Wellington Gastronome - a giveaway and a photo tour of Welly

It was a happy collision of events. In the same week that reading Max's article on Wellington in the September issue of Gourmet Traveller had piqued my interest in visiting New Zealand's political and food capital, Positively Wellington Tourism contacted me to invite me along on a weekend-long blog junket to check out the food and drink scene in Wellington. Seeing as I'd never even been to New Zealand's North Island before (see a post about my trip to the South Island here), it was an opportunity I felt I couldn't refuse.

The junket was part of the publicity for PWT's current tourism campaign in Melbourne to promote Wellington as a cool dining destination - culminating in a two-weeks-only pop-up restaurant on Gertrude Street Fitzroy, run exclusively by Kiwis and using Wellington produce.


The restaurant, called WLG, is operating in the Rue de Fleurus site at 153 Gertrude Street (formerly known as Claypots and conveniently located just across the road from The Everleigh). WLG opens TONIGHT and runs every night until 27 November. The three course menu is a ridiculous bargain at only $35 per head, plus $30 per bottle of NZ wine. Other details about the restaurant, including about the five chefs who've designed the menu and will be running it, can be found here.

Ticket reservations for the restaurant were available through the Time Out website but have already been snapped up - however they'll still accept walk-ins each night, so you may get lucky. OR you might like to enter the Melbourne Gastronome WLG ticket giveaway - I've got a double pass to the restaurant to give away to a blog reader. The pass is for two people for dinner at 8pm on this Sunday, 20th November 2011 (so don't enter the competition if you can't attend on Sunday night, obvs). To enter, leave a comment on this blog post stating your favourite New Zealand import in Australia - cultural, culinary or otherwise - before NOON on Friday 18th (if I don't already know you through blogs/Twitter etc, make sure I know how to contact you in case you win). I'll announce the winner on Friday afternoon (via both Facebook and Twitter, so keep your eyes peeled), and I'll email the winner their PDF double pass.

Wednesday update: Photos of the restaurant and meals served on WLG's opening night can now be seen on Shellie's blog. I was also invited along last night, and was particularly taken with my main (slow-cooked venison in Tunisian brik pastry with veal sweetbreads - mmmmm - broadbeans, peas and pancetta), my dessert (licoricello panna cotta with vodka lime parfait and pistachio wafer) and the laid-back Kiwi charm of a waiter sporting a truly outrageous moustache.


So, a photo tour of Wellington (apologies, I'd half-drafted this post last week but I've been struck down with illness over the last four days and am currently running a fever, so this post will be light on analysis).

I went to Welly a few weekends ago, accompanied by three other Melbourne food bloggers (Ed, Penny and Shellie). During the two days I attended three of the restaurants whose chefs will be running the WLG pop-up.


Lunch on Saturday was at Logan Brown, one of Wellington's most upmarket restaurants. If the facade looks a little imposing, it's because the 1920s building used to be a bank.


Lovely high-ceilinged interior. We had a good chat before lunch to head chef Shaun Clouston (one of the WLG chefs) about the provenance of his produce.


I was particularly excited about trying the local shellfish that we can't get in Oz, like tua tua surf clams from Cloudy Bay (similar to pipis), and Tio Point Bluff oysters and Mahurangi Pacific oysters. Sensational.


Special mention also to the chestnut flour pappardelle with porcini mushrooms, macadamias and gorgonzola, and the Whangamata scallops with cauliflower cream, coppa wafer, apple and preserved lemon. Some beautiful organic biodynamic Urlar wines, too.


In between restaurants I made a beeline for some of the tourist sights: the Wellington Cable Car (see photo at the top of this post) up to the Botanic Gardens and lookout over the city, and an hour at New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa.


Such a great museum! One of the best I've been to in years, I wish I'd had more time to explore it - especially the exhibitions about the geology and flora and fauna of New Zealand, and the Mana Whenua exhibition about Maori culture (including a copy of the Treaty of Waitangi, which I studied at uni).


