his refusal to perform accessibility. He does not translate his place for the world, or simplify it for approval. He builds a system strong enough to hold contradiction: wildness and control, generosity and severity, humour and menace, and trusts it to stand. That confidence is rare. It marks a chef working at the level of authorship, not influence: someone shaping a body of work rather than chasing relevance and fame.
Amisfield proves that global significance does not require proximity to power, trend, or audience. It depends on clarity, stamina, and the courage to stay put long enough for vision to harden into form. Mabee has done that work. The result is a restaurant that demands to be experienced fully, on its own terms. That, finally, is what travelling for dinner was meant to feel like.
PS.
In 2026, Michelin will publish its first New Zealand selection, covering Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown, with inspectors already dining anonymously ahead of the June 2026 release.
By then, Amisfield will already have done something no New Zealand restaurant had managed before: it entered The World’s 50 Best Restaurants extended list at No. 99 in 2025. It won Best Dining Experience and three Knives at The Best Chef Awards. It holds three Hats (19.5/20) from Cuisine’s guide and continues to be described, in plain language, as the country’s defining fine-dining destination. La Liste’s 2026 results even name it Best Restaurant in New Zealand. These are not trophies for having a nice view. Queenstown has views for free.
Practicalities
Restaurant: Amisfield Restaurant
Chef: Vaughan Mabee
Location: Lake Hayes Estate, 10 Arrowtown-Lake Hayes Road, Frankton, Queenstown 9371, New Zealand
Distance: approx. 10–15 minutes from Queenstown centre
Open: Wed - Sun, Dinner Tasting Menu ($595), Lunch Tasting Menu ($395), The Gallery Menu A la Cart, Bespoke WIne Experience
Website: Amisfield
Time commitment: Expect a long evening. This is not a compressed tasting
Reservations: Essential - Book well in advance, particularly during peak travel seasons
