What to Eat and Drink in New Zealand

New Zealand does not have a large restaurant culture and it does have extraordinary raw material. That is the whole shape of eating here: the country is a farm and a fishery with a very good coffee habit, and the best meals you eat will mostly be simple things made from something that was alive near

The practical news is reasonable. Menu prices include tax, tipping is not expected, and a motel kitchenette plus a good supermarket turns half your meals into small money. Someone eating well spends $55 to $80 a day. The full picture is in what two weeks in New Zealand costs.

The seafood, which is the reason to pay attention

Green-lipped mussels. Farmed in the Marlborough Sounds, large, sweet and cheap. Steamed with white wine and garlic, eaten at a table looking at the water they came out of. A kilo costs less than a main course.

Bluff oysters. The genuinely famous one. Dredged wild from Foveaux Strait in the deep south, in season roughly March to August, and rationed by a strict quota. They are large, briny and unlike a farmed Pacific oyster in every way. If you are in the country in the season, order them, and do not be surprised by the price, which reflects a small wild fishery rather than a markup.

Crayfish at Kaikoura. New Zealand rock lobster, sold from roadside caravans on the coast road north of the town. Half a crayfish with butter and a lemon, eaten at a picnic table with seals on the rocks below. It is expensive and it is one of the best meals in the country.

Whitebait fritters. A West Coast institution, a short season in spring, and essentially an omelette holding a great many tiny transparent fish. It is also expensive, at times startlingly so, and the fishery is under real pressure with ongoing debate about its sustainability. Try one, once, and know what you are eating.

Salmon in the Mackenzie. Farmed in the canals near Twizel, in glacial meltwater at high altitude, and sold from a shed. Sashimi grade, cheap, and eaten in a car park with a plastic fork on the way to Aoraki.

Fish and chips. The national Friday dinner. Ask for the local fish rather than the generic option: blue cod in the south, snapper in the north, terakihi and gurnard in between.

The land

Lamb, obviously, and the thing to know is that New Zealanders mostly eat it simply and rare. A rack or a shoulder in a good country pub is better than the same thing dressed up in a city.

Venison, farmed and excellent, on menus everywhere in Central Otago.

Beef, grass fed year round, which gives it a different flavour to grain-finished beef.

Kumara, the sweet potato brought to the country by Polynesian voyagers, roasted, mashed or made into chips. It is on nearly every menu and it is the ingredient with the longest history on the list.

Cheese. Small producers around Nelson, Marlborough and Oamaru, and a supermarket cheese counter better than most countries manage.

Maori food, and how to encounter it properly

A hangi is food cooked in a pit oven, with heated stones, wrapped baskets and earth over the top, steamed for several hours. Meat, kumara, potatoes, pumpkin and stuffing, and the flavour it takes on from the earth and the steam is the point.

There are two ways to meet it. The first is a large evening show near Rotorua with a concert, a buffet and several hundred people, which is competently done and is a performance. The second is a smaller evening at a marae or with a family operation, with fewer people, a proper welcome, a conversation and food served from the pit rather than a bain-marie. We book the second, and we will tell you which is which rather than letting the brochure decide.

Beyond hangi, look for rewena, a potato-sourdough bread, boil-up, kina if you are brave, which is sea urchin and an acquired taste, and horopito, a native peppery leaf now used by serious chefs. Modern Maori and Pacific cooking in Auckland and Wellington is one of the more interesting things happening in New Zealand food.

Cafes, coffee and the bakery

The cafe is a genuine New Zealand institution and it is where you should eat breakfast and often lunch.

The coffee vocabulary: a flat white is espresso with steamed milk and minimal foam, and New Zealand and Australia have argued about who invented it for forty years. A long black is espresso poured over hot water. A fluffy is warm frothed milk for children, and every cafe in the country makes them.

The bakery pie deserves its own paragraph. Mince and cheese, steak, or bacon and egg, in a hot pastry case, from a bakery in a small town, eaten in the car park. It is the road trip food of New Zealand, it costs $5 to $8, and the good ones are very good indeed. In a country where the drives take longer than you planned, this matters more than it sounds. See the real driving times.

