This Hagrid-like chef works magic with fantastic beasts

“I shoot my own deer,” Mabee says when asked where his venison comes from.

On the menu are items that look like they belong in a cabinet-of-curiosities display. The Pütangitangi duck dessert, for example, is an ice cream cake covered in liquefied pastry, moulded to look like the severed beak of the native duck.

“The Pütangitangi duck is a protected native in New Zealand and it is an offence to hunt or kill protected wildlife,” Mabee says.

“I love the Pütangitangi duck because they mate for life and I had to put it on my menu, so I fashioned it into an ice cream where the head is made from aerated duck liver ice cream and the beak is filled with a wild elderberry gel.”

Snakes on a plate: Pizza Hut Hong Kong collaboration that’s off the scales

Born and raised in New Zealand, Mabee was brought up at its northernmost tip in the Bay of Islands.

Like many young people from small towns, he couldn’t wait to go out and see the world. He left for California in 1997 on a journey that also took him to Spain, where he ended up under the tutelage of Martín Berasategui for three years.

Berasategui is an expert in Basque cuisine and his eponymous restaurant in Lasarte-Oria has had three Michelin stars since 2001. He owns 14 restaurants that between them hold 12 Michelin stars – the most of any Spanish chef. It is to Berasategui that Mabee attributes his style.

Mabee also started working with René Redzepi at Noma in Copenhagen in 2009 and was part of the team when it came top of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list a year later.

After that, Mabee returned home to New Zealand, where he focused on working with ingredients from the land in which he grew up. With his background in some of the world’s most famous kitchens, he was offered jobs at restaurants and hotels in cities such as Auckland and Christchurch. But it wasn’t until he visited a vineyard restaurant in South Island that he felt he had found the right fit.

“I just fell in love with the restaurant, the architecture and the space,” he says.

The stone structure at the foot of rocky hills has a high steepled roof and exposed wooden beams, and sometimes appears on Instagram with animal carcasses air-drying before service.

Mabee has strong ambitions to make Amisfield as much a destination restaurant as Noma, The Fat Duck in southern England and El Bulli, the now closed restaurant in Roses, Spain.

“Our next stop from here is Antarctica, so I know my work is cut out for me.”

He was 8 when he first cooked. 12 years on, he’s a Hong Kong private chef

Mabee has been making outstanding progress with Amisfield. The restaurant has been awarded three hats by New Zealand’s Cuisine Good Food Guide – the country’s equivalent of three Michelin stars – for six years in a row, and was named New Zealand’s best restaurant in the 2023 guide; Mabee also bagged the innovation award.

While we did not make the 15-hour journey to Queenstown from Hong Kong, we were lucky enough to sample some of Mabee’s creations at a recent four-hands event at Au Jardin in Penang, Malaysia as part of the Kita Food Festival.

There is a certain level of theatre and storytelling when Mabee presents a dish. He enters the room to introduce Lamb’s Tale while standing next to what looks like a fluffy lamb’s tail, presented on stilts and held up like a museum piece.

He tells the story of how, as a teenager working on a friend’s farm, he would help with lamb docking (the clipping of lamb’s tails to avoid flystrike, a parasitic infestation) and how the boss’ wife would take all the tails and burn the wool off over a fire, then wash them and poach them in some beer before putting them over the fire again.

When they ate them they would add large amounts of salt to the gelatinous morsels of meat. He says that when he was younger this was one of his favourite things to eat.

He sets the tail next to him on fire, sending an aroma of smoky, sweet rosemary over the dining room.

What Amsterdam restaurant’s ‘world’s best’ award says about Dutch food

The flammable “wool” on the tail is actually made from lamb fat, spun sugar, rosemary and vinegar, while the lamb’s tail is dry aged then slow-cooked in reused salty lamb fat, deboned then re-formed.

The lamb flavour was punchy because of the high fat content, yet the caramelised sugar and rosemary cut through the meatiness on the palate and then harmonised the flavours.

Dressed in chef blacks, Mabee emanates an almost cult-leader vibe when he presents dessert – a deer skull with antlers intact.

He describes how the fat content of deer’s milk is four times higher than cow’s milk, before removing the antlers and placing them on the plate. This comes as a surprise to diners – the antlers are in fact made of deer’s milk ice cream sprinkled with burnt antler velvet.

As he pours a deep-red-coloured berry sauce over the rich ice cream and jokes about it being deer’s blood reduction, we almost believe him, forgetting that blood is brown when it oxidises. It’s a testament to the magic of storytelling in Mabee’s dishes.

The show is part of an evening at Amisfield, and Mabee acknowledges that a meal there is as much about storytelling as it is the ingredients. But he emphasises that he is still a chef with a responsibility to make dishes people love to eat.

“Our dishes can be complicated and there’s a bit of theatre, but I would never serve anything that wasn’t delicious.”