Move over Queenstown: this New Zealand city may have the country's best food scene

The boozy smell drifting from an industrial stillhouse on Dunedin's grey fringe takes a moment to identify. New Zealand's resolutely Scottish city wears its Caledonian inheritance with unswerving conviction but the city that lies on the tip of the South Island is confounding expectations.

This isn't whisky. It's gin, Dunedin style.

"We were probably a bit bloody-minded," admits Jenny McDonald, lifting a tray of severed ciabatta crusts and stale coffee cake into a bubbling pot of sticky porridge soon to become Dunedin Craft Distillers' dry gin.

Eighty tonnes of bakery scraps were rumbling off to Dunedin's landfill every year and McDonald, by her own admission, was something of an expert in waste. She had abandoned a medical degree and left a PhD in computer science unfinished when a friend's tirade about food waste sparked an idea. The alchemy was simple: starch breaks down into sugar and sugar ferments into alcohol.

"Our big mistake was thinking how hard it would be," she says.

McDonald teamed up with Sue Stockwell, a veteran of 45 years in nutrition and food service management, and in 2020, the pair founded Dunedin Craft Distillers.

Their Bay Gin went on to win gold at the London Spirit Awards in 2023. That's validation, of course, but it's not the point.

"This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme," admits McDonald, who is yet to draw a proper wage. "We're much more motivated by solving the problem."

Dunedin is full of stories about producers, foragers and fermenters finding inspiration in the overlooked and the discarded. The distillery is one of several stops on a Big Foody walking tour built around people making the best of what's at hand without making a fuss about it.

Not far away, at Princes Street Butcher and Kitchen, Dave Gibson and head butcher Greg Egerton are making sausages and pies that contain only meat, no fillers, no floor scrapings.

"Try one," says Gibson, offering a plate as comforting as a Sunday roast with a stack of hearty lamb, pea and potato pies.

"People were lining up for our pies last year after we cracked 'New Zealand's top 30 pies' award," he says. "We were signing tins and it was, like, 'holy #$@#', what have we done?"

Every ingredient is traced to its origin: beef from Waimate and Middlemarch, lamb from Gore, pork from Timaru. "We know the kids' names, we know the farms," enthuses Gibson as our Big Foody guide leads out the door.

We're steered down No Name Alley off Princes Street and into Wild Dispensary where immunity tonics are being dispensed like communion wine. These therapeutic tinctures are 100 per cent Dunedin-made using ingredients drawn across a rugged coastline and beyond, into Central Otago, gathered at peak vitality and handmade in small batches.

The elderberry blend smells like a German Christmas market and the throat spray - made from thyme, clove, kawakawa and sage - tastes the way medicine probably should but generally doesn't. One of the tourists in our group winces.

The writer was a guest of Enterprise Dunedin