Peter Gordon’s Homeland restaurant and cooking school to close

Monday, 25 March 2024

Top New Zealand chef Peter Gordon is set to close his restaurant, Homeland, after the prime Auckland site was sold to a property developer.

Homeland, based in Wynyard Quarter and which also houses a cooking school, would begin “scaling back and will shut the doors… around the end of July”, Gordon and his business and life partner, Alistair Carruthers CNZM, said in a statement.

The developer was “renovating our building, beginning huge construction works around us and won’t renew our lease.

“We have tried to stay. And we have been looking - unsuccessfully - for another site.”

Classes would continue as scheduled until July 29, but the site was “unlikely” to be able to host events from about May.

A change proposal consultation had begun with Homeland’s “wonderful and extraordinary” staff.

Homeland opened in late 2020, after Gordon moved to back to New Zealand after 31 years in London. In the statement, he and Carruthers said upon opening in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, they had “scenarios for everything we could imagine back then.

“But we didn't expect our landlord selling the site to a property developer that doesn’t see Homeland in its vision.”

Homeland, which holds a Cuisine hat, joins a steadily growing number of influential restaurants around Aotearoa to shut in the last few months, including Auckland’s Pasture and Inca Newmarket, and Hiakai, Shepherd and Field and Green in Wellington.

Gordon and Carruthers said there was “more to be said” about Homeland’s future.

“It isn’t over, but has to change.”