Forest began its life in 2018 as a series of pop-up events around the city, before establishing its first permanent residence on Symonds St: a 17-seater restaurant offering a plant-based three-course set menu that changed week to week. Last year, Forest owner and head chef Plabita Florence found a new home for the restaurant’s seasonally focused and entirely vegetarian (often vegan) fare on Dominion Rd.

Whimsy finds its way into the restaurant décor via the purple and green painted walls, the wavy green glasses, the doodles in the dining room, the sprigs of fresh blooms dotted around the restaurant and the snail-shaped vase on the mantelpiece — which has become a kind of mascot for the place. It’s eclectic, yes, but it’s also decidedly chic.

At the back of the restaurant, almost an entire wall is populated by rows of jars: potion-like vessels of homemade ferments, brews and pickles. If most of the menu is focused on produce locally in season, these jars of preserves fill the gaps. Leftover pea shells and passionfruit skins are brewed in vodka, to be transformed into martinis; vinegar is imbued with superfluous cherry pits; and wine that isn’t sold is saved, boiled down and turned into “old wine” butter. 

The menu at Forest still changes weekly, but whichever season you visit, the food promises to be playful, delicious and even a little oddball at times. We are utterly obsessed with their deep-fried halloumi: it arrives in a glossy pool of caramelised onion gravy and celery honey, piled with slices of green apple. Then there’s the kūmara with Marmite cream and caper peas — a fantastically plated, ultra-umami crowd-pleaser of a dish. Savoury courses are done to perfection at Forest, but the restaurant also boasts some of the most inventive desserts in the city: think giant kyoho grapes suspended in jelly; fresh black truffle grated on to olive-oil ice cream; jelly and yuzu custard dotted with a veritable posy of foraged wildflowers; or maybe an orange sticky rice dusted with rhubarb sherbet.  This is interesting, charming, deeply thought-out food, that’s perfectly in tune with every other element of the restaurant – that’s what makes Forest so singular, and so genuinely special.