There’s a new owner at an old Ponsonby Rd restaurant address and he won’t be pandering to your comfort eating needs. Chef Matt Lambert speaks to Kim Knight about coming home to cook with intention.
Six days before he opened his new restaurant Matt Lambert was still writing the menu.
Easier, perhaps, to tell us what he would not be cooking: duck fat potatoes. Absolutely anything designed for sharing. Fries.
“This is food specifically made and composed just for you. And I feel like that is a throwback way of cooking now. When was the last time somewhere opened that did that?”
The Michelin-starred chef doubles down.
“Definitely no fries. If you want fries, I don’t give a s***. You can get fries anywhere else.”
Return, Matt and Barbara Lambert’s new 62-seater restaurant, in Ponsonby. Photo / Babiche Martens
Last Wednesday, Lambert and his American wife Barbara opened Return, a 62-seat restaurant on a storied Auckland hospo site most recently occupied by Gigi and, for the longest time before that, Ponsonby Rd Bistro.
“We are entering a continuum and we will treat it accordingly,” said Lambert, although standing on the footpath underneath the vivid red rolldown canvas awnings installed by a previous owner, he also said, “if these don’t disappear today, I’m getting a ladder and a boxcutter and doing it myself”.
We are supposed to be in the restaurant, sitting on the banquette seats newly recovered in a very specifically briefed shade of blue (“the colour of the New Zealand ocean in the summertime”). But while sauces are underway in the refurbished kitchen, the dining room is a construction zone.
Matt Lambert photographed during the renovations of his new Ponsonby restaurant Return. Photo / Michael Craig
Tradies are cutting holes in the roof to accommodate 30kg of chandelier lighting; a 16.2m long swamp kauri countertop is cocooned in protective blankets and the glassware with the muttonbird logo is still in boxes upstairs.
Lambert decamps to a cafe and orders himself two iced black coffees.
“I’m a little bit tired, but it’s not my first rodeo. I’ve been through this so many times and, to be honest, with it being our thing – Barbara and I – everything is great. Like, it sucks when problems come up, but ultimately, when it’s finished, it’s gonna be f***ing beautiful. And I’m just really proud of what it’s gonna be. I can see that, and that is better than anything that could be going wrong.”
Barbara calls it a “full-circle moment” – a culmination of everything the couple has learned in their lifetime of hospitality.
Barbara and Matt Lambert have worked together in hospitality for at least half their married life. Their newest restaurant is Return, on Ponsonby Rd. Photo / Amber Soljan
Return is the Lamberts’ first restaurant since New York’s The Musket Room. In 2013, they broke the record for attaining the world’s fastest Michelin star, earning the accolade just four months after opening (and holding onto it until 2020 when they came back to Auckland to work with Rodd & Gunn’s The Lodge Group).
“I’d do anything for that dude,” Lambert says of Rodd & Gunn’s chief executive Mike Beagley. But: “I don’t know how else to say it, other than I’d prefer to just be in charge of what’s happening”.
Lambert left The Lodge late last year planning to take a year off and maybe finally renovate the house he and Barbara share with sons Pierce and Elvis. All that changed when Tourism New Zealand announced it was spending $6.3m to bring the Michelin Guide to Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown. Lambert had busted a gut in New York in an unfulfilled quest for two-star recognition.
The opportunity to go for it on home turf? “I’m just supremely motivated.”
The Lamberts picked up the keys to 165 Ponsonby Rd on February 9. They gave themselves five weeks to open and, while they missed that target (even the ovens had to be made to order) the tight deadline may not have surprised anyone who knows them.
West Auckland-raised Lambert was 14 when he became a dishwasher. He left school in Year 11 and, as a newly graduated 20-year-old chef, opened Wellington’s Sun Seair Cafe with his mother Anita (“and I probably thought I was better at cooking then than I do now”).
It was a steep learning curve. Ultimately, he’d move back to Auckland for more experience and spend two years working under chef Michael Meredith at The Grove where Barbara (Connecticut-born with a fine arts degree) was working front of house – a young traveller who had landed her job via family connections with the restaurant’s American owner, Michael Dearth. Three months after Matt and Barbara met, they eloped.
“If you plan to take a long time, you’ll take a long time,” says Lambert.
They have been married for 20 years and have worked together in hospitality for more than half that time.
“None of those things make sense . . . for one, most chefs don’t stay married,” says Lambert.
