Niwa heads to Hazelmere Farm for a midsummer family-style feast on July 25

Chef Darren Gee is taking Niwa to Hazelmere Farm for an evening where the distance between field and plate collapses to nothing.

On July 25, diners will gather at the South Surrey working farm—home to more than three decades of organic growing by farmer Naty King—to eat family-style off a menu Gee builds around whatever is coming out of the ground that day. Sake and wine pairings and a short list of bottles and cocktails will accompany the meal. All you need is a designated driver.

The relationship between Niwa (which opened in December 2024) and Hazelmere goes back to the team's previous restaurant, Ugly Dumpling. Co-owner Miki Ellis describes the farm as "magical"—a place where the kitchen visits to pick plums and cherries and hang out under the trees. That familiarity is what makes this dinner possible: Gee's cooking starts where ingredients live, not where they're plated.

Naty King's farm has long supplied some of Vancouver's best restaurants and helped shape the Lower Mainland's farm-to-table movement before the phrase became fashionable. A working farm doesn't stop being a farm just because people have paid to eat there. Tables and glasses come out. The pickers, the equipment, the weather, the occasional crop failure—all of it remains. That's the whole point: eating on the farm is a shortcut to understanding what Gee does at Niwa, where every decision comes from a conversation between chef and ingredient.