‘Sometimes, the eyes are bigger than the stomach,’ says Volker Marecek, the executive chef in charge of Eight, the buffet restaurant at Auckland’s Cordis Hotel. Kim Knight and photographer Michael Craig document 24 hours behind the scenes.
Chefs prep for breakfast while the guests eat dinner. Lunch was largely organised yesterday. On Friday morning, 80kg of bacon will be delivered to the back dock. By Tuesday morning, every rasher will have been cooked and eaten.
Start this story anywhere, because a hotel buffet never sleeps. There are no windows in the kitchen but time is meaningless when you are blowtorching a creme brulee at 11.28am and browning sausages at 4.42am.
On any given weekday, Eight, the buffet restaurant at Auckland’s five-star Cordis Hotel, feeds around 600 diners. At the weekends that number easily tops 700. And over the three days of Auckland anniversary weekend, it hit 2576.
That month, the hotel spent $400,000 across its food operations; some months the bill tops $700,000. More than 3000 raw oysters are served weekly; every two days, a chef spends a full 90 minutes rolling 25kg of dough into the uniform balls that will be stretched and slapped against the tandoor oven to re-emerge as naan bread. Customer demand for butter chicken requires 110kg of diced poultry a week.
But first, breakfast.
Guests start wandering into Eight from 6am. They choose cheese-ham-spinach ... no, wait ... tomato-mushroom-ham ... from the omelette-to-order station. They engineer salads from eight different types of lettuce and select from three varieties of sliced melon. Two housemade sorbets. Blueberry scones or plain scones. Congee or charcuterie or 500 waffles in the shape of a silver fern? Help yourself to the maple syrup. And what, exactly, is happening behind those swing doors?
“Angel ... can we reheat some sausages, please?”
“Angel ... I’ve just taken your last eggs benedict.”
“Angel ... Eggs! I will take your hard-boiled eggs.”
Angel An is the sous chef feeding this beast of a breakfast buffet. It is a relentless taskmaster that runs on adrenalin, organisation - and eggs. So many eggs.
“We easily go over 30 boxes a week,” says Volker Marecek, executive chef. That’s 4800 individual eggs. The roaring noise in the background is a chef wielding a stick blender that looks like a proton blaster from the Ghostbusters movie - scrambled eggs, 300 at a time.
“I would say our buffet is different to others,” says Marecek. “We don’t have so many dishes where people help themselves. At Eight, we have eight live stations with chefs. You order your food more like a market.”
Ostrich steak or moki fillet. Salmon sashimi or avocado sushi roll. Creme brulee or apricot Danish. Oysters and/or all of the above, because the only limit to human greed is your two-hour reservation slot.
“You can eat how much you can eat,” confirms Marecek. “Sometimes it breaks my heart, how much people are putting on the plate. Like you have oysters, and then they’re having bread and butter pudding with vanilla sauce. Everything, on one plate! If I’m talking to customers, I say ‘take less, but go more often’.”
Sometimes, says Marecek: “The eyes are bigger than the stomach.”
Seven am on the Friday ahead of Auckland Anniversary weekend. Hotel occupancy is at 80 per cent and Marecek is anticipating his team will do up to 300 breakfasts today and another 500 tomorrow morning. A steady trickle of guests load their plates. Fried rice. Tomato juice. Mushrooms and hash browns. In the kitchen, Makoto Chiba is seasoning the four trays of sushi rice he will need for the lunch station that opens at midday.
The pastry team work separately in a cool room behind heavy doors. It hums to its own soundtrack. “Sad boy country music,” says Jonno Moughtin. He’s a commis pastry chef, the lowest ranking in a kitchen hierarchy established in France two centuries ago. The secret to a good scone? “Room-temperature butter. And use buttermilk.” And the secret to finding joy in a hotel kitchen job? “Seeing people enjoy the food. The guest is on a journey and you want to keep it going for them, you want the person to keep coming back.”
Volker Marecek has been executive chef at the Cordis (which used to be the Langham) since 2009. He oversees 20 chefs working in the buffet restaurant Eight, and another 47 across the Chandelier Lounge with its a la carte menu and high teas, the cocktail bar-adjacent Our Land Is Alive, and the banquet teams which can service up to 800 diners at a time in the hotel’s massive function spaces.
