This head chef makes everything from scratch using the food he sources from his onsite garden and the hills and rivers nearby, proving resourcefulness is the key to creating truly New Zealand cuisine.
By Veronica Johnston
You’d be hard pressed to find something on the menu at Fiordland Lodge in Te Anau that isn’t homemade or locally grown. Head chef James Musk and his small team will have plucked the strawberries in the breakfast jam from the onsite garden while having sourced the wild venison or rabbit dinner from the local hunters.
Every item on the menu at the Lodge hails from the surrounding land, and just to make things more interesting, 25-year-old Musk changes the four-course menu daily so that guests at the Lodge, who yearn to sample New Zealand cuisine, never have to eat the same meal twice. But as the Auckland-born but Dunedin-raised chef reveals below, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
How did you become a chef?
I left high school early and started working at High Tide restaurant in Dunedin where I basically put myself through an apprenticeship. I worked my way from the bottom to become sous chef there then I went overseas and carried on cooking in Australia, Thailand and the Pacific Islands.
How did your travelling affect your cooking?
It had a huge impact on my appreciation for fresh and local ingredients and seeing different nationalities working with such pride on their local traditions, recipes and ingredients. I’ve always had a great love of food and after leaving school and going straight into a kitchen all I wanted to do was to taste everything.
How do you define New Zealand cuisine?
To me, it really just means using as much food that we grow and farm here. We have a huge garden and some chickens and ducks at the Lodge. We also use a lot of local growers and have access to a berry farm just down the road. All the lamb comes out of Southland and the wild venison we use at least three or four times a week comes straight out of the national park. That’s caught by wild game hunters and quite often our guests can even see it being flown in by helicopter out of the bush. New Zealand cuisine is a melting pot influenced by our heritage. We are lucky as a nation to have such a diverse culture and not be restrained by centuries of tradition.
Why do you have a daily-changing menu?
Fiordland Lodge is a member of the exclusive Lodges of New Zealand group where dinner is a highlight and part of the criteria for membership is that you must produce a daily changing menu.
This ensures guests never see the same dish during their stay while experiencing as much New Zealand food as possible. So if we have a guest staying for 8-10 days, we run 10 different menus in a row. Though we are reliant on what we can source at the time from the local fishing boats and hunters.
So how do you design the menu daily?
Sometimes the dishes are very similar to the dish the day before depending on how long the guest stays. But we forward plan mostly by contacting our suppliers and finding out when the fishing boat is coming back to port with some tuna or beautiful groper from Stewart Island or when the hunters are coming back with some fresh venison or rabbits. It’s a whole process of having some base ideas of what you’re working with on the day and being flexible with when the ingredients turn up.
How does the meat arrive?
We get a lot of whole carcasses depending on the time of the season, how busy we are and what we are doing. But we also work really closely with the local butcher and sometimes when the Lodge isn’t as busy, I might just ask him for the animal’s legs and belly. It’s a real mix.
We also do a lot of breaking down when we get whole fish and sometimes the boats will come in and tell us they’ve caught the fish and already filleted them for us.
Why do you like to break things down?
I place a huge importance on being able to break things down and make things from scratch. You learn to get used to the whole animal or vegetable by breaking it down and making exactly what you can out of it and if you can’t make it, don’t sell it.
We also have facilities here to store whole carcasses, and we have a vacuum packaging machine so if we get a whole animal and we only have ten people in, we can break it down and know that over the next few days we can use it. It’s a really different experience and a bit more of a challenge with things changing every day as opposed to the same menu day in, day out.
Who is your mentor?
The chef that trained me, Mark Lane, (now executive chef at Manaaki Functions Centre at Otago Polytechnic) who took me under his wing straight out of high school. I was 15 when I started working for him as a kitchen hand and I stayed with him on and off for about six years. The modern apprenticeship scheme wasn’t around back then but Queens high school in Dunedin started up a course doing City and Guilds training one day a week for people in the industry so that’s what I used to do on my day off. By the time I finished two-and-a-half years training, I was already sous chef at the restaurant.
So what brought you to the Lodge?
A few years ago, I worked in Milford and Doubtful Sound on an overnight boat. That’s when I really fell in love with the area so when the job became available I took it because I really wanted to get into a situation where I could deal with some of the best ingredients, work closely with a small team, and build relationships with local suppliers while pushing the growing of things onsite.
Within five minutes drive of the lodge there’s at least 10 or 15 rivers that have fresh watercress sprouting every day and wild black berries that grow on the side of the road. We have a huge vegetable garden with about 100 strawberry plants and when they’re in season, we’re picking kilos of strawberries every week. We’re building tunnel houses this winter, and we have plans to bring in more livestock so we can produce more items onsite.
I think there’s a massive dying trade of chefs that are prepared to make things. It’s very easy to make a loaf of bread, and jams and chutneys. These are just simple things that people take for granted that really don’t take a lot of effort at all.
