Matt Lambert was just 11 years old when he asked for his first job in a Henderson, Auckland restaurant kitchen.
He might have been knocked back then but three years later he was washing dishes in that restaurant, determined to follow his dream of becoming a chef.
That dream led him to New York and achieving a coveted Michelin star for his 4-month-old restaurant The Musket Room.
Now he is back in New Zealand, a Covid-19 refugee, seeking to share his knowledge and become part of New Zealand’s future food story.
The determination Lambert, who was a guest speaker at last week’s national Food Hui, showed as a child has been evident throughout his career - sometimes to his detriment, he admits.
He worked his way up the kitchen ladder and through an apprenticeship and chefs’ training at speed and began running restaurants in his late teens. By 20 he had opened his own restaurant.
‘‘I’d done everything so early. I had specific goals.’’
Looking back now he can admit it was ‘‘blind ambition’’ without any business or organisational skills to match it.
‘‘I didn’t know much about anything. At 20 I didn’t have the repertoire or vocabulary to communicate my food and my timing was not good for what I wanted to do.’’
But it did make him more serious about what he wanted to achieve and that required learning from the best.
‘‘You learn through failure. I learnt what not to do.’’
He managed to get a spot in Michael Meredith’s kitchen at The Grove and for the first time experienced what a ‘‘serious’’ kitchen was like.
‘‘As a young cook you are shaped and guided by people like him.’’
Then love intervened. He met his future wife, Barbara, who is American, working at The Grove and decided to head back to the US with her.
‘‘I always wanted to work in a Michelin star system. To me it is the benchmark, it is hard work being rewarded, a barometer of where you are at.’’
Michelin is a French system that awards stars to restaurants based on excellence. It does not operate in New Zealand. Instead the country has the ‘‘hat’’ system run by culinary magazine Cuisine.
In New York he worked at various restaurants including one-star Michelin restaurant PUBLIC where he worked his way up to chef de cuisine, but he had a hankering to ‘‘get my own’’.
‘‘It was the rest of the piece of the puzzle. I wanted to be able to take the credit for it.’’
‘‘I’d been working on it a really long time. I liked Elizabeth St as it has the right energy.’’
The idea was to play to his strengths and his background as a New Zealander, so he set out a tasting menu based around the Maori creation story.
It captured the imagination of many and it became a popular place to eat for international guests and celebrities, such as regulars Robert de Niro and Scarlett Johansson.
‘‘It was real crazy. Hard to fathom for a boy from Henderson.’’
He always believed in simplicity and honesty as being the cornerstones of his cooking.
While he had been told there was no way he would get a Michelin star right after he opened, he was always hopeful. But when the call came he did not believe it, thinking it was a friend pulling a joke on him.
‘‘It was definitely the biggest moment in my career.’’
He had left the Musket Room feeling no longer valued there, then Covid-19 hit just as he was developing plans for another venture and was working up a tasting menu for a cruise ship.
But the ships stopped sailing and signing a lease for a new restaurant did not seem sensible.
However, the opportunity arose to return to New Zealand to work further with Rod and Gunn, a company with which he had a long-standing relationship through its Lodge bars and restaurants in Auckland and Queenstown.
‘‘It was perfect timing.’’
Lambert had always wanted his two children to experience a Kiwi lifestyle and they were growing up — they are now 10 and 5 years old.
‘‘We didn’t want to leave it too late.’’
So they packed up and came to New Zealand where Lambert has been able to concentrate on being executive chef for the Lodges and work on new projects.
‘‘It’s about trying to find the balance. I was travelling the world cooking but it was more stressful than being at home, I came to realise, as you could never reproduce it to the same level.’’
Covid has provided a few challenges, his team experimenting with take-out food for a time and meal kits but now deciding just to wait out the lockdown.
When the question of what is New Zealand cuisine is raised, Lambert says he has given it a lot of thought — given the Musket Room’s menus — but came to the conclusion the country’s food styles are still developing.
Many of what are considered ‘‘New Zealand foods’’, such as deer, beef or lamb, have their origins in other countries, such as England. And the cultural melting pot of the country also led to cuisines with their origins in other cultures.
‘‘New Zealand cuisine has to come from a Maori perspective. Indigenous peoples and endemic ingredients — the most honest aspect of that is seafood, kaimoana is endemic to New Zealand, it is what what is here. Paua — it’s New Zealand.’’
The country’s raw ingredients and native species should be its strengths. An example, he says, is farming the likes of wood pigeons so they can be cooked commercially, creating dishes that could ‘‘be really special’’ in telling New Zealand’s story.
‘‘We need to bring these native ingredients, make them readily available to people to cook. Sprinkling kawakawa on something and calling it New Zealand — it’s not.’’
Ingredients such as scallops — already farmed here — should be kept in New Zealand rather than exported so they could be used to showcase what is unique to this country.
‘‘There are chefs out there ready to support this.’’
They are all issues Lambert is thinking more about with more time on his hands in Auckland lock-down.
With Virgin Voyagers starting to sail again, his tasting menu is in demand, so he is working on updating that regularly alongside his Lodge commitments.
‘‘It’s cool. It means I’m still part of the international cheffing community.’’
He is enjoying having a more balanced lifestyle, which allows him to attend his children’s sports games and spend time with them.
‘‘It’s very cool for me, this time is precious as they’re not going to be kids forever, but I’m a chef forever.’’