On the Saturday night we went to dinner at The Larder in Miramar, a suburb 15 minutes drive away that is also home to Peter Jackson's Weta studios (filming for The Hobbit movies is currently underway, but alas I didn't spy any Middle-earth inhabitants).


Chef/owner Jacob Brown takes great pride in the relationships The Larder has with its suppliers: to reinforce the point, black and white portraits of various suppliers adorn the walls of the restaurant, and Jacob (also appearing at WLG) can tell you an anecdote about each one.


Culinary highlights included my carpaccio of peppered venison fillet with spiced pear, pear jelly and beetroot; Penny's pig's head baked in brik pastry with seared chicken livers, radish and cress; and my main of pork belly with crumbed black pudding, apple calvados puree and pepper caramel. A Valrhona fondant and parfait were also excellent.




Back in town, we went for cocktails at Matterhorn, recently voted one of the 50 Best Bars in the World by Eater.

In addition to flying back some Martinborough pinot and a bottle of the suddenly-very-trendy-in-Melbourne Lighthouse Gin (hand-crafted and hand-distilled in the Wairarapa), I also bought a bottle of Smoke & Oakum's Gunpowder Rum, an outrageous, you'll-love-it-or-you'll-hate-it small batch blended rum infused with tobacco, chillies and actual muzzle-loader style black gunpowder. It's... a little intense.


Although I was in Wellington for less than 48 hours, I liked that my schedule allowed me some time to explore the town on my own. One solo expedition led me to breakfast at Sweet Mother's Kitchen.


SMK was kooky in all the right ways, decorated with lowbrow trinkets and staffed by friendly kids who kept swapping ridiculous afro wigs. The casual (yet ambitious) home cookin' menu, which included Creole, Cajun and Mexican dishes, has no equivalent in cafe-saturated Melbourne - I'd LOVE to know what my N'awlins/Texas expert (and cuisine purist) friend Burger Mary would've thought of it, had she been with me. Those beignets were damned tasty.


Just some photos of buildings in the city centre that caught my eye.


On the Sunday morning we all visited Wellington's weekly food and wine artisan City Market, where we were welcomed and shown around by one of the Market's co-founders, the personable Rachel Taulelei (owner of seafood supplier Yellow Brick Road).


Lots of produce from the City Market will be served at the WLG pop-up in Melbourne.


More local colour at the Market. I really liked that Crooked Cider Lars was selling - it was cloudy, very dry and made from proper cider apples. If only I hadn't already reached my customs alcohol limit, sigh.



Outside at the regular Harbourside Market, loads of red kumara plus bananas SO CHEAP they'd make an Australian weep.



Our last meal was at Capitol, another restaurant whose head chef/owner Tom Hutchison will also be cooking at the WLG pop-up. Photo of Ms Jeroxie taking a photo.


Shellie opted for something sweet at Capitol, French toast with shaved apple and passion fruit salad. The dish I was taken with was the seared scallops with parsnip puree and pancetta crumble.


And finally, a word about coffee. Welly is officially crazy for coffee: there are over twenty coffee roasteries in the Wellington area alone (a remarkable fact when you consider that the city's population is less than 400,000), and the third wave coffee movement has definitely made its mark.


I stopped in at the Memphis Belle Coffee House, the home of Flight Coffee (best ethically traded coffee in New Zealand, according to this year's NZ Coffee Awards). From the coffee station offering Chemex, Syphon, V60 Pour-over or Swiss Gold brewing methods, I chose the Chemex for my Brazilian Moreninha Formosa. Seriously cute little cafe.


And so ends my weekend blog junket to New Zealand! If you're in Melbourne, be sure to enter the giveaway above for a chance to check out the WLG pop-up for yourself on Sunday, otherwise you might like to try your luck with walk-ins if you're wandering down Gertrude Street during the next fortnight.


(Obvious disclaimer due to nearly-all-expenses-paid nature of blog junket to New Zealand, care of Positively Wellington Tourism)

New Zealand Gastronome

In January I went to New Zealand for the the first time, to the South Island. I was there with best-friend-K for a hassle-free week of R&R. We flew in and out of Christchurch, hired a fluorescent yellow car and decided to drive up north because the weather would be warmer and we wanted sun.

