Hawke’s Bay is not just Aotearoa’s Great Wine Capital, we are also New Zealand’s Food and Wine Country. With fertile soils and a temperate climate, in Hawke’s Bay you are never far from a piece of land growing and nurturing the finest of fresh ingredients to stock your pantry and fill your fridge. It is little wonder that many of our region’s incredible wineries, restaurants and bars have local produce at the core of their menu offerings.
Multi award-winning Craggy Range Winery has long been promoting the source of the ingredients on their delicious seasonally changing menu, including how far (or rather, how close) some of their suppliers are. Now, Craggy Range also boasts their own organic and bio-dynamic kitchen garden to embody the essence of garden-to-plate cuisine at its best. Spanning 800 square metres and featuring purpose-built glasshouses, their dedicated garden team collaborates closely with their kitchen crew year-round to ensure a seamless flow of crops and the ability to grow a curated selection of unique vegetable varieties that can be challenging to source elsewhere. Craggy Range has aspired to become New Zealand’s first closed-loop garden-to-table restaurant.
Another top Hawke’s Bay winery restaurant that puts an enormous emphasis on local, sustainable, organic and fresh is Black Barn. Their Bistro works with many of the local growers, with produce often delivered directly to the kitchen door by the growers themselves. Some suppliers also sell through Black Barn’s own Growers’ Market, held every Saturday morning throughout summer. This, alongside plantings of their own around the vineyard, let’s them create just about everything from scratch.
In a semi-rural setting, St George’s Restaurant embraces farm-to-table dining with 90% of its ingredients grown and nurtured in the grounds surrounding the restaurant. Picture this: nestled under a grapevine, you bite into their famous crispy pork belly. The fennel and beetroot were picked that morning. The pork is free-range from a local farm. The plums have been foraged from neighbouring properties. The gardens surrounding their venue aren’t there for looks, they sustain the restaurant year-long with their bounty.
It’s not just restaurants that champion the local ethos either. Two of Hawke’s Bay’s hippest city bars are dedicated to foraged ingredients. Ex-winemakers Kate Galloway and David Ramonteu are the brainchild behind Hastings Distillers, New Zealand’s first producer of certified organic artisan spirits and liqueurs. Their decades-long background in winemaking provided an ideal starting point to further explore their long-time love of all things botanical, creating a range of gins and spirits using botanicals that are either wild foraged or grown in local ‘gin gardens’, farmed using biodynamic methods.
Teresa Cocktail Bar in the heart of Napier also celebrates local and seasonal unique produce. Owner Andrea Marseglia is all about sustainability with a strong focus on foraging. He is so passionate on these topics he co-founded Neighbourhood Foraging; a platform where people can learn about foraged local flora and how to use it in cocktails!
A foraged and locally sourced menu is around every grapevine when you drink and dine in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand’s Great Wine Capital!