Postcard from Lyttelton: the one-man restaurant in New Zealand’s hipster harbour

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Having emerged from three years in a frozen hell, the survivors aboard the Terra Nova arrived in Lyttelton Harbour in 1913. They had sailed into a world of colour and confusion. “Always we looked for trees, people and houses,” wrote the diarist-explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard in his seminal book The Worst Journey in the World. “How different it was from the day we left and yet how much the same: as though we had dreamed some horrible nightmare and could scarcely believe we were not dreaming still.”

The men were welcomed ashore and began to tell the incredible, terrible story of Captain Scott’s fatally incompetent mission to the South Pole. One hundred and 10 years later, not all ships are being welcomed into the old port with such warmth. Arriving from my own Antarctic voyage, I noticed some amateurish, plain-spoken graffiti just outside the port authority’s boundary: “CRUISE SHIPS NO NO GOOD”.

There were a few reasons for the anger, one being a sudden drop in water quality since cruise ships the size of Imperial Star Destroyers began returning post-pandemic. Another was an egg shortage caused by new animal welfare regulations. As one local put it: “We’re lucky if we can buy six eggs at a time and they come in wanting tens of thousands.” 

Literally a little town a mountain away from Christchurch, Lyttleton is a curious place where chain stores do not thrive, independence is cherished and residents are likely to have facial piercings. These hipsters have had a fairly tight grip on the town for years, but part of their particular brand of gentrification has seen the weekend farmers’ market thrive and the excellence of the coffee soar. 

It has an outrageously beautiful setting too, screwed into the bay like a knot in mahogany, with views over the harbour to the volcanic Banks Peninsula. I’d been at sea for a month, and it felt like ideal terra nova for me, a place to absorb the colour green and inhale the perfumes of late-summer flowers. 

I stayed with a friend for a week, filling the days with walks around town and feverishly caffeinated conversations. To thank her for her hospitality, I wanted to take Andrea (an Antarctic guide for part of the year) to the best restaurant in town, but it seemed to have closed, presumably because of the pandemic. Yet on the same site, another, smaller restaurant had popped up. It was there, in the Mapu Test Kitchen, that I met Giulio Sturla.

Sturla was doing everything himself, from ordering individual bottles of wine for service, picking fruits from the garden and washing up

“What is a restaurant?” he asked me in a tone that lay somewhere between confrontational and philosophical. Sturla, who is originally from Chile, decided that, in the post-pandemic world, he’d rather not have to lay anyone off ever again, and so was doing everything in Mapu himself. This included ordering individual bottles of wine for service, picking fruits from the garden just outside, and even doing the washing-up later in the day.

“I don’t have staff so I can afford to use only premium ingredients,” he said. “I need to do 20 covers a week, I don’t care if it’s all in one day. Of course, I can do more than that, but that is the number for it to work.”

I wondered how long a one-man operation could thrive, but the chef showed few signs of self-doubt.

“Look, if I cut my finger or I get really sick, I’ve got a problem, I know,” he said. “But for now, this is working. I am in control. I get to spend time with my daughters during the week. What is a restaurant? It doesn’t need to be the only thing in your life.”

We spoke for an hour, about food and Lyttleton, about the fact that his previous restaurant had been born after the twin earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, and how this one was born out of the pandemic. I asked Sturla if he needed calamity to be entrepreneurial. He laughed and shrugged: “Maybe.”

The next night, Andrea and I arrived for a five-course dinner, taking a third of the six seats arrayed around the tiny kitchen. The other four guests were all West Coast Americans. The couple to our right were gourmets from San Francisco, one of whom worked at David Barzelay’s two-Michelin-star restaurant Lazy Bear. To our left, the couple had made money in tech and had recently retired. (Deeper into the tasting menu, it turned out to be Amazon money. They had eaten at Lazy Bear many times.) 

Altogether we were an eclectic group, but we soon had the restaurant in common. Sturla didn’t quite spin plates but at times he seemed to spin between them, dazzling us with his creativity and energy, all the time dipping in and out of our conversations, knowing that later he’d be on pot-washing duty, then taking care of future reservations. Somehow the quality never dropped, as we moved from crayfish with banana noodles to whitebait cooked in fig leaves to pine-cone torched beef. It really did seem to be a new way of doing things — unsustainable long-term, perhaps, but incontestably beautiful in the moment.

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