A chip off the old block! COLIN'S SON HOGGS THE LIMELIGHT

The reality star has a famous dad who'll be glued to the tele

- Rebekah Hebenton

When the Weekly talks to Kiwi chef Jamie HoggWharekawa, he is in the middle of a busy day prepping food for the upcoming holiday rush. While working as head chef at the iconic Oyster Inn on Waiheke Island under Michelin-starred Josh Emett is a dream job, Jamie admits there is still a part of him that wishes he was back in New York, in the little Italian bistro he sadly had to abandon when Covid hit.

“The thing I miss the most is that New York never sleeps, it never stops. There's always something to do and there are always people everywhere. If it wasn't for the pandemic, I would still be there now."

At the beginning of 2020, Jamie was living the life he had always dreamed of in the Big Apple – a city he'd wanted to visit since he was a child - as well as running his own restaurant, his wife Nadine had just given birth to their first child, a beautiful baby girl named Olive.

Then, the global pandemic hit and the world shut down. Jamie and his small family spent the next nine months in their apartment as the city of New York was devastated by Covid. At one point, the death toll in the city rose so rapidly a that officials struggled to find space to store and bury the bodies of those who had died.

“Olive arrived in February when Covid had just hit New York, then by March the whole city shut down. It was quite scary watching the news and seeing the daily case numbers in the hundreds of thousands. We’d bring the shopping home and sanitise everything.”