Along with P?h? & P?keh? co-founder Belinda McKay, the pair have been doing just that, winning converts and providing curious Kiwi palates with traditional M?ori food with a highly modern twist.

Formed in 2014 with the intention of reconnecting Kiwis to their rich food heritage, the entrepreneurial duo started small, “with one trestle table, a gazebo and a pop up-tent”, as well as a burning desire to bring modern flavours and cooking methods to M?ori and native New Zealand ingredients.

“We were just going to all these markets and events around Auckland and there just seemed to be such a lack of representation of anything native New Zealand or M?ori,” says Belinda.

“So we thought, ‘Wow, there’s a bit for a gap here – wouldn’t it be cool if we could really engage people and get them excited about native New Zealand kai again?’”

Cool is exactly what it is, and it certainly seems like an idea whose time has come.

“New Zealanders all love doing OEs and everyone’s bringing ideas back about cuisines they’ve experienced overseas, but I think our native New Zealand kai has got lost in that process a little bit,” says Belinda. “But now there seems to be a little more talk about what New Zealand cuisine is and how M?ori kai fits into that. People are starting to look inward again.”

Jarrad concurs: “In the last 29 or 30 years, only top-end chefs did New Zealand stuff, but when they did use Kiwi ingredients, they would use just one. They would have twenty things on the menu and they would say ‘look, we are now using horopito on the menu’, or ‘hey, we’ve now got a kawakawa sorbet’. With us, every single menu item has an element, homage or heroes a natives New Zealand ingredient. That just hasn’t been done before.”

So far, that pioneering approach is working. From trestle table to food truck, and now, brick and mortar digs in Grey Lynn, the pair seem to have struck a nerve with Kiwis hungry for something different, yet familiar.

“All of the feedback we’ve been getting so far is that people are really connecting with what we’re doing,” says Belinda. “They find it really refreshing that there is somewhere that they can call their own.”

“People seem to feel a real sense of ownership about what we do, as if they can consider it ‘ours’ [in the broadest sense]. We feel the same. This is us. That’s why we’re doing it.”

For all the talk of tradition, however, the food is plenty hip: Horopito-spiced piri piri chicken salads? Check. Hangi-cooked pulled pork and slaw sandwiches? Double check. Panko-crumbed k?mara balls served with a sweet horopito sauce? Oh my.

“Taking an original product like hangi-cooked kumara, mashing it with coconut cream, rolling it in panko crumbs and coconut makes quite a different beast to a traditional hangi meal,” says Jarrad, “so we’ve had to take people along on that journey.”

“We’re doing modern M?ori fusion, taking these elements and elevating them, and people are connecting to that concept really, really quickly.”

But for all its early success, P?h? & P?keh? is still a passion project for the duo that they’re planning on building slowly.

“I’m passionate about being a Kiwi, I love everything about New Zealand and I think, as we’ve gone on, it has become more than just the food,” says Belinda.

“We didn’t start out on this journey with the idea that we were going to build this food empire. Now, we have the big thinking and the big goals, but at the same time, it’s little steps until we get the resources to be able to do it.”