Wine, which is world class and worth a day

Marlborough. Sauvignon Blanc that changed the international market, plus increasingly serious Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Around Blenheim, and easy to visit from Picton after the ferry.
Central Otago. Pinot Noir grown at the southern edge of where grapes will ripen, near Cromwell, Bannockburn and Gibbston, twenty minutes from Queenstown.
Hawke’s Bay. Syrah and Bordeaux blends, and the country’s most underrated wine region, next to an art deco town rebuilt after the 1931 earthquake.
Waipara and North Canterbury. Riesling and Pinot Noir, an hour from Christchurch.
Martinborough. A small, walkable Pinot Noir village an hour from Wellington.

One practical point. New Zealand has a low drink-driving limit and it is enforced, and the wine regions are places you drive to. A half-day with a driver is $90 to $160 per person and it is the correct way to do this. We build it that way, and our food and wine route uses two regions properly rather than five in passing.

Craft beer is excellent, particularly in Wellington and Nelson, and the hops grown near Nelson are exported to brewers worldwide.

Sweet things and oddities

Hokey pokey ice cream, vanilla with pieces of honeycomb toffee, which is the national flavour and is sold everywhere. Pavlova, meringue with cream and fruit, which New Zealand and Australia both claim and which we are not going to adjudicate. Afghan biscuits, chocolate and cornflakes. Lolly cake, which is exactly as strange as it looks. L&P, a lemon soft drink from Paeroa that New Zealanders are sentimental about. Feijoa, in autumn, a small green fruit with a perfumed flavour that people either love or find overwhelming, and which almost never leaves the country.

What is overrated

Manuka honey as a souvenir. It is a real product with real research behind some of the claims, and it is also the most aggressively marketed thing in every airport shop, sold at prices that have very little to do with what is in the jar. If you want it, buy it from a producer at a farmers market, not from a display near the departure gate.

The famous Queenstown burger queue. A good burger, an hour of your evening in a line, and a town full of restaurants with tables free. Once, if you enjoy that sort of thing.

The big hangi and concert shows. Competent, professional, and a show. The smaller evenings are the better version of the same thing.

Winery restaurant long lunches on a driving day. Delightful, and then somebody has to drive four hours over a pass. Put the wine day where it belongs, next to a night in the same town.

Fine dining in general, in a country whose strength is elsewhere. New Zealand has a handful of excellent serious restaurants and they are worth one evening. They are not more memorable than crayfish from a caravan at Kaikoura or mussels at a table in the Marlborough Sounds, and they cost six times as much.

Buying dinner in Milford or at the glaciers. Limited choice, captive market. Eat in Te Anau, and take lunch with you. More on that day in how to visit Milford Sound.

Eating on the road, practically

Supermarkets are good, and Countdown, New World and Pak’nSave are everywhere. A motel kitchenette plus a supermarket is how New Zealanders travel their own country.
Small towns close early. In much of the South Island, dinner is served from six and the kitchen shuts at eight thirty. Arriving in a small town at nine means the petrol station.
Farmers markets run on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and the ones in Nelson, Christchurch and Hawke’s Bay are worth building a morning around.
Book ahead in Queenstown, in summer, for anything you actually want. Everywhere else, walk in.

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Frequently asked questions

Is New Zealand food expensive?

Groceries and casual food are reasonable, restaurant dinners are moderately expensive, and seafood at the top end is priced by scarcity rather than by fashion. The absence of tipping helps.

Where is the best eating?

Auckland and Wellington for range, Wellington for coffee and craft beer, Marlborough and Hawke’s Bay for wine with food, Kaikoura and the deep south for seafood. Queenstown has the most restaurants and not the best ones.

Can we eat well with dietary restrictions?

Yes. Vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free are widely labelled and understood, and cafes handle them easily. Choice narrows in small towns, so we flag the nights where self-catering is the better plan.

Do we tip?

No. Service is included and staff are paid a proper wage.

Is the tap water safe?

Yes, and it is excellent. In the backcountry, treat water from streams below huts. —

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What to eat and drink in New Zealand, and where