Alamjot was fifteen the day he first walked into a working kitchen — a boy who, by any sane measure, had no business standing that close to a flame. But something in him already knew. Beneath the heat and chaos of a dinner service in full flight, he found the one place in the world that felt like home. That first apprenticeship, in his hometown in India, was never just a job. It was the start of a devotion that would shape the rest of his life.

It carried him through some of India’s finest kitchens — including a palace kitchen, where his plates were set before world dignitaries — and then, with nothing but his knives and his nerve, across an ocean to New Zealand. Along the way he learned every side of the business: the fire of the pass, the discipline of running a bar, the detail of managing a restaurant floor. So when he finally stepped into a kitchen entirely his own, he knew exactly the chef, and the house, he wanted to build.

While the culinary world chases its next trick, Alamjot turned back toward the food that made him — old-school, unhurried comfort food, cooked the way his own family cooked it, nothing hidden, nothing to prove. Because the plate was never where his heart lived. The table was. He grew up around one that never seemed to end — chairs dragged in to fit one more, wine poured like it would never run out, nobody ever in a hurry to leave. That is the fire he rebuilt when he opened Orakei Local.

He lives by an old Italian saying: years, loves and wine are never counted. That is the only rule at his table. Nothing here is measured. No one is rushed to go.

“Anni, amori e bicchieri di vino, non si contano mai.”
Years, loves and glasses of wine are never counted — Alamjot’s own words to live by.