Cooking up a garden

摘要

Fragrant basil and succulent cherry tomatoes go straight from rooftop garden to plate at Wellington's Zibibbo restaurant. JAMIE OLIVER HAS one. Fellow celebrity chef James Martin has got in on the act. And legendary Californian restaurant The French Laundry has the best and biggest kitchen garden by far (they call it a culinary garden). Growing their own is an increasingly common response from restaurants to the "locavore" (localfood) dining movement. And you can't get your food any more local, or any fresher, than at Wellington's Zibibbo bar and restaurant, where the distance between garden and plate is roughly 10m. That's right; should the mint for Friday night two-for-one mojitos run low, restocking is as simple as sending a kitchen hand up through a hatch to the rooftop garden, where mint grows rampantly in its recycled mussel box beds alongside sage, thyme and coriander.