KITCHEN CULTURE

Acclaimed chef Monique Fiso has won awards – and fans – with her work bringing kai Māori to our plates, but it comes with pressure. As she tells Emily Brookes, championing Aotearoa’s indigenous cuisine is both a responsibility and a privilege.

I“At the same time I’m wondering why kai Māori isn’t well represented in the dining scene. It was like a lightbulb – hello, this is what you should be doing.”

t started, as so many great stories do, with a road trip. Monique Fiso had returned home on holiday from New York, where she’d been working in the kitchens of Michelin-starred chefs, at the same time as an old friend and former colleague. Being foodies now based overseas, they thought they would set off on four wheels and eat their way around the South Island.

“We got on the ferry,” Fiso recalls. “The plan was to drive down to Queenstown and then come back up, and on that trip we couldn’t find anything that we felt was a representation of Māori cuisine.”

The Wellingtonian thought about the other food cultures she’d been exposed to since she left school to study for a diploma in cookery and patisserie at the Wellington Institute of Technology (WelTec): places like France, Mexico or Italy, where not only would there be restaurants serving regional food all over the country but they had exported their national cuisine internationally.

In Aotearoa, Fiso found there were “little touches” of indigenous kai – things like kūtai, green-lipped mussels, or other native kaimoana on menus, but nothing that could be considered an indigenous cuisine. “It really stuck with me.” She returned to New York where, she says, “I just kept thinking about it”. At the same time, Fiso was also thinking about where she wanted to go with her career: did she want to follow her Stateside mentors Brad Farmerie or Missy Robbins into their Asian or Italian-style cuisines? She enjoyed them, but it didn’t sit quite right.

Then in late 2015, after seven years in the Big Apple, came the chance to come home to work at the remote, luxury Riverview Lodge in Hanmer Springs.

“And the two thoughts converged on me: I’m trying to decide what I want to do with all these skills that I’ve learnt and what is going to be the next thing for me, and at the same time I’m wondering why kai Māori isn’t well represented in the dining scene. It was like a lightbulb – hello, this is what you should be doing.”

Fiso, 36, is of Samoan, Māori (Ngā Rauru, Ngāti Ruanui) and Pākehā descent. She spent the early part of her life in the Porirua suburb Cannon’s Creek, a community so densely Polynesian that she once told RNZ she thought she lived in Samoa until she was about 4, and later moved to leafier – and whiter – Northland, in central Wellington.

The prevailing food culture of her childhood was Samoan and, as she had discovered, few chefs were seriously working with kai Māori at a restaurant level. So when Fiso decided to establish a pop-up series, she faced a real challenge in terms of figuring out exactly what to cook, and how. She credits people like renowned Māori academic Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal with having done some important work in the space and says “there were some great books out there but they… didn’t go as deep as I wanted to go. So I went on a journey of going around different family members saying ‘Does anyone know anyone who knows about that?’”

As a result, the first few of the pop-up series she would call Hiakai (te reo for hungry, or craving food), Fiso now recalls as “almost kind of cringe”.

She’d come from the style of cuisine broadly known as New American, which essentially means taking global ingredients or techniques and applying to foods familiar to local diners, so this, initially, is how she approached Hiakai as well.

That led to dishes like sous vide chicken with kawakawa seasoning which, Fiso says now, “highlighted the chicken more than the kawakawa… I look at it as a courageous first step but it’s like, man, we’ve come so far”.

Where precisely Hiakai has come to is well-known. After running the pop-ups for two years and receiving not only high praise but a clutch of awards, it opened in 2018 as a 30-seat, brick-and-mortar restaurant on Wallace St in Wellington’s Mt Cook, where it quickly racked up Cuisine hats, prizes, and international acclaim.

Front and centre of that acclaim was Fiso herself, who found herself not only thrust into celebrity chef status (she spent her 30th birthday on the set of Netflix series The Final Table) but suddenly called upon as an authority on and spokesperson for all things kai Māori. “To be honest,” Fiso says, “where Hiakai has gone and how much it’s grown, I was not prepared for that, especially in those early pop-up days. I kind of viewed it as, well, I’ll do this and I’ll see if anyone is even interested in this idea we have. So I don’t think I was prepared for everything that would come next, which maybe is a good thing because there’s a little bit of courage in naivety.”

