Georgia van Prehn
Owner and head chef at Alta, Auckland
When I meet Georgia van Prehn at restaurant Alta, she walks me around the garden. There are lettuces, basil, tomatoes and oregano, growing in planters around the sun-soaked courtyard. Alta, a small restaurant on one of Auckland’s hippest stretches, serves elegant food celebrating seasonal produce. It’s always been a dream to grow some of that produce out back, making it truly as fresh and local as you can get.
It’s been a long journey for Georgia to open her own restaurant, taking over the space at 366 Karangahape Road formerly occupied by natural wine bar Clay, but she always knew she wanted to work in food. The 31-year-old says she had been cooking dinner at home – and loving it – since the age of 10.
She started in hospitality at the age of 14, working front of house. “I loved the fast pace of it and that feeling of looking after someone,” she says. She would continue working part-time during high school, eventually entering the kitchen and realising it was the only place she wanted to be, before leaving New Zealand for Melbourne at the age of 18.
Heading to Melbourne was about experiencing life outside of New Zealand, says Georgia, who knew hardly anyone when she moved. But it was also about developing her skills in a dining scene bigger than our own.
She worked at several restaurants cooking what she calls “modern Australian food” – the sort of casual fine dining Melbourne was so known for at the time, and which has subsequently caught on in New Zealand. Host Dining, now shuttered, was the most notable of these. Georgia spent two and a half years working under chefs Florian Ribul and Rory Kennedy learning “absolute heaps”. “I was pretty green at the time and they were really patient and really took me under their wing,” she says. “Rory definitely influenced the kind of food I like to cook now and taught me a lot.”
From Melbourne, Georgia moved to the UK to stage at zero-waste restaurant Silo (then located in Brighton, now in East London). “I had eaten there a year previously and loved the simplicity of the food and the use of all parts of the animal and vegetable,” she says. Her time at Silo taught her plenty about getting creative with food that would normally be considered waste – an approach she still uses in her cooking today.
After returning to New Zealand in March 2019, Georgia took on the head chef role at Scotch Wine Bar in Blenheim, before the opportunity arose to open her own space. Dan Gillett, Georgia’s boss at Scotch Wine Bar, owned Clay in Auckland and offered her the space. “I really wanted to open my own restaurant because I wanted a challenge. I’ve never really been a ‘life over work’ sort of person,” says Georgia. “I also wanted to have creative freedom over everything – not just the food, but
