City of f lavour

From the experimental kitchen of Hillside to the extravagant goodness of a dedicated peanut butter shop, Wellington’s booming food scene is guaranteed to please.

It would be safe to say that anyone with an appetite will be incredibly satisfied after a weekender in Wellington. Craft breweries? Tick. Hidden laneways with obscure menus? Tick. Seasonally driven kitchens based on local providores, food miles and foraging? Hard to miss.

With a distinctly meatless, plant-based menu, Hillside is quite literally sitting upon a gentle hill in the suburb of Thorndon – an easy 10-minute drive or gentle walk from the CBD if you’re working up an appetite on the way. Tucked away from the main part of town, the shoebox-sized restaurant site has a well-deserved reputation for fine food, led by owner and chef Asher Boote.

Since their opening in 2015, it’s been all hands on deck with Asher and the team pitching in to create the fit-out,

resulting in a welcoming space that’s as real and unpretentious as the food – he even built his own tables. This is perhaps, New Zealand on a plate, with Boote sourcing ingredients from his veggie patch out the back, while everything else comes – where possible – from growers within a 150-kilometre radius or is foraged nearby.

Last year saw Boote remove meat from the menu – both, he says, as an ethical statement and also to continue to grow and further innovate the style of food Hillside is known for. With seasonally driven creations like marinated heirloom tomatoes in kawakawa oil (native to New Zealand) and local olives, or an asparagus tart made with sunflower and asparagus emulsion, pine oil and a touch of chilli, the origin of the ingredients is paramount to the kitchen, generating tūrangawaewae (a place to stand) which Māori culture acknowledges as feeling and connecting to our earth mother, Papatūānuku, and to ngā tāngata katoa (people).

Boote also regularly hosts wine nights at the venue, with dedicated pairings from Cult Wine, which supports New Zealand artisan winegrowers and producers of natural and lo-fi wine. hillsidekitchen.co.nz

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Hillside Kitchen’s asparagus tart; Asher Boote, head chef at Hillside Kitchen; foraged ingredients at Hiakai; Garage Projects’ line-up; crunchy almond butter toast at Fix & Fogg.