5 Restaurants Putting Organic Food on the Menu, and I'd Like to Eat at All of Them

From kitchen gardens in Queenstown to biodynamic vineyards in Waipara, these restaurants are bringing organic food closer to the table. But what does organic really mean when you're eating out?

Sherwood in Queenstown has three different answers to the same question. Its own website says over 40% of its green produce is grown in its own kitchen garden. The Michelin Guide says 90% of the ingredients are either picked from its own organic garden or foraged in Central Otago. When the Herald visited, around 55% of the fresh produce was homegrown, with a target of 85%.

None of those numbers has to be wrong. Green produce, fresh produce and all ingredients are three different things to count, and foraged food sits in a category of its own. But it shows the problem with the word organic on a menu. A restaurant can grow its greens without sprays and pour organic wine, and still serve plenty that isn't organic at all.

So this isn't a list of New Zealand's most organic restaurants. That would need a much bigger audit than I've done. It's five places making a serious commitment to organic food, and the five I'd most like to eat at. I haven't eaten at any of them yet, which is the point of the list.

Three kinds of organic

It helps to separate three things that often get blurred together.

Certified organic means an independent certifier, such as BioGro, AsureQuality, OrganicFarmNZ or Demeter, has checked the farm and keeps it on a register. Grown organically usually means a restaurant's own garden is run without synthetic sprays or fertilisers, but nobody outside the restaurant is checking. Regenerative describes how land is farmed, with a focus on soil, and it isn't the same thing as organic.

None of the five restaurants below describes its kitchen as certified organic, and none of them appears on BioGro's register. Each gets to organic a different way. Here they are, north to south.

Ahi, Auckland

Ben Bayly farms a 4-acre garden to keep one restaurant in vegetables, and organic greens are picked from it daily. Many of Ahi's vegetables are grown at the Ahi Garden in South Auckland, using organic and sustainable growing practices, and the kitchen buys from New Zealanders embracing regenerative agriculture.

The restaurant is on level 2 of Commercial Bay, at the bottom of Queen Street, with views over the harbour. Cuisine named it Restaurant of the Year in 2024, with 19 out of 20, and Michelin gave it one star in the 2026 guide.

Ahi means fire in te reo Māori. Fittingly, the dish Cuisine singled out was wood-fired duck breast from Cambridge with nettle chimichurri.

The meat: The chicken is certified organic, from Bostock Brothers, and Bayly will only ever serve Bostock's at Ahi. It's the same chicken you'll find in the Woolworths chiller, and I weighed up whether it's worth the extra money in May. Since 2024 the brand has been owned by Inghams, which I covered in New Zealand's only certified organic chicken.

The rest of the menu travels: wild-caught seafood and grass-fed beef from all over the country, octopus from the Bluff coast, and red deer wild-shot on the flanks of Tapuae-o-Uenuku. Grass-fed and wild-shot are good stories, but neither one is organic.

When I wrote about Bayly's podcast interview in October, he never quite made the case for organic directly. His garden makes it for him.

Worth knowing:

• The space was supposed to be a big deck, until the developer, Precinct Properties, saw a restaurant in it.
• Before coming home, Bayly held senior chef roles at Michelin-starred restaurants in France and London.

What kind of organic: its own garden, grown organically, plus organic chicken.

Good to know (November 2026): open for lunch and dinner daily. More on Ahi's website.

St Georges Restaurant, Havelock North

At St Georges, the morning's harvest decides that evening's menu, and almost everything on the plate is grown from seed a few steps from the kitchen. The restaurant grows 90% of its own produce and calls it fresh, seasonal and organic.

The building, between Hastings and Havelock North, was once a winery and reopened as a restaurant in 2012. You can eat in the dining room or outside under the vines in the courtyard.

It's run by Francky Godinho, head chef and gardener, and his wife Kathryn. Francky grew up on a family farm in Goa, in India, and started as an apprentice at 15. He cooked at the Burj al-Arab in Dubai before moving to New Zealand in 2005, and he's twice been named New Zealand's Chef of the Year.

Nine-tenths of the produce from your own garden is a remarkable share for a working restaurant. St Georges isn't in the Michelin Guide, but that says nothing about the food. The guide's first New Zealand selection, announced on 30 June 2026, only covered Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown.

The meat: It's free-range, from local suppliers. This autumn's menu ran to duck breast with blackcurrant cabernet jus, slow-braised beef short rib, and slow-cooked lamb shoulder with smoked carrot. Free-range is a welfare claim, not an organic one.

Worth knowing:

• The garden grows 25 kinds of tomato.
• The crispy fried chicken starter comes with Francky's own garden jalapeño.

What kind of organic: its own garden, grown organically, and most of the menu comes from it.

Good to know (November 2026): open Wednesday to Sunday, 11.30am to 10.30pm. More on St Georges' website.

Black Estate, Waipara

Black Estate raises its own beef. It runs low-line Angus cattle for the restaurant, grazing them on its Netherwood vineyard. Vegetables come from Little Owl, a biodynamic farm near Gore Bay: tomatoes, brassicas, radicchio and, in the right season, wild porcini.

Co-owner Pen Naish calls the Waipara Valley an amazing valley between the sea and the mountains, with rivers throughout. Naish and Nicholas Brown bought the original vines in 2007 and opened the restaurant in 2012. It's 40 minutes from Christchurch airport, with two turns, and Cuisine named it Winery Restaurant of the Year in 2023.

It's also the only one of the five where the land itself is certified. Its vineyards are certified organic with BioGro, under licence 5202, and Black Estate says they've been biodynamic with Demeter since 2022. That certification covers the grapes and the wine, not the kitchen, where chef Olly Le Maitre cooks with local and organic produce. Like St Georges, Black Estate sits outside the Michelin Guide's four cities.