Hotel kitchens, he says - especially ones with a buffet - are logistically tricky.
“I would say a restaurant kitchen is easier,” says Volker. “Not so much the cooking, but the costings. In a restaurant kitchen, you know that you need a 180-gram portion of meat. Here, the guest might eat 200 grams - or 40 grams.”
Eight am in the main kitchen and a young chef chops watermelon. Nine am in the main kitchen and the same young chef chops watermelon. Ten am, and she’s switched to pineapples. Excluding SkyCity, this is Auckland city’s biggest hotel food operation. That one litre of milk you keep in your home fridge? At Eight, the pastry chefs use 100 litres a week just for the creme brulees.
Sustainability is important; reducing food waste is crucial. Eight has the veneer of a buffet - chocolate fountains, chafing dishes of breakfast sausages and huge bowls of help-yourself seafood on ice - but portioned raw meat and fish, salad greens, and sliced raw vegetables are displayed behind glass. Guests point; chefs select, cook and serve. Rotisseried roasts are carved to order; curries are ladled by the chefs. At the end of a lunch service, what has not been used can be safely wrapped, stored and presented again at dinner.
“For food safety reasons we cannot reuse dishes exposed for any longer than two hours,” says Marecek.
Any leftover sushi is binned. Anything that has been sitting in a chafing dish (potato gratin et al), and any uneaten “help yourself” salads (around four are prepared daily) are binned. Rubbish is separated for recycling, and food waste goes to an Ecogas facility in Reporoa where it’s bio-digested into methane gas for injection into the natural gas grid. Residual sludge is then composted and delivered to local agricultural operations.
The volume of food consumed means less “from scratch” preparation than you might expect. The 600 mini pastries and 500 mini Danishes (berry and apricot) that will be devoured over the weekend are bought in from Paneton Bakery, for example. Most fish arrive filleted; most meat is pre-butchered. It saves on food wastage, says Marecek - and time.
“If we had to shuck 3000 oysters ...”
But sometimes, a chef’s gotta chef. Today, Marecek will debone a whole spring lamb for the rotisserie. Marcetto will break down two giant kingfish for sashimi. There will be seven large boxes of mushrooms on the stainless steel bench top that require chopping and Marecek won’t be able to help himself - he takes one and demonstrates the lightning-speed carving technique he learned as a young German chef who came to The Savoy, London, via a stint in Ireland.
“I left school at fifteen-and-a-half. I had two left hands,” says Marecek. “I wanted to do something with food. I could have gone into a bakery, but I would have had to settle down. With cheffing, I could travel. I thought it was stupid to learn English. I flew into Ireland. I’d never flown in my life. I flew into Cork and my work was in Killarney ...”
He paid 100 pounds for the almost 90km taxi ride; he didn’t know Irish money was different to English money. There were 10 chefs in the kitchen and nine of them were German. Today, when he urges his staff to say hello to diners and engage with customers, he also reminds them, “English was not my first language either”.
In the dining room, a Chinese aircrew has just arrived for breakfast. “Ni hao,” says Marecek. And then, to an American carrying a newspaper and an apple, “Good morning”. Marecek is everywhere, pacing, smiling, lifting the lid of a chafing dish for a woman who wants chicken sausages, and picking up a serving fork that has clattered off a bowl of feta on the cheese board.
A small boy in a Hawaiian shirt pours syrup onto his waffle. When a dollop of whipped cream won’t come off the spoon, he scrapes it carefully with his finger and then pops that finger in his mouth. An older man quietly informs a chef that a hair has fallen into the poached eggs. A woman shepherds a child back to a table. “Did you get that yourself? Did you make a mess? Good job, buddy. FOUR croissants?!”
In the windowless kitchen, cardboard is separated for recycling, dishwashers dump dirty coffee cups in a plastic tub, the docket machine dispenses room service orders and news that a guest is allergic to raw bananas and eggplant. A chef arranges vegetable crudites on a platter that sports a leafy celery centrepiece. It’s 8.45am. Marecek’s step count has just hit 8000.
