Auckland-based chef Kia Kanuta talks about the ideas behind his cooking, reframing Māori cuisine, and where to try it back home.

Dining on the grounds of Sekolah Seniman Pangan; Mā chef Kia Kanuta. — *Left to right:* Dining at Sekolah Seniman Pangan; Māori chef Kia Kanuta. (Photos: James Louie)

Curtains of steam rise from a cement-walled pit as a small but hungry crowd gathers around in anticipation. Armed with tongs, New Zealand chef Kia Kanuta removes hot stones, leaves, and coffee sacks to reveal neatly stacked banana-leaf parcels of food underneath. All the while he quietly sings the words to “Hoki Mai,” a 1940s folk song composed to welcome returning Māori soldiers at the end of World War II.

Kanuta is proudly Māori: his striking tā moko mataora, the traditional facial tattoo, testifies to his lineage from a coastal clan in the Northland region’s Kerikeri area. It’s his third time in Indonesia this year to demonstrate the hāngī cooking technique, whereby a pit is dug and rocks heated to create an underground steam oven. Previous trips took Kanuta to Bali, but today he’s on the grounds of Sekolah Seniman Pangan, an entrepreneurship training school for food producers run by social enterprise Javara Indonesia in Bekasi, a sprawling satellite city of Jakarta. Here, three hectares of degraded land once filled with construction waste have been nursed back to health, creating an organic Eden brimming with more than 250 kinds of edible flora.

Alongside “jungle chef” Charles Toto, who is showcasing the Papuan bubigi hot-stone cooking technique and ingredients like the crimson-red Pandanus conoideus fruit, Kanuta is the star of a cross-cultural event organized by the New Zealand Embassy and Javara Indonesia. Former lawyer Helianti Hilman, Javara’s founder, calls it “gastro-diplomacy.”

As the pandanus-flavored chicken and taro leaves in Toto’s bubigi oven steam away, diners tuck into their individual parcels of hāngī-cooked food. There’s sweet purple yam, carrot, and potato; a cabbage leaf hides a moreish stuffing of torn-up bread, onion, and carrot fried in a generous amount of butter. A juicy chicken leg has been seasoned with herbs brought over from New Zealand: peppery dried horopito leaves, which have a slight numbing effect, and the leaves of the medicinal kawakawa plant.

Kanuta’s life story is an inspiring one. He dropped out of school at the age of 14 to help support his family, starting out as a dishwasher and working his way up through the kitchen before earning a scholarship to culinary school, where he graduated top of his class. Experiences with various cuisines followed. While leading Auckland’s Ada restaurant, Kanuta pivoted its menu to modern Māori fare, and was voted Outstanding Chef at the 2024 Lewisham Awards. He subsequently stepped back from Ada to focus on his family and health, doing private dining experiences and the occasional pop-up abroad. Now, the charismatic chef is set to host a TV travel show that will be called Kia Eats the World, with filming due to start in 2026.

Hot stones and banana leaves being used for hāngī cooking. — Hot stones and banana leaves being used for *hāngī* cooking. (Photo: James Louie)

How would you describe your culinary background?

I’ve been cooking for about 20 years. I specialize in Vietnamese food and traditional French and Italian, but because I have so much cultural relevance with kai Māori—Māori food—and I’m pushing different techniques and bringing back traditional values around that food, it seems to be the one that I’m known for these days.

How did your childhood inform your approach to Māori cooking?

My dad used to go fishing for us. He used to collect shellfish, seafood, and we used to catch eel. A lot of the dishes that my father ate were considered quite ugly foods, ferments, some pickles. He would eat a lot of fish heads, and a lot of preserved shellfish, which, if you know anything about smoking and curing salty fish, can get a bit smelly.

So at Ada, I focused on reimagining all of those dishes that kind of gave me trauma. I could never eat them [at the time], but some of the stuff my dad ate was super healthy and he never got sick. There were some dishes that I softened. You soften some things for people, and then in other areas you really push them. That’s how you reintroduce the culture to people.

When you were head chef at Ada, how did you bring Māori principles into the work environment?

With the restaurant, it wasn’t just about Māori food. It was also about our respect for our ingredients, and having Māori perspectives and values in the kitchen. So there were things like extending bereavement leave if somebody passed away.

And it was really important to me to get people’s names right. For a long time in New Zealand the Crown wouldn’t allow Māori people to have Māori names, and they wouldn’t allow them to speak Māori in public areas, in schools especially. My father was a victim of that. He had his name taken away. His birth name was Tipene, but the school changed his name to Steven. So one of the things that I did in my contract after working in a Vietnamese restaurant for so long was to make sure that the names of all my staff, no matter where they came from, were pronounced properly. The Vietnamese staff I used to work with would say they were Alex or John, but their names were really Hoang and Khuong.

What are your thoughts on the idea of food as medicine?

What colonization has done to the perspective on food is damaging to everybody. We get comfortable looking for the cheapest piece of meat and not necessarily the piece of meat that’s best for us. We forget that so much of who we are is based on what we eat. If we don’t get our minerals and our sustenance properly, we can’t function day to day. If you don’t feed your kids the right things—too much sugar—their brains don’t develop properly. Western science has proved this. But indigenous knowledge has always known this.

And how about seasonality?

Not to quote Anthony Bourdain, but he once said we have become OK with mediocre strawberries, because we would rather have average strawberries all year instead of having the best strawberries for two to three months. I’m doing everything I can to align with what is seasonal. And it’s cool, because when you do that, you can really create dishes that are so unique and so distinctively of your culture and of a certain area, but it’s only here for a window of time. The window’s open for as long as the season goes, and then the menu changes again.

What are some of the indigenous ingredients you’re bringing into the mainstream?

Some things are traditional that people know of, like tarata. It’s a tree that’s in the birch family, and the wood has a lemony flavor to it. I’ve been using that as skewers for scallops instead. And I leave a couple of the little leaves on the branch. It looks cool and tastes great. Dried shellfish is another one—they’re like little protein boosts. Dehydrating shellfish is something that Māori have done for thousands of years. I use them to flavor stocks and soups and things.

Is Māori cuisine having a moment right now? And who are the chefs leading the way?

Māori cooking is becoming popular through Instagram and TikTok. You know, we’re more than just a haka. And so being able to share our food and our style, that’s something I’ve always wanted to do. But it wasn’t cool when I was a young chef. Because it was looked at as poor people’s food. So it’s taken a lot of hard work by chefs like Peter Gordon, who’s a huge inspiration of mine, and Monique Fiso as well. There’s also the Bird sisters—Karena and Kasey—and Nancye Pirini, who’s an amazing Māori-Samoan chef.

What restaurants would you recommend for Māori food in Auckland?

The Grey Lynn Firehouse, which is a place that literally just opened. The food is by young Māori head chef Kererū Wilson. Because of the area he’s in, he has to cater to certain demographics, but he’s doing his utmost to put his Māori culture into the food. There’s also Good Home Pukekohe from chef-owner Lyall Minhinnick. Now that lad, he is doing the best Māori food in the city, in my opinion. There are other places that people might mention first, but for me, with the level of authenticity that Lyall has, there’s no one better than him.

With an upstairs restaurant and ground-floor gastropub, The Grey Lynn Firehouse occupies an 1889-built fire station. (Courtesy of The Grey Lynn Firehouse)

“We’re More Than Just a Haka”: A Māori Chef on His Food Culture

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