Support Chef Nick Honeyman to feed people in need.

Born in South Africa and raised between Australia and New Zealand, Nick Honeyman has spent two decades chasing the kind of cooking that quietly reshapes a village. He trained in some of the world’s most demanding kitchens — a stint in Tokyo with Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai, a year in Paris under Pascal Barbot at L'Astrance and Alain Passard at L'Arpège, and time in Sydney with Justin North at Becasse — before landing in Auckland, where he came up through The French Café, Dallow’s and Cru.

In 2012 Honeyman opened The Commons, followed by the modern Japanese izakaya Everybody’s Izakaya, before taking the executive chef role at the five-star Sofitel Auckland. But it was a near-accidental purchase in the south of France that changed everything: in 2015, Nick and his wife Sina — a trained sommelière — took over Le Petit Léon, a garden restaurant in the 300-year-old village of Saint-Léon-sur Vézère, largely, as Nick tells it, as an excuse to spend European summers together.

That instinct paid off. In 2024, Le Petit Léon was awarded a Michelin star — one of only 52 restaurants across France to receive the honour that year — with the Guide praising Nick’s cooking as a 'masterfully intelligent festival of emulsions and contrasting flavours.' He now splits his year between Le Petit Léon’s seasonal May-to-September season in France and Paris Butter, the Two-Hatted fine diner he and Sina co-own on Auckland’s Jervois Road.

Honeyman describes his signature as evolution itself — a refusal to let any one dish sit still for too long.

For CEO CookOff Perth, he brings a rare thing: a Kiwi-Australian chef with a genuine Michelin star, flying in from the French countryside to cook alongside the city’s business leaders in the name of rescuing good food from landfill and putting it on the plates of people who need it most.