Native gastronomy

MONIQUE FISO REINVENTS - TRADITIONAL MAORI FARE FOR HER POP-UP RESTAURANT, HIAKAI.

Monique Fiso is a M-aori-samoan chef who first learnt to cook in her Samoan grandmother’s kitchen. Her parents worked long hours, so as a five-year-old she’d spend her Saturdays with her grandma, going to the markets, picking out ingredients and breaking down the root vegetable taro, ready for Sunday lunch. “Samoan families are massive,” Monique laughs. “So it was like a mini catering business we used to crank out of grandma’s kitchen!”

Two-and-a-half decades later, Monique is cooking on a slightly different scale. For the past few years, she’s dedicated her time to researching and experimenting with traditional M-aori ingredients, all towards the goal of opening Hiakai (translated: ‘hungry’), a modern M-aori pop-up restaurant based in Aotearoa – New Zealand. Monique developed the idea when she was working at New York’s Musket Room, a New Zealand-inspired restaurant far away from her Wellington home. “I was a sous chef at the time, and the head chef would be like, ‘We need to think about how we can make this dish a little more New Zealand.’ Then I’d have to sit there and go, ‘Actually, what does that mean?’” For Monique, who grew up eating homecooked Samoan food, the answer was distinctly Polynesian, but she wanted to push beyond the foods she’d eaten for Sunday lunch. For many New Zealanders, indigenous M-aori cuisine means a mixture of pork, potatoes, h-angi (meat and vegetables cooked in the ground), and ‘boil-up’ – a meaty broth made out of pork bones, watercress, flour dumplings, and sometimes t-ı t-ı , the fatty muttonbirds harvested on New Zealand’s Stewart Island. Though boil-up and h-angi have a place in Monique’s heart, they’re not at the centre of her Hiakai menu. Instead, her research has led her into Aotearoa’s forests and oceans, where she sources ingredients native to the New Zealand environment. Bush herbs, berries and seafood make up a big part of her cuisine – but they haven’t been easy to come by. “When I first came back to New Zealand from New York, I was arrogant,” Monique recalls. “I thought, ‘Maybe no one’s opened this kind of M-aori restaurant because they can’t cook like me.’ I quickly realised this wasn’t about skill. It’s a matter of access, because you can’t just call someone and be like, ‘I want a kilo of bush herbs.’”

To learn about M-aori cuisine, Monique has had to work closely with archives, local elders, and the few people who know M-aori forest lore. In the first few months back home, she would go out and harvest puha (a native green), only to be told off by the local kaum-atua, or elders. “That was the biggest lesson for me,” she says. “Understanding what the customs are around harvesting, collecting, and the whole M-aori lunar calendar. If you do things respectfully – and that’s the only way I want to do them – then you’ve got very specific days you’re meant to be out foraging.” Monique has a better sense of M-aori ingredients now, but she’s also developed a new appreciation for traditional techniques. “People have this idea that M-aori used to just chuck t-ıt-ı birds in the h-angi,” she says. “But no! They actually used to grab the birds and render the fat down, the same way the French-would do with duck. When you really look at the techniques that Maori were using early on – smoking, preserving – they’re extremely sophisticated.”

For Monique, a big part of Hiakai’s goal is to change the way people think about M-aori cooking – both historically and in the present. It’s about working with the past and presenting it in an eye-catching way on a plate. “The food looks modern,” she says, “but these elements have been in New Zealand for ages. Here are oysters that M-aori have been eating forever; here are native berries that no one ever uses. Here’s New Zealand, just in an oyster shell.”