A bacon and egg pie built on a family recipe more than 40 years old has been named the best pie in New Zealand, handing a Blockhouse Bay bakery the country’s most sought after food title three months after it was shut down over a pest problem.
Sean Vo of Levain Artisan Bakery took the supreme award at the Bakels New Zealand Supreme Pie Awards, announced in Auckland on Tuesday night. He also won gold in the steak and gravy category, giving one small suburban bakery two of the eleven gold medals awarded.
NZ Bakels managing director Brent Kersel said the winning pie stood out for its “smoky slices and petite core of bacon, the generous amount of whole eggs, and that signature light, yet creamy sauce with a delicate hint of cheese”, the New Zealand Herald reported.
The recipe came from Vo’s father. “Dad loved bacon and egg pies. He ate one almost every day,” Vo told Hospitality Business. His Vietnamese parents bought the Blockhouse Bay shop decades ago and built it around English baking, a detail that says a great deal about how the New Zealand pie actually gets made. Vo said his parents wanted a business specialising in “English-style baked goods like Chelsea buns, Sally Lunn buns, tank loaves and fruit loaves”, with pies a big seller.
Vo told 1News he had not seen it coming. “I was in shock. I wasn’t expecting it,” he said. The bakery lifted production to around 1,000 pies to cope with the rush that follows a supreme win, a surge every previous winner has had to plan for.
The competition is now in its thirtieth year. NZ Bakels started it in 1996 to push bakers to lift the quality of an everyday product that most people bought without thinking about it, and it has grown to roughly 600 entries a year. Pies were judged over two days on 29 and 30 July before the results were released this week.
Judging runs in two tiers. Independent industry judges score every pie in its category on four things, the top, the base, the filling and the baking properties, covering pastry lift, shape retention, the ratio of filling to pastry, texture, colour and glaze. The gold medal winners are then re-judged from scratch by a separate panel to find the supreme winner, with an independent auditor watching the process. Entries must weigh between 280 and 300 grams, must be baked entirely at the registered premises, and are disqualified if they are overweight.
The rest of the gold medal board spread further than Auckland, though not by much. Jason Hay of Richoux Patisserie in Ellerslie won mince and gravy. Cheth Bun of Eurobake Espresso in Kumeu took mince and cheese. Sok Heang Nguon of Taste Bakery and Roast in Henderson won potato top. Songheng Sor of High Bakery and Cafe in Hamilton won steak and cheese, and Vong Hean of Pie2go in Mairangi Bay won chicken and vegetables.
Three golds went outside the main centres or off the standard menu. Tour Khin of The Village Bakery Cafe in Piopio won gourmet meat with a creamy paua and cheese pie. Sophea Tang of Penny Lanes Bakery in Onehunga won the vegetarian category with a vegetable, mushroom and spinach filling. Anthea Loeffen of Traiteur of Merivale in Christchurch won cafe boutique with an oven roasted pear pie made with vanilla, caramel and ginger. The commercial and wholesale gold went to Jason Danielson of Kai Pai in Wanaka, ahead of Couplands of Christchurch and Dad’s Pies of Silverdale.
Read the winners list from top to bottom and a pattern is hard to miss. Most of the bakers holding gold medals this year are Cambodian and Vietnamese New Zealanders, families who came here from the 1970s onwards, bought suburban bakeries nobody else wanted at four in the morning, and quietly took over the making of the most New Zealand food there is. The supreme pie of 2026 is an English recipe, perfected by a Vietnamese family in West Auckland, judged the best in the country by an industry that has spent thirty years trying to raise its own standards.
The organisers said the entry list this year ran from Korean herbal chicken to mountain goat curry and smoked beef brisket with truffle paste, but the biggest fields were still steak and cheese and mince and cheese. Novelty gets the attention. The classics get the entries.
The win closes an awkward chapter for Levain. In May the bakery was given an E grade, the lowest food safety grade Auckland Council issues, and was closed. Council documents cited widespread cockroach activity. The business first told customers it had shut for family reasons before Vo acknowledged the real reason in a social media post on 24 May. An E grade means a business has had a critical food safety issue and has been closed as a result, and it can only trade again once it satisfies the council that standards have been fixed. Levain was cleared to reopen on 31 May after a further inspection found the risks had been dealt with. Vo has said since that the bakery strengthened its systems and procedures.
Auckland Council publishes grades for every food business it licenses, and any customer can look one up before they buy. The system is blunt by design. It closed a bakery in May and it let the same bakery back open a week later, and neither decision was a judgement about the pie.
For the next few weeks the queue outside a small shop on Blockhouse Bay Road will be the longest it has ever been, which is what the award is really for. Thirty years ago the point of the competition was to make the average New Zealand pie less bad. On the evidence of the 2026 board, that argument has been won.
What is the best pie you have ever bought, and where did you get it? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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