Celebrating an icon

IYou’d be hard-pressed to find anyone from the Wellington region who doesn’t know, and love, Nikau Cafe. Now its essence has been distilled into a cookbook for everyone to recreate the magic at home. Dish chats to Kelda Hains, the culinary brain behind the much-loved local. f anybody deserves a well-earned break over the summer holidays, it’s Nikau chef-owner Kelda Hains. Involved now with two eateries – the aforementioned beloved Wellington institution and the cool new kid in the capital, Rita – she’s also just released a cookbook, celebrating the recipes and ethos of the former. So it’s no wonder she hasn’t really thought much about what’s on her own Christmas menu, “I haven't made any plans this year, I was thinking I might just put my feet up and do a bit of gardening,” she says.

The garden is important to Kelda on many levels – at home, in the restaurant’s roof garden and at the community orchard is where she recharges. But it’s the garden, too, that often becomes the inspiration for many of her dishes. As she writes in her introduction to Nikau Cafe, “Just as good cooks never fasten on a particular fish to cook but wait instead to see what is freshest, so too should we treat vegetables. Why do we expect vegetables always to fit in?”.

This philosophy is evident flicking through the pages of this gorgeous love letter to Nikau – each chapter in the book is named for a key restaurant dish, with the recipes that follow flowing on from there. So, for instance, the “Herbed Lentil Salad” chapter includes other complementary elements to add on, such as a tomato salad with goat’s cheese, and a twice-cooked eggplant salad – the primary recipe being the building block for a meal.

“I wanted to share how I think about cooking – so someone of any ability would benefit,” Kelda says of the book. “I also tried to distill some Nikau classics – anyone interested in replicating some of our favourites will find rich pickings.”

And there’s plenty to pull from. Kelda’s been cooking at Nikau for 19 years, which is an extraordinary feat in an industry where places and names can often seem fleeting. The winning formula is a combination of factors, a significant one being the “accidental magic” of Kelda’s business partnership with co-owner Paul Schrader (they also joined forces for Rita – so named for Kelda’s grandmother).