The type of restaurant every traveller should seek out

April 8, 2026 — 5:00am

Henry Onesemo emerges from the kitchen with a bowl and a jug. The chef and owner of one of Auckland’s most awarded and expensive restaurants is here to wash your hands.

He will do this as a sign of respect, he says, the same way he as a kid used to show respect to his elders in Samoa. This little ceremony will display his dedication to hospitality, the pleasure he and his staff take from cooking and serving and making people feel welcome.

And so he does it – he washes your hands. Then he heads back to the kitchen at Tala to prepare dessert.

If Henry or his staff make any false move with this ceremony, if they give even the slightest hint of fakery, the whole thing falls apart. It becomes a charade, awkward and uncomfortable. It becomes less about respect and more about subservience. The rapport the Tala team have carefully built up over a few hours of fine-dining excellence will immediately dissolve.

But there are no false moves. You’re left thinking: this is all real. He means it. They all mean it. What the hell?

Tala is a restaurant that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, on face value. It’s an eatery that is serving a cuisine that doesn’t really exist: Samoan fine-dining, a 14-course meal of fancy Pasifika dishes that have never been cooked before.

These plates are being created and prepared by a chef with very little formal training, someone who runs the kitchen, keeps an eye on the floor, who does his own PR and even runs his own social media accounts in a world where most fine-dining establishments have a whole slick team to take care of that stuff. And he’s charging almost $200 a head for dinner.

Not to be too derogatory here, but Pacific Island food isn’t the sort you think would lend itself to haute cuisine. Henry is also set on telling the story of Samoa and of his own childhood through what he calls “journeys”, which are his degustation meals – again, if you set a foot wrong with this sort of approach you end up with something painfully pretentious and ultimately boring.

Those restaurants do exist. I’ve been to plenty of them. Please just feed me, you think, somewhere deep into the chef’s monologue about childhood memories of lavender fields or fishing trips with Uncle John.

But now here you are eating “Seasonal Fruit”, which in this case is a slice of unripe pineapple rolled in salt and sugar and chilli, meant to replicate the green fruit Henry and his family would dunk in sweet cordial powder when he was growing up in Samoa. “Pisupo” is play on corned beef, which was brought to Samoa by American servicemen in World War II; here it becomes steak tartare with daikon and yuzu kosho.

You make connections in these places, which isn’t always easy to do in organic ways when you’re travelling.

You should go to Tala if you visit Auckland. In fact, you should visit Auckland to go to Tala. It’s that good.

It’s also the perfect embodiment of the sort of restaurant that every traveller should be searching for: somewhere that provides connection. Somewhere that does far more than serve you food. It gives you an experience, unique and personal and cultural.

Ditch the massive restaurant conglomerates. Avoid the empires, the spin-offs, the slick machines.

Look for small restaurants run by passionate people. Find places where the owner is the man or the woman in the apron calling dishes from the pass, or banging the pans. Seek out the joint where the sons or the daughters are running the restaurant floor.

These places can be very expensive but they can also be very cheap. For every Asador Etxebarri, an incredibly refined restaurant in the Basque hills where chef Victor Arguinzoniz has been quietly influencing every “wood-fired” eatery that has popped up around the world, there’s 100 ramen joints in Japan where the owner charges $10 for a bowl that he or she has been perfecting for decades.

Japan specialises in these sorts of eateries, where service is so personal, where culture is so ingrained. You don’t have to search far when you’re there: almost every izakaya, every soba noodle shop, every sushi joint fits these parameters.

But you will find this in Italian trattorie, in Thai noodle joints, in Argentinian steakhouses, in French bistros, at Sri Lankan kottu roti stands.

You make connections in these places, which isn’t always easy to do in organic ways when you’re travelling. How often do you get to talk to someone who is the living, breathing embodiment of their culture, who is often changing that culture, who has passion and talent and who will share it all with you?

I’ll tell you some of my favourites. Güeyu Mar, a seafood restaurant on the coast of Asturias in Spain, where chef Abel Alvarez is a pleasure to get to know. Da Enzo al 29 in Rome. Fuku Yakitori in Tokyo. Schole in Hobart. Kabab Erbil in Dubai. Matria in Lima.

And of course, Tala in Auckland. Time recently included this restaurant in its list of “World’s Greatest Places” for 2026, and you can see why. It’s all real.

The writer visited Tala with assistance from Tourism New Zealand.