NZ DINING in 2021

You don’t just wake up one day and open a restaurant. From concept to completion, planning can take a couple of years, and that’s without a global pandemic slowing you down. So when New Zealand went into a strict and sudden lockdown in March last year, projects at various stages of readiness came to a halt and the worry set in. Watching the rest of the world, we wondered what would become of dining out and if it would ever be the same again.

In an industry that is synonymous with burnout, those five weeks of isolation offered an uncharacteristic period of rest. Time to reflect on their food, their offering, what was important to them and, in the case of new ventures, time to consider what they wanted those places to look