Michael Meredith

Michael Meredith is a Samoan-born chef who has spent two decades championing Pacific cuisine in Auckland. Born in the villages of Vaimoso and Lepea, he grew up watching his mother Metita Saleilua run a pancake stall at the Apia market. When he was six she moved to New Zealand for work and the boys were sent to an uncle; when he was twelve the family reunited in Auckland. That early separation and the food that held the family together run through everything he has cooked since.

Meredith studied at AUT on scholarship, then won a place at the Culinary Institute of America before staging at Montrachet and Gramercy Tavern in New York. Back in Auckland he worked through Antoine's and Vinnies before becoming the founding chef at The Grove, where he won the Lewisham Award for Outstanding Chef in 2005. In 2007 he opened Merediths on Dominion Road, a fine-dining restaurant that won Cuisine Restaurant of the Year in 2011 and became one of the most celebrated kitchens in the country. He ran it for a decade before closing it in 2017.

What followed was a deliberate shift in register. Mr Morris, which he opened in Britomart in 2020, is a more relaxed neighbourhood eatery that is still running. His most recent restaurant, Metita at SkyCity, opened in late 2023 and is named after his late mother. It serves Pacific cuisine reimagined for a contemporary audience and won Cuisine's Hotel Restaurant of the Year, Metro's Best New Restaurant and two hats at the 2025 Cuisine Good Food Awards.

Alongside the restaurants, Meredith co-founded the social enterprise Eat My Lunch with Lisa King in 2015. Built on a buy-one-give-one model, it has provided more than 1.6 million free lunches to children across the country. The venture features in what New Zealand's most successful founders did next.

Across the kitchen and the lunch run, Meredith has used food to tell a story about where he comes from. He has reframed Pacific ingredients and traditions for a New Zealand fine-dining audience while putting his cooking to work for children who would otherwise go without. The restaurant named for his mother is, in that light, the thread that ties both halves of his career together.

Sources: SkyCity · Broadsheet · E-Tangata · NZ Herald