Nourishing, Flavourful Food for Meaningful Gatherings
Pachamama Catering creates vibrant, beautifully presented catering for weddings, retreats, celebrations and events across the Central Coast, Sydney, Newcastle and the Hunter Valley. Known for abundant shared feasting, seasonal menus and elegant presentation, Pachamama combines a relaxed garden-to-plate philosophy with the experience of high-end event catering. Using local, organic and homegrown produce wherever possible, our menus are designed around seasonal ingredients, thoughtful hospitality and memorable shared dining experiences that bring people together around beautiful food.
Ali is the founder, head chef and cookbook author behind Pachamama Catering. With 12+ years of catering weddings, retreats and gatherings across the Central Coast, and training as a plant-based chef in New York City, Ali brings warmth, creativity and a deep love of garden-to-plate cooking to every event.
Every Pachamama event begins with a conversation - about your guests, your space, your story, and the flavours you love. From there we build a menu that feels like yours: seasonal, generous, and beautifully presented.
We cater weddings, retreats, milestone celebrations, corporate events and at-home gatherings, in whatever style suits the day:
Long-table feasts and shared family-style dining
Grazing tables and roving canapés
Buffets and abundant share plates
Casual menus — tacos, paella, wood-fired pizza
Drop-off catering for relaxed gatherings
Menus are built around what's in season and what's growing in our own permaculture garden, with vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, gluten-free and omnivore options on every menu, never an afterthought.
Available across the Central Coast, Hunter Valley, Newcastle, Sydney and beyond.
Grown, made, served
We grow much of our own produce in a small permaculture garden in Killcare - herbs, leaves, edible flowers and seasonal vegetables that often travel less than an hour from the bed to the plate. What we don't grow ourselves, we source from local growers and food-makers across the Central Coast.
We compost every scrap, keep single-use products to an absolute minimum, and choose suppliers who care about the same things we do. It's not a marketing line, it's just how we cook.
A menu for every guest
Our menus are built so that every guest - vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, allergy-aware or omnivore - eats beautifully. Never a sad alternative plate, never an afterthought. The same care, the same presentation, the same generous serving, for every guest, at every event.
For coeliac and serious allergy guests we prepare food on separate, untainted surfaces and brief our team thoroughly. Many of our clients have multiple dietary needs in their guest list - accommodating them isn't an extra service, it's the heart of how we cook.
Meet Ali
Ali trained as a plant-based chef in New York City and has spent over a decade cooking across fine dining, film and corporate hospitality. From Head Chef at the University of Melbourne, to private catering for Spotify, TripAdvisor and Uber, to crew catering on sets including Real Housewives of Sydney and Selling Houses Australia.
These days, her heart is in the kind of catering she loves most - weddings, retreats and gatherings on the Central Coast, cooked with mostly garden-grown produce and shared with people who care about where their food comes from.
She's also the author of the Pachamama cookbook and runs small-group cooking classes, both from her permaculture garden and from various venues across NSW.
