Amisfield’s Vaughan Mabee: ‘I’m never satisfied with anything’
Sunday, 27 July 2025
Top chef Vaughan Mabee has worked in the world’s best kitchens — and often hates what he does. He tells Craig Hoyle why he can’t stop.
Vaughan Mabee wants many things for his son, but there’s one career path he’s already actively trying to discourage – the suggestion that 8-year-old Milton might follow in his footsteps and work in a kitchen.
“He wants to be a chef and I tell him he should do something different,” Mabee says, speaking to Sunday before another full-house dinner service at Amisfield, the Queenstown fine-dining restaurant that earned further international acclaim a few weeks ago. It is the first New Zealand venue to make The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 51-100 list, placing 99th.
There are many reasons why Mabee would rather spare the next generation: the hours; the stress; the constant debilitating pursuit of perfection. The younger Mabee is “already kind of keen” on spending time in the kitchen, but “right now rugby’s his thing, so I hope he’s an All Black and not a cook”.
The tension here is that despite Mabee’s success, he’s frank about hating his job.
“I’m never satisfied with anything. I can be, for one day, and then the next day I’m not satisfied with it. It’s just never-ending. But then at the same time I hate it, but I love it. But the love’s just a little bit more than the hate, it keeps me going!”
A long time ago, Mabee, now 44, wanted to be an architect or an artist. In his own words, he had “a bit of a weird upbringing” with a Kiwi father and American mother, born in London because his father, Paul Mabee, was racing in sailing’s One Ton Cup at the time. That British birth and US parentage would later prove useful, allowing Mabee to work visa-free in California and across Europe.
His family was, he says, “kind of, you know, well off”. The kids went to private school; there were family excursions on a yacht belonging to his grandfather - Milton Mabee, for whom his son is named, of Auckland’s noted Mabee Halstead & Kiddle – and they were “living the Kiwi dream life”.
The privilege was temporarily upended following his parents’ separation, after which the kids were living with their mother “and we kind of had no money”. Mabee was enrolled into Dilworth School – “kind of a mixed bag for us” – and subsequently transferred to Auckland Grammar after his mother entered a relationship with the British consul-general, who to the kids “was kind of like James Bond”.
For 13-year-old Mabee, having gone from riches to rags and back to riches, life at the official British Government residence in Mission Bay was a revelation. “Nelson Mandela came to dinner, crazy things were happening.”
Thus it was that he was properly introduced to the possibilities of good food.
“When we did the events, this cook, chef, this French caterer used to come in and start making canapés and all that kind of stuff. And I still remember them to this day, what he was making. And I was always helping him, and eating a lot and it was really delicious, and it was completely different to what I knew about food and I think that was where I first got my eye on that style of cuisine, and I was really obsessed with it.”
By 15 or so, Mabee was washing dishes in a kitchen in Kerikeri, before moving back to Auckland and the bright lights of Killarney St Brasserie in Takapuna, followed by Cin Cin on Quay – “the coolest little restaurant”, he recalls, with an amazing seafood platter: “I still remember it with the martini glass with the half crayfish and the piece of tuna.”
He was still “really young” when the opportunity arose to move overseas, “probably about 16 and a half, 17”, where the elegance of American hotels drew him towards fine dining in earnest. Now, the kid who had wanted to be an architect or artist was instead captured by the beauty of the plate. “Anything that looked beautiful, or was plated a little bit more nice, I kind of morphed into that idea of cuisine, because it attracted me more … I went to some fancy restaurants and stuff and thought this is what I wanna do.”
Mabee “never really made a goal” of becoming a world-class chef; “it was just work”. And by work, he means the back-breaking slog that will be familiar to many aspiring hospo workers: “I was working seven days a week, never had a day off,” he recalls.
“I just kept on working and learning, and trying to improve my own skillset, just because I’m like anal retentive about every little thing in my life in the kitchen – outside the kitchen I’m a bit of a disaster, but in the kitchen it’s all about making things to the best I can.”