The pastry room has changed its soundtrack. The new beat is distinctly South American. Executive pastry chef Anton Pochtar slices a flourless orange and almond cake into at least one million pieces, while a slab of cheesecake slowly defrosts. Leftover pastries are repurposed into skillet-sized bread and butter puddings. A pistachio-green slab cake will be piped with cream and dotted with chocolate shards and dianthus petals. There is a shout from the main kitchen. A bird has just flown in through the back dock. “Who left the door open?” bellows Marecek.
Bamboo baskets hold steaming shu mai. Balls of what looks like mozzarella turn out to be enormous white onions, ready to be fried with tomatoes, halloumi, courgette and more at the Mediterranean station that was, at breakfast, the omelette station. Marecek rubs the whole, deboned lamb with mustard, honey and mint. Roll-tuck-wrap. A dead body bound for the dinner rotisserie.
“Knife ... coming through ... remember, at 12 o’clock I need 30 doughnuts ... don’t be sorry, be happy ...”
Eight offers breakfast and dinner daily, and lunch from Friday to Sunday. Up to 20 chefs work a 24-hour roster. They have just one guest-free hour to switch the dining room from breakfast to lunch service and three hours between lunch and dinner. At 10.45am, the lights go on over the American Grill (veal tongue, pork scotch, venison sausages, etc) and the Tandoor Kitchen fires up. Entire trolleys loaded with pottles of yoghurt and cereals are wrapped in plastic and stickered with dates. Stacks of fresh plates and cutlery are wheeled back into the dining room. Smash! Someone sweeps up the pieces.
Marecek asks executive sous chef Ronesh Chandra to taste a curry - he’s not entirely happy with the flavour. Makoto is slicing lemons for lunch - and Angel is already working on tomorrow’s breakfast. Eggs are pre-poached for four to five minutes; as demand dictates, they’ll go back into the water bath for a 45-second reheat. In the dining room, the floors are vacuumed and there’s a pot of miso soup on a burner. They’re loading brulees - two in each hand - onto the dessert station. You can feel a stretch in the air; a tension. They’re almost ready.
It’s 11.59am. The first lunch guests are already loading their plates with oysters.
“The oysters come in boxes,” says Marecek. “Sometimes you don’t know how they look ... we had an issue once with the size. They looked like cocktail oysters. No, we don’t use it. A couple of times last year, we didn’t get oysters ... people don’t understand.”
Marecek pays upwards of $60 a kilo for some of his seafood, but bulk ordering buys him more room to negotiate than a chef in a smaller, standalone restaurant.
“I like to try ingredients people don’t eat so often, like liver or kidneys. I had lamb brains last year. We poached them, put them in a sort of bread dumpling and made a roll and then we sliced and grilled it. I was quite surprised how much people ate.
“We have venison, ostrich, tahr. We had alpaca, but the supplier closed down through Covid. I’m always happy to try something new. I say to my fish and meat suppliers, ‘anything new - give it to me, and I’ll see what I can do. This is the fun part’.”
12.10pm and the enormous bowl of oysters-on-ice already needs a refill. The dining room smells like frying onions; a roasted pork hock has been hacked into appealing hunks. “More gravy, thanks,” asks a guest. “Can I get the crispy bit?” The tandoor kitchen is hard selling its chocolate naan (“it balances the spice”) and, in the big kitchen, an oven timer goes off. The bok choy is ready. “Can I take a break?” asks the young chef who is still cutting fruit.
Every day, Eight offers between 50-60 different food items; 80 per cent of it is gluten-free (including the slices of bread that sit under the bacon) and awareness around sustainability issues means it’s 10 years since the menu featured fresh tuna. In the staff cafeteria, there are just two mains (soy-glazed chicken wings; Korean cauliflower) and soup. But at least you can see the sky from the communal tables.
Today’s paying guests can’t get enough lamb rump or ostrich. Both options have been refilled. The veal tongue is absurdly popular. Lunch continues apace, but behind the swing doors, a chef grates Granny Smith apples for tomorrow morning’s Bircher muesli. Tangles of fresh pasta are being portioned for dinner. “I’d like a truffle sauce,” says Marecek.
