I can remember what I was wearing the first time I made my way down Marylebone High Street, bracing against the British winter until I found the glass bay windows of Peter Gordon’s The Providores and Tapa Room. On a busy day, to push through the door from the whistling cold into the sound of so many happy people cracked through me like a mood swing. It was a London institution like no other.

There’s a special difficulty in making a name for yourself and your country in a place so far away from home. Like Ben Shewry of Melbourne’s Attica — New Zealand’s other most internationally famous chef — Gordon wasn’t “made” in New Zealand. He started here but England made him. His ability to go from a Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāi Tahu kid from Whanganui to a household name in England is nothing short of Herculean. He was deeply woven into the British culinary tapestry, making the 2019 closure of The Providores and Tapa Room palpable in London. He did, however, always fly the flag (and wear the pounamu) — an unofficial ambassador who took it upon himself to familiarise the United Kingdom with the unique wines and produce of New Zealand, a place so much more than a small faraway island nation.

After pressing the detonator on the past 25 years of his life in England and severing ties with SkyCity’s The Sugar Club, Gordon has returned home to start again at age 57. With Homeland , he has taken the role of New Zealand culinary ambassador a step further. Dubbed a “Food Embassy for Aotearoa”, Homeland is a hub for producers, a cooking school, and an all-day restaurant. It’s an ambitious project and the largest restaurant he’s ever run.

With the bones of such a huge open space and the floor-to- ceiling glass, you run the risk of having the energy bleed out of the room like a severed jugular. But he and partner Alastair Carruthers, who have opened Homeland independently from any investors, have done an admirable job of avoiding cold and keeping the space inviting and pleasantly airy.

It’s a good thing, as there’s a lot going on here. There’s a shop where you can stock up on artisanal salt from Northland’s Taipa Salt Pig or organic honey from Niue’s flourishing Pacific Bee Sanctuary. You can take a cooking class on the modern roast or bring in your catch and have Gordon teach you how to transform it into a fragrant, whole curried fish. You can pop in for a pastry from the counter or settle into the garden for a late lunch. With the newest addition of Sunday Jive Sessions for those after live music, there are no shortage of ways in which you can experience Homeland.

It’s on my third visit when I decide my ideal experience of Homeland is to sit in the garden next to the pineapple sage and the chocolate mint in the middle of the day, a table scattered with an order that balances Gordon’s brunchy dishes with bright vegetables and salads and, if appetite allows, a plate of clams or fish. Then throw in a vanilla-and-orange-infused cold brew or a glass of wine from Homeland’s exclusively New Zealand list for something stronger. Perhaps Carruthers is teaching one of the young chefs how to properly harvest from the mint planter (cut the edges so it grows more in the middle) or Gordon’s setting up for his bread-making course, easily spied in his element through glass. It all adds to the sense of community and a lovely afternoon dining by the water.

It’s not surprising that many of the most satisfying dishes on the menu at Homeland fall into the brunch category. Over 18 years of warm cheese scones and plates of chorizo at The Providores and Tapa Room, Gordon helped to successfully transform the English into a people who brunched. At Homeland, his classic Turkish-eggs dish makes its due appearance on the menu and it still satisfies: two eggs in a bowl of whipped garlicky yoghurt topped with a copper halo of Aleppo-infused chilli butter and fresh herbs from the garden. It’s a dish that, when dug into with a tear of crusty Dusty Apron sourdough, brings with it that special joy that can only come from a perfectly jammy yolk. It’s a signature that’s stood the test of time and exactly the sort of cooking that solidified Gordon as the Godfather of Fusion .

Fusion is a funny beast. It’s a style of cuisine that can call to mind things like miso caramel and was once a sort of culinary “dirty word”. It also happens to be one of the more impactful cooking styles of the past century. It was ridiculed as “Con- Fusion” by many critics in the beginning, but fusion chefs pushed diners to think about cuisine outside the confines of rigid categories. They helped them to understand how cuisine can be shaped by a meeting of different cultures and life experiences to create dishes as multifaceted as the people behind the plates. Essentially, fusion cuisine helped make it so that you can walk into a trendy bistro anywhere in the world, eat a meal composed of flavours from France, Israel and South America, and be content with the explanation that the chef is cooking “their food”.

At this point, I imagine Gordon must feel like Joaquim de Almeida, one of Hollywood’s most recognisable bad guys (you’ll know his face): unable to be cast in any role that does not include a vendetta and a weapon in the same way Gordon cannot be spoken about without being painted with the fusion brush that brought him his initial fame. “If I’d simply been able to say I was cooking ‘my food’ and gotten away with it, I would have done that,” Gordon tells me following my last visit to Homeland. “These days, there is such a mash-up of cuisines that perhaps fusion has become redundant and has served its purpose.”