Londo - Christchurch's tiny kitchen & restaurant

The freshest produce is the star at Christchurch’s wine bar turned restaurant Londo

When Londo won New Zealand’s Casual Restaurant of the Year in the Cuisine Good Food Awards in 2025, the magazine wrote: “We’re not sure what comes first at Londo, the bar or the restaurant. Either way, both the food and the drinks are superb.”

The dilemma was a good one to have for founder and chef Bob Fairs, who, after a quick rise in the world of fine dining, opened Londo in 2021 to showcase the organic and low-intervention wines he loved and whose makers he was friends with.

“We had something like 15 wines by the glass and only like five food options", says Bob.

The serious cooking chops of the young chef quickly gained the small space on Papanui Road a reputation for thoughtful and delicious food, and now he says, “the market dictates what you are, and we have become a restaurant, people treat us as a restaurant, and that’s a great thing.”

The making of a chef in Christchurch’s collaborative restaurant scene

As a child, Bob was “infatuated” by food and cooking, learning at his mother’s side as she baked, while he was “messing around with off-cuts of quiche or whatever she was making.” Looking to make some money to buy records, at 15, he got an after-school job washing dishes at the Cassels Brewery restaurant. After two weeks, chef Finbar McCarthy, who went on to be head chef at Gatherings and is now at Lillies, “pulled me out of the dish pit and got me cooking.”

He worked his way through kitchens, and then in 2015, he left Christchurch to intern in a restaurant in Copenhagen when new Nordic cuisine was all the rage. “I saw [Gatherings founder] Alex Davies and told him what I was doing, and I remember him very clearly saying, “awesome, bro, but bring it home.”

He returned to an influential stint as head chef at Lyttelton’s Roots with Guilio Sturla, who now runs Mapu, went back overseas to chef in Dubai, and now, with Londo, has brought all that experience home to Christchurch.

Christchurch is at the heart of the South Island’s produce

Londo got its name from a mash-up of the old English term “lond” meaning land, and the phone prefix for New Zealand’s South Island, 03. Bob talks of the importance of the restaurant’s location as an early food area when Christchurch was founded, its connection with Papatūānuku (the Māori Earth Mother) and how the city’s location means “you can get the best of the South Island to your door within a day or two. You can get the best lamb from Southland or kina or paua from Bluff, you've got all these amazing orchards and vineyards up in Nelson and Marlborough, and we really pull predominantly from the South Island.”

Bob says the faster he can source ingredients, the fresher they will be, while accepting that, unlike his time in Dubai, he has to be highly dependent on seasonality. For example, “we’re not going to use figs that are grown in Australia, we wait two or three weeks longer, and we have a relationship with that grower that we’ve had for years, to the point where she says, I've saved the last pick for you.”

Bob says developing those relationships is the most important aspect of his food.

He is excited to see new ingredients from the South Island, such as king crab from Picton’s Connor’s Catch. “They have just come out of nowhere in the last six to eight months with endemic New Zealand king crab and diamond crabs, and wow, they are beautiful. If you live in America, you’re getting Alaskan king crab, or if you live in Europe, you’re getting Norwegian king crab. How lucky are we that we have New Zealand king crab?”

What to expect on the plate at Londo?

Bob likes to give the ingredients and their growers most of the credit, but what he produces from a tiny kitchen consistently wows diners with how he designs a dish from a few key ingredients and then works backwards. The menu changes every six to eight weeks, and Londo is famous for never repeating a dish.

“I’ve never wanted to be somewhere that you can come back and get that classic dish. I've always tried to challenge ourselves to do something different with the product every year, because the product comes out at the same time every year. Why would we look back and go, okay, we’ll just bring this one out of the hat again?”

He sees the constraints of space, equipment and seasonality as spurs to his creativity. “We have a home induction home oven, a meat slicer and a countertop fryer that we fill with water to cook pasta. You have to be realistic about what you’re able to achieve within that, and we have limited fridge space too. It’s those limitations that provide that framework.”

He is also a forager who draws inspiration from what he finds locally, such as flowering currents gathered from walks on Banks Peninsula, “because those are fond memories for me of smelling these fragrances on a dewy morning or trying to capture these micro seasons.” He loves acidity and freshness, saying that “spring florals resonate with me so much because there is no freshness until November in Christchurch.”

Staying true to his vision and his flavours is the heart of Bob’s dishes at Londo. As his friend Liam Kelleher from Lillies once said to him, ‘You need to stop cooking food that you think people want to eat, and you need to start cooking food that you want to cook.’ “For me, that was a light bulb moment,” says Bob.

Diners at Londo have been seeing the light ever since.

Your questions from this article answered:

What are the Cuisine Good Food Awards?

The Cuisine Good Food Awards are widely considered the gold standard and most prestigious accolades for New Zealand’s hospitality industry.

Operating for over two decades, they act as the definitive annual guide to the absolute best dining experiences across Aotearoa, evaluating everything from high-end fine dining to exceptional neighbourhood wine bars.

Do you need a reservation for Londo Christchurch, or do they take walk-ins?

While Londo does accommodate walk-ins if space permits — especially for stools along the bar pass— booking ahead is highly recommended.

Because the space is incredibly intimate (around 30 square meters and seats only about 27 people), it fills up very quickly, especially on Friday and Saturday nights.

What are Londo Christchurch’s opening hours?

Londo is open Tuesday through Saturday from 5:00 pm to 11:00 pm. They are closed on Sundays and Mondays.

What kind of food does Londo serve, and how much does it cost?

Londo serves an ever-changing, hyper-seasonal menu focused on local South Island produce and foraging. The style is modern, refined yet unpretentious, with shared plates and bar snacks.

• Mains/plates price range: generally, between $24 and $35.
• The experience: diners can order à la carte shared plates or opt for a chef’s set menu. The menu changes almost weekly, depending on what chef-owner Bob Fairs sources from local producers.

What is the drinks selection like at Londo?

The beverage menu is a massive drawcard.

They specialise in local natural, organic, and biodynamic wines — including their own exclusive collaboration wine, Londo Blanco, made with Kindeli in Nelson. They also feature a highly curated cocktail list.