Hayden Phiskie is giving me his pitch for a TV show – he would travel around Italy with a TV crew filming him as he experiences it all for the very first time. Imagine it: his first bite of pizza actually eaten in Napoli, his first taste of risotto cooked in Milan, the reaction to eating horse in Puglia. Astonishingly, this chef who has made his name cooking Italian dishes oozing with flavour has never actually been to Italy.

It was during his OE in Argentina and Chile – where he worked for World Vision and UNICEF cooking lunch for school children – that Hayden first came to know Italian food. For more than a century, waves of Italian immigrants chased better opportunities and big dreams in the fertile lands of South America (today, more than half of Argentina’s population has Italian heritage) bringing with them their recipes, food traditions and heritage, and Hayden became familiar with very traditional Italian food South American-style. Later experiences further awakened his interest. “I was living in Melbourne for a long while, and I just started to admire their Italian food,” he says. “What I like about Italian food is that there’s nowhere to hide. There are three flavours on a plate and you should be able to taste every one of those three flavours. They need to be seen, they need to be heard, they need to be tasted. You can’t just hide it in a sauce; if a sauce is there, it’s there for a reason.”

It’s a pared back aesthetic that is evident in Hayden’s latest restaurant, Bianca, in the Auckland suburb of Ellerslie. An unassuming shopfront, inside it is small but airy and inviting, and here Hayden has cracked the code of casual neighbourhood dining. By noon on a cool Tuesday lunchtime the tables are filling up, the buzzy atmosphere is convivial and relaxed. Starting in 2023 as a pasta deli that served lunch, it has slowly built to offer a dinner service with a short seasonal menu in which house-made pasta is the unabashed hero.

This humble space with a small team is a far cry from what Hayden first craved when he started as a 17-year-old kitchen hand. “I really loved the chaos of the kitchen… It’s not like I loved food, I just loved the environment and the excitement. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.” This was what Hayden has come to see as the first of his journeys in his 25 years of cooking. “Then as I got older, I thought, ‘No, there’s more to this than just the service part and getting through it’. So I started to appreciate more about food, the enjoyment of food and what makes good food and how to be a part of it.”

At Bianca he is still very much on the pans but, once the order is ready, it’s Hayden who will deliver the dishes to the table, interacting with diners and learning what works and what doesn’t. “I think I understand a lot better what people want, what they’re coming for and what they appreciate, and about how they want to spend their money.”

Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the short menu. It’s honest food that diners understand. “When I was doing fine dining it felt like a lot of smoke and mirrors. I felt like a lot of hands were touching up products before it actually went out to the customer. What I love about Italian food is it’s so simple, but so beautiful.” TRACY WHITMEY