Mabee’s career from there is well-known. He worked in some “really fancy restaurants” in the US, and then did the majority of his fine-dining training in Europe, including a stint as an intern running snacks at Noma, the three-Michelin Star restaurant by René Redzepi in Copenhagen, which was ranked best in the world five times between 2010-2021.
Working at Noma, Mabee recalls, was “a very high-stress position”. He describes Redzepi as a “psychopath – and I love that about him”. “He is an amazing inspiration to me, in the way that he thinks and the way that he just never calms down … I loved the way he infected everyone around him into thinking the same way that he thought.”
Brilliance, of course, comes at a cost, and Noma subsequently announced it was closing its doors to the public, with Redzepi saying in 2023 that the grueling hours and intense workplace culture at the highest levels of fine dining had become “unsustainable”. (Redzepi has since changed course, and Noma remains open.)
Mabee brushes off the suggestion that Redzepi’s comments could have a broader application, acknowledging that while Noma’s former model may not have been sustainable, running dozens of chefs, Amisfield is a very different operation, with only nine. (For the record, he still sees Redzepi as “an amazing inspiration”, and says the pair recently spent time together.)
Mabee’s own moment of truth came not long after Noma, during a visit back to New Zealand. He’d been working in the best restaurants in the world, but they paled in comparison to the fresh snapper on white bread he enjoyed “with copious amounts of butter” while fishing with his father and brother in the Bay of Islands, leaving him “wondering why the hell I ever left this place”.
“I thought you know what, I want to go home.”
Much has been written about his subsequent career trajectory at Amisfield Restaurant and Cellar Door on the shores of Lake Hayes, with the backing of Amisfield owner John Darby. They have regularly featured in Cuisine’s Good Food Awards: Mabee was Chef of the Year in 2019/2020 and awarded the Innovation Award in 2022 and 2024; Amisfield was Restaurant of the Year in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, and retains three hats (the maximum in Australia/New Zealand) at a score of 19.5/20. Since 2024, Mabee has also held three knives – the highest recognition by The Best Chef Awards.
The most recent acclaim, coming in at 99th in the world, had Mabee and Darby “a little bit emotional” at the awards gala in Turin, Italy, in June. “It was really cool to be there and see a lot of my friends that are on the list as well, that I’ve worked with when I was young, whether it was in Spain, or Copenhagen or even California – to kind of be on the list with all of them is really incredible.”
It was, he says, an opportunity to showcase New Zealand on the world stage and drive our potential as a foodie destination. “I was really promoting Aotearoa, promoting our products. We’re an island, we’re so different, it’s not just hobbits and Holdens, there’s things around that that are enticing, with food and wine, that people need to see.”
Mabee acknowledges there’s no such thing as perfection, but that’s not going to stop him from having a bloody good crack. “It’s like an obsession, it’s like a drug. And if I’m not changing and improving, and not loving what I do, I’m finished.”
While he doesn’t “fully understand the way I am”, his wife Julia “understands me correctly”. “She’s not always happy with me, but she loves me deep down, you know!” The couple welcomed a baby daughter, Aya, in June, and true happiness, Mabee says, comes from family: “The thing that makes me the happiest the most is when my son is happy and my wife is happy.”
And if true happiness for Milton, 8, means becoming a chef, then Mabee will support that. He tells a story of his son recently serving a cannoli appetiser made with a slice of mortadella, crushed truffle chips, fermented green chilli sauce and shaved black truffles, “without me giving him any advice”.
“He’s very much like me, in weird ways,” reflects Mabee, acknowledging that perhaps a black jersey may not beckon for Milton after all. But there are other just as exciting things to look forward to.
“All black truffles! He’s into it, for sure.”
For more, click here to read Craig Hoyle’s feature on dining at Amisfield.
The Chef’s Menu at Amisfield is $695 per person, with an additional $600 per person for wine pairings. For bookings and more information visit amisfield.co.nz.