Star-gazing, Matariki kai and Michelin stars
Saturday, 11 July 2026
Denise Irvine is a Hamilton freelance journalist and food writer, and a regular Waikato Times contributor.
It is Matariki weekend and I’m talking about stars in honour of this. I had the best location for star-gazing in my childhood, in the foothills of Mt Maungatautari, near Cambridge: step out onto our farm at night and there were big, black velvety skies and shining stars overhead, and my father was a helpful tutor in the constellations and clusters.
He’d show my sister and me how to stand on our tip-toes, then reach up and trace Orion, the Pot, with our fingertips, and he always had star-stories to tell. A silly one about how he’d tried to count the stars in the Milky Way, another more significant one about the Southern Cross being the marker of his place in the world. I don’t recall ever being shown the Matariki group (we previously knew it as Pleiades or the Seven Sisters). Maybe we never got out of bed in time because you have to be up early in winter to see it, about 5.30am or thereabouts.
It seems such a good thing, though, that Matariki has become our new-ish public holiday, celebrating the Māori New Year and the rise of the exquisite little star cluster, also embracing universal themes of remembering loved ones who have died, sharing food with family and friends, and looking ahead to the future. The holiday is growing in stature, now the vehicle for many public events and private celebrations.
My contribution to a Matariki lunch with friends on Friday was making a peppery kawakawa pesto to spoon into bowls of Seven-Vegetable Soup. For the pesto, the young leaves were picked from the kawakawa trees in my garden; I chopped them a bit and blitzed them with olive oil, a handful of parsley, toasted walnuts, parmesan and garlic, and added salt and pepper to taste. Just like basil pesto only Aotearoa-style not Italian, and the recipe is adapted slightly from the local Nourish magazine.
A number of Hamilton restaurants have turned on special events to mark Matariki, among them an excellent vegetarian dinner at Hayes Common hosted by co-owner Lisa Quarrie. It was a full house, the ingredients on our plates were grown locally, recipes were the work of Raglan cookbook author Emma Galloway, and I’ve since made her delicious Harissa-Butter Roasted Broccoli. (They thoughtfully handed out recipe cards at the end of the evening.)
While we’re talking food and stars, it’s hard to bypass the presence in New Zealand of Michelin, the prestigious global restaurant guide, and the generous number of accolades it dished out at its inaugural dinner in Auckland on June 30. There may have been more commentary on this event than there are stars in the Milky Way, but as an early sceptic on the Government’s $6.3m spend on importing Michelin I need to do some revision.
Putting aside the fact that Michelin’s anonymous inspectors were annoyingly limited to restaurants in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown, and that a large sum of money changed hands in order to get them to New Zealand, it was a real pleasure to see so many places recognised: to see the delight as chefs stepped up to get their awards, and to hear them acknowledge their hard-working kitchen teams.
A whopping 110 establishments - from good value to fine dining - got the nod with various stars, Bib Gourmand and Selected awards, and the Michelin Guide’s international director Gwendal Poullennec said New Zealand’s performance had been genuinely impressive. The reported knock-on effect of a boom in bookings is hugely valuable, too, at a difficult time for hospitality. Michelin feels like a win.
Special mention here for star-recipient Sherwood restaurant in Queenstown, where the executive chef is former Hamiltonian Chris Scott. His wife, Hayley Scott, is Sherwood hotel’s general manager, and the couple ran the popular Zinc Bar & Eatery (nowadays Jam) in Queenwood for several years before moving to Queenstown in about 2013.
I was also pleased to see Ortega Fish Shack in Wellington get a star; it’s long been my personal favourite in the capital for its beautiful seafood, Ortega is family-owned, friendly and entirely unpretentious. In short, it has all the essentials of Kiwi hospitality.
While a star for Amisfield restaurant in Central Otago may have been a surprise after its former executive chef Vaughan Mabee was outed (and ousted) earlier this year for his appalling behaviour towards his staff, especially women, Amisfield’s inclusion was a reminder that there are always many other hands on the pans in the kitchen, a salute to the wider team.
And a reminder, too, (supporting Waikato which of course didn’t get a look-in with Michelin), that we have some excellent eateries here with all the chops of good food, service and committed kitchen crews, including Palate, Hayes Common, Little Honey, The Green, Thyme Square, Gothenburg, Sage, Mr Pickles and Chim Choo Ree in Hamilton, Alpino in Cambridge, The Shack and ULO’s Kitchen in Raglan.
Going off-menu, the last star is for a lovely new book called Whistler, by American author Ann Patchett: the plot turns on the events of a snowy winter night near Boston, in Massachusetts, when Eddie Triplett drives his step-daughter Daphne Zabriskie to a raspberry farm on top of a big hill to better see the stars. They are briefly rewarded with a milky wash of glitter before things go awry, and readers are rewarded with a book about kindness, courage, and enduring memories.
It’s a perfect read for a mid-winter Matariki weekend, along with sharing food with family and friends, at home or at a restaurant (Michelin or not), and maybe tracing the stars in the night sky with your fingertips.