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BJ Sebastian has just come in from the garden when he sits down to explain his vision for Plume’s vineyard restaurant where he’s just taken over as head chef a few days previously.
He’s been busy exploring the extensive gardens and greenhouse at the Sharp Road restaurant and vineyard, as well as getting to know the kitchens.
“This morning I was picking all the kaffir lime leaves for oil,” he says. “Yesterday I was picking flowers and making nasturtium vinegar for a new dish.”
He also has batches of grapes and daikon radish fermenting and bottles of tomato vinegar on the go, so it comes as no great surprise to learn that his most ardent culinary passion is for the ancient art of fermentation.
“My food concept is nature-to-plate – everything we need is found in nature – with a lot of preserving, smoking, pickling and fermentation behind it,” he says.
Sebastian doesn’t just confine these procedures to fruits and vegetables, but meat and fish as well, something he demonstrated when he was made an Ambassador Chef for Beef + Lamb NZ earlier this year. Both his winning dishes – Kombu aged beef eye fillet, beef cheek, onion textures, caulilini, beef tendon puff, bone sauce and leek ash, and Hawkes Bay lamb loin, lamb belly and potato roulade, piko piko, lamb sweetbread, elderberry, burnt zucchini, pickled green walnut and lamb garum – employed advanced fermentation techniques and flavours. They also showcased Sebastian’s other culinary loves – cooking with foraged ingredients, seasonality and using every part of the plant or animal protein he can.
“It takes a lot of effort to grow these things, so we have to use as much as possible. I have huge respect for people growing what we eat. I like to respect the whole product. For example, you can use even the leaves and petals of the onions. You can burn the skin and make an ash, if you know how to use it.”
Sebastian was born in India, where he acquired his love of food from watching and helping his mother and grandmother gather, preserve and cook a wide variety of foods. After working in one of Gordon Ramsay’s London restaurants, he moved to New Zealand in 2013, where he has since worked in a number of top flight winery, lodge and restaurant kitchens.
The chef is no stranger to the Mahurangi area, having worked for a while at Sculptureum’s Rothko restaurant when it was first established five years ago with Jarrod McGregor – a former Beef + Lamb NZ ambassador chef himself – at the helm. Sebastian’s most recent post was heading a team of 25 chefs at the Mudbrick Vineyard and Restaurant complex on Waiheke. He says he is excited to be moving to another winery restaurant.
“I know exactly what I’m going to do here. I know the suppliers here, like the oyster farmers, and many others from Auckland.
“I want to give an identity to the place, a different approach to the future. And we intend to change the menu often, depending what is in season.”
Sebastian describes his food as contemporary in style using a blend of flavours, with influences from cuisines as diverse as Japanese and Italian, and he is busy devising a completely new menu that will be launched on the evening of Friday, November 18.
“It’s totally different. I like to experiment and bring something new, or it all becomes very boring.”