“The way she makes people feel in the dining room is like, I don’t think there’s anyone better, you know? There have been times where I’ve tried to work with somebody else, and it’s just been like, ‘what the f*** are we doing here?’ She makes everybody feel special.”
Lambert claims he’s still figuring out what he brings to the table.
“I definitely would say that I have pretty strong elements of impostor syndrome, but I know that I can do a pretty good job and, generally speaking, my food’s pretty solid.”
For years, the chef has fielded questions about dining differences between New Zealand and New York. It’s only now, he says, that he feels qualified to have an opinion.
“Auckland doesn’t have enough institutions that just stand the test of time. We’ve got Prego, we’ve got Cibo, and that’s awesome but there should be more. Tony’s Restaurant in Henderson closed and, to me, that’s f***ing sad. I remember going there as a kid.”
More controversially, he fears a collective “dumbing down” of the industry in response to customer demand for post-Covid comfort food.
“A lot of times, there is a value placed on ‘how full do I feel?’ I’m not trying to make you feel full, otherwise I’d just give you a bowl of pasta and some mashed potatoes and we can be done. I’m trying to teach my team to get the most out of the least ingredients, to do better than I’ve done before. I can’t do that by trying to please everybody.”
Three days after this two-coffee interview, Viva received an email. That menu was finally taking shape – an a la carte list of snacks, entrees, mains and desserts, a six-course “short story” ($165) and a 10-course “long story” ($225).
“Fish and chips” reimagined by chef Matt Lambert for Return, the new Ponsonby Rd restaurant he has opened with his wife Barbara. Photo / Amber Soljan
Pāua, kingfish and quail. Venison, salmon and fried bone marrow. A study of feijoa and textures of chocolate. There are “Chips and dip” and “fish and chips” but they come with a quotemark caveat that, in a restaurant setting, guarantees subversion. (The latter, it transpires, is a Lambert classic that begins with a beer battered cracker).
Return’s drinks list (led by sommelier Jim Turner) champions local growers and producers, with pairings available for both tasting menus and a cocktail selection that includes the “Flightless Bird”, a play on a white negroni using Kākāpō gin.
The crudo entree from Return. Photo / Babiche Martens
“I had planned to only use things that were wild and nothing farmed,” says Lambert. “But that just isolates everything and takes you away from cooking good food. One of the driving forces is don’t let philosophy get in the way of good cooking.
“The harder you want to go on it, the less your vocabulary or library of flavour is going to be, because anything that you think of is going to be introduced – kiwifruit, feijoa, avocados, lamb, beef, venison, goat, all of it, you know what I mean?
“New Zealand is a nation of birds and fish. I would love to serve weka, and I did a bunch of research, but . . .”
Weka are fully protected on mainland New Zealand. The only place where they can be legally harvested is the Chatham Islands and some islands around Rakiura.
Return’s Ora King salmon with fennel and lemon. Photo / Babiche Martens
He does hope to feature fresh tītī (more commonly known as muttonbird). In the meantime, its silhouette features on the Return logo, a migratory shearwater echoing the Lamberts’ own northern-southern hemisphere travels.
“I was playing with a lot of ideas for names. ‘Return’ felt bang on. It just carries a lot. The connotations of travel and my own journey and coming home. It’s quite an emotional word. And, you know, I was f***ing shocked that no one had called a restaurant Return before.”
Lambert has never wanted to be anything but a chef. His kitchen persona has, he says, evolved.
“Before I had kids, I would say I was a real ***hole . . . but I haven’t had an absolute blowup in probably eight years. There would have been times when I would have been very challenging to work for in New York. I might have put too much importance into what we were doing . . . I will swear a bit and sometimes I get f***ing angry. But these days, I am definitely way, way, way more chill and I try to allow people the space to figure out things themselves.”
At Return, the ethos is literally bound in a nine-page kitchen welcome and staff workbook.
Sample text: “You may hear people describe Return as fine dining. It isn’t. This is intentional dining. Fine dining can become about surfaces, performance, or expectation. Intention is about purpose – why something exists, why it is cooked, why it is served the way it is.”
The workbook is practical (labelling, ordering and prep lists), philosophical (attitude, learning and legacy) and – crucially – personal.
“The walls here have seen care, pressure, service, exhaustion and celebration – the full rhythm of restaurant life . . . At our wedding, witnesses included people directly connected to the history of this building.”
It’s a reminder, say the Lamberts, that hospitality is relational.
“Restaurants are made by people, not concepts.”
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Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk.