Postcard from Lyttelton: the one-man restaurant in New Zealand’s hipster harbour

Having emerged from three years in a frozen hell, the survivors aboard the Terra Nova arrived in Lyttelton Harbour in 1913. They’d sailed right into a world of color and confusion. “All the time we seemed for timber, folks and homes,” wrote the diarist-explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard in his seminal e book The Worst Journey within the World. “How totally different it was from the day we left and but how a lot the identical: as if we had dreamed some horrible nightmare and will scarcely imagine we weren’t dreaming nonetheless.”

The boys had been welcomed ashore and commenced to inform the unimaginable, horrible story of Captain Scott’s fatally incompetent mission to the South Pole. 100 and 10 years later, not all ships are being welcomed into the previous port with such heat. Arriving from my very own Antarctic voyage, I observed some amateurish, plain-spoken graffiti simply outdoors the port authority’s boundary: “CRUISE SHIPS NO NO GOOD”.

There have been a number of causes for the anger, one being a sudden drop in water high quality since cruise ships the scale of Imperial Star Destroyers started returning post-pandemic. One other was an egg scarcity attributable to new animal welfare laws. As one native put it: “We’re fortunate if we are able to purchase six eggs at a time and so they are available in wanting tens of 1000’s.” 

Actually somewhat city a mountain away from Christchurch, Lyttelton is a curious place the place chain shops don’t thrive, independence is cherished and residents are prone to have facial piercings. These hipsters have had a reasonably tight grip in town for years, however a part of their explicit model of gentrification has seen the weekend farmers’ market thrive and the excellence of the espresso soar. 

It has an outrageously lovely setting too, screwed into the bay like a knot in mahogany, with views over the harbour to the volcanic Banks Peninsula. I’d been at sea for a month, and it felt like excellent terra nova for me, a spot to soak up the color inexperienced and inhale the perfumes of late-summer flowers. 

I stayed with a buddy for every week, filling the times with walks round city and feverishly caffeinated conversations. To thank her for her hospitality, I wished to take Andrea (an Antarctic information for a part of the yr) to the very best restaurant on the town, however it appeared to have closed, presumably due to the pandemic. But on the identical web site, one other, smaller restaurant had popped up. It was there, within the Mapu Take a look at Kitchen, that I met Giulio Sturla.

Sturla was doing every thing himself, from ordering particular person bottles of wine for service, choosing fruits from the backyard and washing up

“What’s a restaurant?” he requested me in a tone that lay someplace between confrontational and philosophical. Sturla, who’s initially from Chile, determined that, within the post-pandemic world, he’d moderately not have to put anybody off ever once more, and so was doing every thing in Mapu himself. This included ordering particular person bottles of wine for service, choosing fruits from the backyard simply outdoors, and even doing the washing-up later within the day.

“I don’t have workers so I can afford to make use of solely premium components,” he mentioned. “I must do 20 covers every week, I don’t care if it’s all in someday. In fact, I can do greater than that, however that’s the quantity for it to work.”

I questioned how lengthy a one-man operation may thrive, however the chef confirmed few indicators of self-doubt.

“Look, if I reduce my finger or I get actually sick, I’ve received an issue, I do know,” he mentioned. “However for now, that is working. I’m in management. I get to spend time with my daughters in the course of the week. What’s a restaurant? It doesn’t have to be the one factor in your life.”

We spoke for an hour, about meals and Lyttelton, about the truth that his earlier restaurant had been born after the dual earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, and the way this one was born out of the pandemic. I requested Sturla if he wanted calamity to be entrepreneurial. He laughed and shrugged: “Perhaps.”

The following evening, Andrea and I arrived for a five-course dinner, taking a 3rd of the six seats arrayed across the tiny kitchen. The opposite 4 friends had been all West Coast Individuals. The couple to our proper had been gourmets from San Francisco, one in every of whom labored at David Barzelay’s two-Michelin-star restaurant Lazy Bear. To our left, the couple had made cash in tech and had just lately retired. (Deeper into the tasting menu, it turned out to be Amazon cash. They’d eaten at Lazy Bear many instances.) 

Altogether we had been an eclectic group, however we quickly had the restaurant in frequent. Sturla didn’t fairly spin plates however at instances he appeared to spin between them, dazzling us along with his creativity and power, on a regular basis dipping out and in of our conversations, realizing that later he’d be on pot-washing responsibility, then taking good care of future reservations. One way or the other the standard by no means dropped, as we moved from crayfish with banana noodles to whitebait cooked in fig leaves to pine-cone torched beef. It actually did appear to be a brand new means of doing issues — unsustainable long-term, maybe, however incontestably lovely within the second.

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