Two pm and a 4.5kg hunk of char sui pork is lowered into a behemoth of an oven; fresh ice is shovelled onto the seafood station at exactly 4pm. Even frozen water costs money that nobody wants to waste.
It is going to be a relatively quiet night, Marecek tells his team. The plastic wrap is coming off the seafood. The evening’s dishes are scrawled in white marker pen on the station windows. The latticed hexagonal tuiles Marecek demonstrated to a young chef earlier are dotted with goat cheese and honey - the dinner menu includes a selection of canapes (including 30 doughnuts topped with a celeriac salad), the seafood section gets a crab and Moreton Bay bug boost, the pasta section can’t find that truffle sauce (”it’s being sorted!”).
View the restaurant from a seat in the restaurant. Overheard: “I didn’t see any chopsticks? Go and ask for a chocolate naan. Hold onto your fork, don’t let them take it away ...” Dinner is a food coma of black pepper crab, salmon sashimi, wild tahr and game terrine with orange cake to finish.
Once, Marecek worked in a hotel in Estonia with kitchens on the 20th, 10th, eighth and sixth floors. That was a marathon. At the Cordis, the distance from his bunker-like office, through the kitchen and into the dining room at Eight, is roughly 20 metres. At 4.40pm, his step count hits 19,000. By day’s end, it will be 24,000.
There are 640 rooms and suites in the Cordis Hotel and, this weekend, most of them are occupied. At 4.30am, the only people in the corridors are staff. Cold prep for breakfast happened in the very dead of the night. Through the swing doors and Maracek is waiting with coffee and the news that 500-600 people are expected for breakfast. There will be two omelette stations. A chef has called in sick and, in an adjacent kitchen, an oven is broken. Angel asks for help with a jar of honey - the lid has stuck. The pastry room is playing, inexplicably, Lionel Ritchie.
Marecek breaks open the packaging on a new George Foreman benchtop grill. “Only $100 on special,” he shrugs, setting it up behind the restaurant-sized hotplates that will do the heavy lifting. The big ovens are stacked full of trays of bacon and mushrooms. Angel has begun the monumental task of frying off 15kg of chicken sausages and the same again of beef. “Maybe,” says Marecek, “It’s still not enough?”
The bacon goes out hot and sits under a cover, but when guests lift the lids on the metal serving pans, the temperatures drop. The trick is to control the food flow; to only ever offer just enough. The most common complaint, says Marecek, is cold bacon; people are very particular about bacon. “You have the Americans, and they want the bacon dead. Black and crisp.”
In London, Marecek lived in a room the size of his current office. It had a mattress, a cupboard and a sink. His shift started at 5am. He earned 75 pounds a week and spent 20 pounds on transport, and another 30 on accommodation. There were 100 chefs in the kitchen. It was a brutal training ground. “People would hide sauces, steal shallots.” He thinks young chefs should move on every two years or so. “It doesn’t matter if you go to a shitty kitchen or a good kitchen - you’re learning something.” At the Cordis, “it’s important to me that we work as a team. As a family. The guest comes first. No guest, no work. No work, no salary.”
5.50am. The pancakes are on the grill again. Each week, the team makes 100kg of ice cream and 60kg of sorbet. This morning’s flavours are banana, vanilla, passionfruit and coconut. At 6.30am, a child proves it is never too early for ice cream in a cone.
“Good morning, Sir. How are you?” Marecek opens a fresh bottle of Watties tomato sauce and plonks it in front of the sausages. He estimates diners will consume 15kg of congee this morning; oatmeal porridge will also be popular - there’s a shipload of cruise passengers breakfasting before they embark and “cruise ships eat porridge”.
In the kitchen, Makoto arrives to start prepping sushi rice. In the pastry room, the scones are still warm and there is an instruction to decorate a small cake for a surprise staff birthday. It is 7am. Marecek checks his watch - 4000 steps. “Angel,” he calls. “I think more eggs ...”
Kim Knight is an award-winning lifestyle reporter who joined the Herald in 2016. She holds a Masters in Gastronomy and, in 2023, was named one of New Zealand’s top 50 influential & inspiring women in food and drink.