Six months ago, I cooked up a multi-course Hobbit feast to accompany a viewing party of the extended-cut Lord of the Rings trilogy. So it seemed fitting to close out the year by traveling to Hobbiton in New Zealand, the idyllic setting of the Shire where Peter Jackson filmed his movies. After the immersive tour, we stopped at the Green Dragon Inn for a dinner banquet fit for a Hobbit. And I had to see how my own feast measured up!

Hobbiton is actually a 1,250-acre sheep farm located near Matamata on the North island of New Zealand. The Shire was constructed for the original three Lord of the Rings movies but then disassembled – it wasn’t until Peter Jackson reconstructed them for the Hobbit movies that they became permanent. Today there are 44 Hobbit homes, and while some of them are just iconic round doors and windows built into the rolling green hills, others have been fully decorated inside with an incredible eye for detail.

I’m not exaggerating when I saw this was the very first thing that I booked for our New Zealand vacation – even before any of the airfare, car rentals, or hotels. The evening banquet experience is the last tour of the day, and we got to see a perfect summer sunset at the Shire as we made our way over the mill pond to the Green Dragon Inn for dinner. The inn serves its own Southfarthing ales and ciders, as well as local New Zealand wines and a non-alcoholic ginger beer.

The food was excellent – exactly the types of hearty home-cooked dishes you would expect from Hobbits. There were three long tables to accommodate everyone, with identical dishes at both ends of each table. For the mains, there were roasted chickens, lamb with gravy, beef stew, and slabs of salmon. Also vegetable pot pie, salad, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, pickles, bread rolls with butter, and roasted root vegetables. For dessert, there was sticky toffee pudding with crème anglaise, fresh fruit, almond bakewell tarts, cheese, and meringue pavlovas that are a traditional Christmas treat in New Zealand and Australia.

I would say that my own Hobbit feast was fairly comparable to the one offered in the Shire. Even though I created seven meals and this was only dinner, a lot of the dishes overlapped: fluffy bread rolls with butter, fresh fruit, salad, cheese, pickles, stew, and roasted potatoes all appeared on both tables. And of course the vegetable pot pie! We saw hand-held pies all over New Zealand, usually meat mince, steak and onion, or beef and cheddar. The ones I made looked a little different (more like savory Pop-Tarts in puff pastry) but I’m inspired to try my hand at making a vegetarian version of the New Zealand pies that we saw everywhere.

This was the perfect way to start our New Zealand adventure! I was surrounded by people who were even bigger fans of the movies than me, and I could not stop smiling the entire time. The guides had lots of behind-the-scenes knowledge, the chef made a ton of delicious food, and it was pretty magical to see the Shire lit up by party lights and cozy windows in the hillside after the sun went down.