New Zealand

Wait beside a hāngī as it's opened after hours in the ground and you'll understand New Zealand's table at once: baskets of lamb, chicken, kūmara and pumpkin lifted steaming from a stone-lined earth pit, smoky and falling-apart tender — in Rotorua the geothermal ground does the cooking itself. This is young, clean, ingredient-led food on a pair of islands where nowhere is far from the sea and the green pastures raise some of the finest lamb on earth.

The coast keeps giving: plump green-lipped mussels, Bluff oysters in their short season, crayfish pulled from the water at Kaikōura, and fish and chips unwrapped from paper on a windy beach. A Sunday roast of lamb remains the centrepiece, and the café culture is world-class — locals will tell you the flat white was invented here. Marlborough's zippy Sauvignon Blanc put the country on the wine map, and pudding is, of course, the pavlova — a cloud of crisp meringue and cream crowned with kiwifruit — best enjoyed without mentioning that Australia claims it too.