Now, however, she takes her role as a representative of Aotearoa’s indigenous cuisine very seriously. “At times it can feel a little bit daunting knowing that you are in that position where you have a lot of responsibility, but I also understand that it’s a privilege to be in that position.”

A perk is that it comes with ambassadorial duties, which allows Fiso to meet, work with and learn from other chefs around the world. Recently, she had the chance to team up with Mark Olive, the celebrated Bundjalung Aboriginal Australian chef, as part of the Tasting South Australia trade event to promote South Australian food and drink producers to hospitality professionals in Aotearoa. Together, the pair devised a lunch menu that included sustainable native foods from both sides of the ditch

– there was wallaby, King George whiting smoked over blue gum, hāngī potato and kūmara, a side of pikopiko, kareao and asparagus and, for dessert, a pavlova that the chefs agreed they would call a “collaborative” dish.

“I’ve been a big fan of Mark Olive’s work and his kaupapa, and I’ve got a lot of respect for what he’s done for the cuisine of the first peoples of Australia since the 80s,” Fiso says, explaining why she got involved.

“The fact he’s been so clear about his mission and his vision and he’s still doing it, I just wanted to learn more from him and see him in action, see what ingredients he was working with.”

The Tasting South Australia indigenous lunch came just a couple of weeks after Fiso had sat on an Indigenous Voices panel at the Hawai’i Food Festival with a number of other chefs championing pre-colonial food traditions.

“We were all saying how it’s kind of daunting. We all started in cooking to be chefs and as our careers have gone on we represent not just cooking but also our culture. It comes with a lot of responsibility that European chefs can’t understand because they do their mahi without having to think about representing a wider group of people.”

Fiso still loves cooking and is hands-on at Hiakai. She reckons she might have missed two services since the restaurant opened. But she credits much of its success to her partner in business and life, Katie Monteith. The couple met a few months after the restaurant opened, when Fiso, on the hunt for new ingredients, went to the urban farm Monteith was working at.

“So we basically met over kōwhitiwhiti, watercress,” Fiso chuckles, “the most romantic story ever. We always laugh. ‘How did you guys meet? Over some watercress.’”

At the time, Fiso says, “Hiakai was growing at a pace that was probably faster than I was able to keep up with on my own and I needed some help, so along came Katie onto the scene and she just transformed the way we were doing things.”

With a background mainly in community work, Monteith, whose official role is general manager, was able to bring a different organisational perspective to the running of the restaurant. “I don’t know how I did it before she came along. I sort of think, when was I sleeping? She is a genius, and so super organised and detail-focused, and definitely fills the gaps where I think I have weak points. And I like to think I do the same for her.”

Fiso says Monteith’s influence has been integral to establishing Hiakai’s character. Though the set menu is $225 per person for food and beverages, Fiso bristles at the term “fine dining”, which she finds “very stiff, very Eurocentric”.

A big factor in the menu’s comparatively high price, she points out, is the lack of broad commercial availability of many of the ingredients it uses, as well as its kaupapa of working as sustainably as possible (for example, she wouldn’t do that sous vide chicken anymore; too much plastic).

“We feel like we’re kind of rule-breakers,” Fiso says. “Our style of service is quite relaxed and we try to make it a quite inviting, non-intimidating experience.”

Most of their clientele is Kiwi, a fact that clearly makes Fiso happy. She likes using Hiakai as a way of educating people about what they’re eating. “Without turning it into a university… We try to make it a really engaging, fun way to not only dine and have a great night but also come away learning a little bit more about Aotearoa.”

Another Hiakai teaching tool is Fiso’s book, which she published to yet more acclaim – it won multiple awards, including an Ockham – in 2020. “Katie and I are in the process of starting to write another pukapuka,” Fiso reveals. “I can’t say too much, but it’s one of those things where you finish the book and go, ‘Oh gosh that was stressful, why did I ever sign up for that – I’ve got another idea!’”

People would say she works all the time, Fiso says, and they might be right. But she can’t imagine doing anything else.

“Sometimes on the hard days I think, I should have become an accountant, and then I think – no you don’t, you love being on the move, you love being creative, you love working with kai. This is you. This is what you do.”

“As our careers have gone on we represent not just cooking but also our culture. It comes with a lot of responsibility that European chefs can’t understand because they do their mahi without having to think about representing a wider group of people.”