The meat: It's the beef, and it's homegrown. The cattle are raised regeneratively, and the beef comes with a wine from Netherwood, so what's on your plate and what's in your glass grew on the same piece of land. The cattle aren't covered by the BioGro certificate, which lists grapes and wine only.

Worth knowing:

• The cows, and the neighbours' sheep, graze between the vines to keep the grasses down.
• Netherwood's Pinot Noir was planted in 1986, on its own roots, and farmed without irrigation.
• For 10 years Black Estate has run a winter truffle day with its neighbour Kings Truffles. You ride a bus to the farm, dig for truffles, then sit down to a five-course lunch with aged wines.

What kind of organic: certified organic and biodynamic land under the vines, with its own regeneratively raised beef on the plate.

Good to know (November 2026): lunch Thursday to Monday; the cellar door is open seven days. More on Black Estate's website.

Gatherings, Christchurch

Gatherings has been buying from the same vegetable grower since before it was a restaurant. Streamside Organics, near Leeston, has supplied Alex Davies since his pizza pop-up days after the earthquakes. Cuisine describes the vegetables as mostly organic. "Mostly" is an honest word, and a rare one on a menu.

Those pizza days are a good story. Davies started out cooking pizzas in a borrowed stone oven in the middle of the rubble after the 2011 earthquakes. He then spent about a year on an organic farm in North Canterbury, opened Gatherings in February 2017 aged 30, and three months later won Best New Restaurant in the Cuisine Good Food Guide.

It's a small place in Merivale, with a Bib Gourmand in the 2026 Michelin Guide, the award for good cooking at good value. The menu changes weekly around local, organic ingredients in season. The wine list is grounded in organic and low-intervention winemaking, and Davies calls it exclusively natural wine.

The meat: The pork is from Poaka, which I covered in my piece on who actually grows New Zealand's pork. Josh Hill raises Berkshire and Wessex Saddleback pigs outside their whole lives on his family's farm at Aylesbury, west of Christchurch, and finishes them on sweet chestnuts. Since January 2025 he has processed them in his own on-farm micro-abattoir. Poaka isn't certified organic, though it's working toward it, and it's the closest thing New Zealand has to certified organic pork. Davies reckons the way they farm is truly incredible. When it's on, the Fiordland venison is a must-try.

Worth knowing:

• The wasabi comes from Coppersfolly in Canterbury, grown by Fenton Wood, an ex-policeman.
• Kisi Bar, a casual walk-in wine bar, shares the same Merivale address.

What kind of organic: organic vegetables bought from named growers, plus organic and natural wine.

Good to know (November 2026): hours weren't on its homepage, so check Gatherings' website before you go.

Sherwood, Queenstown

Sherwood has planted an alpine garden at 550 metres on Mt Dewar, with Coronet Peak in the distance. Queenstown's overnight low averages minus 6°C in July. Executive chef Chris Scott is counting on it to lift the homegrown share from 55% towards 85%.

That's the second garden. The first already feeds the restaurant, which holds one Michelin star: an organic vegetable garden and beehives on land that was once covered in bracken, grown without sprays or pesticides. The bar pours natural wine from seven taps.

Sherwood sits above Frankton Road, looking down the lake to the Remarkables. It began in the 1980s as a Tudor-style motor inn. It's now a hotel with the restaurant inside, and a surprising amount of it is built from recycled material.

The meat: The menu lists an organic half chicken, alongside Wagyu bavette and Lumina lamb shoulder. I couldn't find who supplies the chicken. The rest of the produce comes from Otago and South Island growers.

Worth knowing:

• The kitchen floors used to be car tyres, and the carpet tiles are made from recycled fishing nets.
• Its 248-panel solar array was one of New Zealand's largest private solar arrays when it went in.
• The red, white and black currant bushes are not a pick-your-own situation. The kitchen turns the fruit into sorbet.
• The birch bolete mushrooms are foraged from a secret spot above Lake Hayes.

What kind of organic: its own garden, grown organically, plus natural wine and an organic chicken.

Good to know (November 2026): open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. More on Sherwood's website.

What about the meat?

Read the five sections back and a pattern shows up. The vegetables are the organic part. The meat mostly isn't.

Of the menus and reviews I could find, only two of the five restaurants call any meat organic, and both times it's chicken: Bostock's at Ahi, and an organic half chicken from an unnamed supplier at Sherwood. Everywhere else the meat comes with a different word attached. Free-range at St Georges. Heritage and chestnut-finished at Gatherings. Regenerative at Black Estate. Grass-fed and wild-shot at Ahi.

Those words describe real things, and some of them are worth paying for. But none of them means organic, and none of them means someone outside the farm has checked. Pork shows why the gap is so hard to close. When I looked into who grows New Zealand's pork, I found there's almost no certified organic pork in the country at all, and the best-raised pigs on a restaurant menu still don't have the certificate.

What to look for when you eat out

Look for growers' names. Gatherings and Black Estate name their suppliers, and you can look them up.

Look for a certifier's name. BioGro, AsureQuality, OrganicFarmNZ or Demeter means someone outside the restaurant checked. The word organic on its own means the restaurant says so, which is a different thing.

Ask how much. If one restaurant's garden can be credited with 40%, 55% or 90% depending on who's counting, it's worth asking which number you're eating.

Ask about the meat. An organic garden doesn't make the lamb organic. If it matters to you, ask what the meat is and where it came from.

Check the wine list. It's often the easiest place to find certified organic, because certified wines usually say so on the label. Natural wine and certified organic wine overlap, but they aren't the same label.

Don't read a star as a farming award. Michelin describes one star as high quality cooking. It tells you the cooking is good. It doesn't tell you where the carrots came from.

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