Scarce produce a recipe for distress
First, restaurants couldn’t get any staff. Now, NZ’s terrible summer means potatoes are tough to find for their menus, as the bad weather has lashed harvests. Emily Brookes reports on the perfect storm that impacts your plate.
First, restaurants couldn’t find enough staff. Now, it’s potatoes. That’s a blow for Alric Hansen, head chef and co-owner of Wellington’s Highwater Eatery, who, in an attempt to simplify the menu, recently added fried potatoes for the first time.
‘‘We’ve always said we’re not going to have chips on the menu, but now we do. It kind of dumbs down our offering. It’s not what we want to do, but what we need to do.’’
That ‘‘dumbing down’’ began as a response to a lack of staff. Highwater took a red pen to its opening hours, cutting lunch and brunch services so it’s only open four nights a week, and reworked the menu to make it as simple as possible from both a prep and service perspective.
That included Hansen swallowing his pride and offering a bowl of fries, described on the Highwater menu as ‘‘Fried Perla potatoes, lovage salt, summer herbs, tarragon emulsion’’.
And then the weather hit. ‘‘(Potatoes) certainly don’t like wet soil,’’ Hansen deadpans. The price of a kilo of potatoes has tripled or quadrupled.
The cyclonic summer of 2022-23 was catastrophic for some of the most fertile areas of the North Island. Compounded with already squeezed supply chains and high prices, it’s forcing restaurants to rapidly rethink their menus.
Of course, this is nothing new. ‘‘It all starts from Covid,’’ says Ben Bayly. The well-known restaurateur who owns Ahi and its newly opened Commercial Bay neighbour Origine in Auckland’s CBD, The Grounds in Henderson, and Aosta in Arrowtown.
Post-Covid, inflation pushed up the price of fresh produce. Commercial rents increased, as did wages – ‘‘which is a good thing,’’ Bayly acknowledges. ‘‘But you have to change your business model as wages increase. It makes you very thrifty.’’
For Bayly, one thrifty move was taking over an organic farm in Patuma¯ hoe, South Auckland, to provide produce to the restaurants. That’s helped cut down on outgoings – imperative for Bayly, who slashed costs in mid-2020 after the effects of the first nationwide lockdown saw him faced with losing his home – and now is giving him much-needed options.
The gardens were largely
insulated from the Auckland floods, Bayly says. Cyclone Gabrielle caused some wind damage but left the growth mostly intact.
Which is good, because many of the staples the restaurant relies on have almost entirely evaporated, with the price of what’s left prohibitively high.
‘‘Lettuces, herbs, baby spinach, spinach, any leafy things,’’ Bayly rattles off. ‘‘You can’t get dill to save your life.
Avocados, lemons – citrus is super hard to get. Herbs.’’
Remember those images of onions washed from their fields in Pukekohe? The weather wreaked havoc on onion season – the veg is harvested in late summer, as are many common varieties of potato.
Hansen is now seeing onions – a ‘‘building block of cuisine’’ – at $14 a kilo, when he’d usually expect to pay $3 or $4.
So what’s a chef to do? Well, where you can, you get creative.
‘‘Poor man’s parsley is the top of the carrot,’’ says Bayly. ‘‘Everyone throws the tops of the carrots out, we chop them down and use them. Lemon can be replaced with a good-quality vinegar, like apple cider.’’ Mushrooms, he notes, are grown inside, so haven’t been affected by the adverse weather. ‘‘Maybe we’ll put a mushroom dish on early.’’
The rock melon on Highwater’s popular burrata has been replaced with persimmon, which is still coming in from areas like South Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty.
And the cauliflower side dish that would usually be half a cauli and not much else now includes ‘‘myriad other garnishes or other added-value things,’’ says Hansen. ‘‘Cauliflower’s so expensive we have to drop the size to maintain the price, so add value without bulking it up or making it too big.’’
But there are some things, like onions, that aren’t so easily subbed out or replaced.
In that case, says Hansen, ‘‘You have to suck it up and pay it and pass it on to the customer.’’ Restaurants, however, aren’t like supermarkets or petrol companies; people will just stop going if prices get too high.
‘‘Everything that comes in, prices get checked: can we afford this?’’ says Bayly. ‘‘Because prices go up without notification.’’
Restaurant diners don’t tolerate fluctuating prices.
‘‘You’re booking a flight late on Air NZ they’ll just put the price up. We can’t do that.’’
So restaurant profit margins get thinner and thinner.
‘‘A lot of businesses wouldn’t get out of bed if they’re not making 10% (profit),’’ Bayly says. ‘‘But a lot of restaurants aren’t making 10%, if any at all.’’
The pressure on restaurant pricing is coming from many other points than just supply.
Hansen is particularly concerned about the lack of migrant workers for low-income jobs, which affects restaurants in the back and front of house as well as planting, picking and processing.
‘‘Even the courier system in Wellington here is shocking,’’ he says. ‘‘You can’t rely on stuff turning up.’’
The summer’s effects are far from over, Hansen reckons.
He’s expecting other basics like carrots and broccoli to be short in supply, high in price and possibly poor in quality as the cooler months set in.
‘‘I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet,’’ he says grimly.
Bayly, while not unrealistic about the challenges of his industry, is more upbeat, and is looking ahead to better times.
‘‘Restaurant people are tough, man,’’ he says.
‘‘When the suppliers who’ve been affected are back online I’ll be buying their stuff.’’