Fleurs Place seems to sit not only on the rocky edges of Moereki, a weary seaside hamlet on New Zealand’s South Island once home to one of the country’s largest whaling facilities, but right on the edge of reality.

A worn timber staircase and stained-glass windows rescued from nearby demolitions, vintage cutlery and tableware, as mismatched as the tables on which they’re set, and the sight of the titular Fleur zipping ceaselessly between restaurant kitchen, adjacent pier, bordering herb gardens and dining room; a meal at Fleurs Place (the apostrophe is implied) is both satisfying and dream-like.

Ephemeral as the surrounding experience may be, the food is refreshingly tangible and literal. Making the most of fishing quotas collected over decades, Fleur Sullivan serves only what her boats have drawn from the water that morning.

“If you’re sitting here and you tell me you want a whole fish, and I see boat come in over there,” she says, pointing to the small pier that shares her small inlet, “I’ll go zipping over there to get it for you straight away.”

She laughs, perfectly aware of the madness of her own enterprise.

“This isn’t a pimple by the way,” she adds quickly as she covers her lower lip with her hand. “I’ve been bitten by a crayfish. They’re terrible things.”

Shortly after Sullivan shuttered Olivers in the late ’90s, her celebrated, similarly apostrophe-less restaurant of 20 years outside Queenstown, the chef was diagnosed with cancer. She prescribed herself a permanent dose of sea air and relocated to Moereki on the eastern edge of New Zealand’s South Island, an hour north of Dunedin.

“It means ‘a place to rest by day’,” Sullivan explains, “but I didn’t know that when I moved. It just feels good here. Nobody takes any notice of me.”

Her self-imposed retirement was short-lived. Barely had her cancer gone into remission when Fleur, inspired by the fish she saw being pulled from the water each morning, bought a catering caravan and began to sell fish (fresh and smoked), soup and bread to locals and occasional tourists.

“My son asked what I was doing it for,” Sullivan says. “And I said, “Maybe the whales will come back in one day and I’ll make lots of money’. But he said the whales have too long a memory, they will never come back in here.”

Word of the celebrated chef’s small seaside operation spread quickly, and the success of the caravan brought with it the inevitable temptation to open a new restaurant. Despite Fleur’s insistence that she was out of the restaurant business for good, Fleurs Place was born.

Perched on a small, blunt peninsula, the eatery quickly gained a reputation for its simply prepared seafood, often featuring under-used and highly sustainable local breeds of fish, as well as indigenous specialities such as muttonbird and whitebait. It’s food the chef describes as being “like going home on a good day”.

A visit from Rick Stein in 2006 solidified Fleur’s fish shack’s spot on the map, marked as indelibly as his autograph on the door downstairs (it has since been joined by thousands of other signatures from satisfied travellers, adorning every reachable surface in the place. Sullivan accepts the practice mournfully: “I stripped all this wood myself, and now people write all over the walls… ”).

But it was another special visit that secured Fleurs Place’s position in local folklore.

“It was 16 years ago. I was full inside, full outside,” Fleur explains of the moment a fisherman raced into the restaurant and insisted Sullivan follow him outside.

“Just out there,” she says, indicating the coastline that almost laps at the building’s foundation, “a southern right whale was going backwards and forwards slowly. Right in front of the restaurant. I had this urge to take all my clothes off and join him in the water. Then he blew water out of his blowhole and away he went.

“I stood there with tears in my eyes.”

Today Fleur Sullivan still wakes early to catch the fishing boats returning to the pier. She wanders the garden surrounding the restaurant to pick herbs and edible flowers. She strolls through the restaurant introducing diners to the latest catch before it reaches the kitchen. And today she stands outside the restaurant, a twinkle in her eye, watching a couple walk towards the door oblivious that they’re passing the titular Fleur.

“Oh god, don’t eat there,” she says with a wink, “that place is awful!”