We’re thrilled to welcome Mark Gregory into the Cuisine Good Food Awards Hall of Fame, though he will have to nudge aside dozens of other trophies to fit this one on his shelf, evidence of the considerable list of accolades he has earned in his outstanding 35-year career.

Chef, TV presenter, author, entrepreneur, consultant, culinary judge and philanthropist are just some of the labels to describe this remarkable hospitality professional. But it is not only his talent in the kitchen and ability to build successful businesses – both within hospitality and in the broader sector – that’s notable, but also his generosity of spirit in supporting others and giving back to the community.

Let’s start with the awards. He was named New Zealand Chef of the Year in 1983, 1986 and 1987 before heading overseas and winning the title of British Chef of the Year in 1988. He was the first New Zealander to be awarded a Master of Culinary Arts by the Royal Academy in 1996, and earned the status of Meilleur Ouvrier (Master Craftsman) in France in the same year. Returning to New Zealand he became a member of the Restaurant Association Hall of Fame in 2022.

Mark has worked in top restaurants across Europe, including a nine-year stint as executive chef at London’s top-end One Aldwych hotel, and founded numerous successful restaurants including popular chain Itsu, credited with creating Japanese food for the European palate. Working alongside some of the most recognisable names in the culinary world, he has cooked for heads of state, royalty, movie celebrities and pop stars.

Picked by the BBC as one of six Hot Chefs in the early 90s, Mark went on to host wildly popular Ready, Steady, Cook and recently hosted Christmas at the Castle based on his book of the same name, and a series that has just been picked up by SBS in Australia, Apple TV and Amazon. He also has two new books in the pipeline – a notebook of his top kitchen hints and hacks, and a cookbook in which he updates the classics for modern times and for which he is in the midst of shooting more than 100 hands-on videos.

In 1993, Mark turned his practical knowledge of kitchen life to clothing design creating the Le Chef clothing brand. He is a director of Eveve, a leading supplier of restaurant reservation systems, and online booking system Restaurant Hub. In 2012 he was a founding trustee of DineAid, an annual Christmas campaign that has seen more than 60 restaurants raise over $1.2m to date for foodbanks in New Zealand.

“When I started out I was 15 or 16 and I’d never been good at anything. My granddad said, ‘What have you done that you’ve really enjoyed?’ I said cooking. So, by chance I fell into something where it clicked but I had no thoughts of the future at all.”

An apprenticeship and study at AUT laid the groundwork and his potential was recognised when he was named Young Chef of the Year at college. As he headed overseas, Mark was about to discover reserves of talent, tenacity and a capacity for the long hours and sheer hard work of a successful kitchen career.

Not all skills came from the day job. Competing in cooking competitions gave him valuable skills in how to develop a dish and he laments that such competitions have fallen out of favour among young chefs. It’s not about the winning, he says, but the teaching. Working towards the Meilleur Ouvrier – a competition in which the candidate is given time and basic materials to not only create a masterpiece, but to do so with a goal of approaching perfection – he wanted the pastry on his gâteau to rise. Not just to rise, but to soufflé. So he made it once, then he tried it again. And again. After 19 attempts he thought he had it right. “You have to have an empathy for the dish,” he says. “And then refine, refine, refine.”

Hard work it certainly was, and Mark recalls days of filming when he would make two episodes of a TV show in the afternoon then jump in a taxi to get to the restaurant in time for dinner service. “I haven’t worked so hard in all my life. But the camaraderie mixed with the discipline and knowing your place in the team is brilliant. It is a great way to spend your time. It really is. And if you’re in a really good kitchen, it’s like going out with your mates every night.”

That said, when his daughter Analiese wanted to become a chef, he says he did everything he could to talk her out of it. Realising she was undeterred, he then threw his support behind her going to AUT as a 15-year-old, from where her career has soared.

Mentorship and staging – an unpaid internship when a chef works briefly in another chef’s kitchen to learn and be exposed to new techniques and cuisines – provided vital learning for Mark, so when he was in a position to pay it forward he gladly did, picking up the phone to put in a good word when it would help. “The thing, without question, that I’m most proud of is the young chefs that came through our kitchens and who are now in really good jobs. When we were young, restaurants would have people like me queuing to do stages. We would have people come into our kitchen and we would have our people go into others, and I would often do that as a gift. It is a gift to go into someone else’s kitchen – make no mistake.”

From luxury fine dining, through mass-appeal high-street brands and delving into the grim world of food insecurity and helping to feed those in need, Mark has an overarching view of our contemporary food world. Luxury has its place for sure (Mark was on the voting panel for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants for 13 years), but hospitality is changing and he believes we need to change with it. “Fine dining at its best is far from irrelevant,” he says, adding that those World’s 50 Best restaurants continue to push boundaries, striving to make dining genuinely experiential. “Whether you like the food or not, they’re not going anywhere. But hospitality is metamorphosising. Quick-service restaurants are growing rapidly because people can afford to go to them and that side of the industry requires a very different chef.”

So did he count himself as one of the rock-star chefs of the time? “I was just in my kitchen working away. I had a very good career and so for a period of time I was somebody. At that level doors open and you decide whether you walk through or which ones you walk through or not. I’ve done other things, I’ve done TV, I’ve had businesses, but I was always a chef. I’ve never wished I’d done something else and cooking is, without question, still the best bit.”