It wasn't a particularly gastronomically-focused week for us, but I wanted to put up a post of photos and highlights to share with you.


Flying overseas gave us the chance to check out Shannon Bennett's new Cafe Vue at Melbourne Airport, in the international terminal past duty free (sorry, boarding pass holders only). B-f-K had porridge and I had the duck egg, bacon and hollandaise jaffle, which came out with ludicrously thick bread. Man, that duck egg was good though - as were the yuzu and cassis macarons we took to eat on the plane.


We found some great holiday accommodation through Book a Bach, a snappy, easy-to-navigate site connecting bach (NZ holiday house) owners with prospective renters. In our first destination (Kaikoura) we stayed in a lovely little bach called Room With a View. How could I resist a place that had a claw foot bathtub on the balcony?!


Kaikoura was sleepy and gorgeous. I'd never seen mountains so close to the ocean. Our first meal in New Zealand, at local pub The Whaler, was fush and chups washed down with a couple of glasses of Monteith's.


The next morning we went out whale watching and spotted not one but two sperm whales. So, so awesome to see them up close.


I'd been told by about half a dozen people that we simply HAD to stop off at Nin's Bin for crayfish (the local specialty from which Kaikoura derives its Maori name). Nin's Bin is a famous roadside caravan about 20-25km north of Kaikoura that has been serving up fresh crayfish to passersby for the last 35 years.


The price of each crayfish is written on its tail. Once we'd selected ours, the woman serving us lined it up under the guillotine and chopped it in half with a loud thwack.


You're given the option of having your crayfish served hot with garlic, but we preferred to have ours cold - as nature intended it. We took Pinchy to one of the picnic tables outside and ate him then and there with our fingers.


My favourite thing that I ate in NZ. Deeeeelicious, especially the meat in the legs.


We stayed in Picton for a couple of nights - if Kaikoura was sleepy, then Picton was practically comatose. But again, oh so pretty. From our B&B up on the hill, we had a lovely view over the valley and down to the harbour.


One night in Picton we went to local restaurant Le Cafe for dinner. The warehou carpaccio I ordered was sensationally fresh (although HUGE points off for covering it with cheap nasty dried parsley) and B-f-K raved about her NZ green-lipped mussels. We were also served some Seresin Estate extra virgin olive oil that was so good we drove to Seresin Estate the next day to buy a bottle.


Two of the days were spent grape grazing through Marlborough. B-f-K and I are both pinot noir fiends, so the excellent 2009 Marlborough Report from the fellas at Pinot Unearthed was a useful resource.

But our biggest surprise in Marlborough was discovering NZ sauvignon blanc that was not only drinkable, but actually really nice! My favourites were the Mount Riley Seventeen Valley 2008 and Mahi's The Alias 2008 (the fact that they're from small vineyards and both oaked may have something to do with it).


The other wines we adored were Forrest's The Doctors Arneis 2010 and several from Bladen Wines: the 2007 Merlot/Malbec, the 2009 Riesling and the 2008 Gewürtztraminer, a variety I usually despise. Happily, Bladen's wines are available in Melbourne at Burwood Cellars, so I drove out there to buy a case last weekend.


One morning we got up early and caught a boat across the Marlborough Sounds for a day of tramping along the spectacular Queen Charlotte Track.


15km later, we were ferried back to Picton on the boat. We saw dolphins!


The one posh meal we had in NZ was the degustation at Herzog, on the recommendation of Kate. While the setting, food and wine were all beautiful, we didn't enjoy the meal as much as we thought we would - probably because the very formal atmosphere and mannered service from the army of German/Austrian/Swiss girls working front of house came across as a bit old-fashioned and stuffy to the two of us who were in chilled out holiday mode.


Highlights amongst the dishes were the beetroot cured freshwater salmon with tuna tartar and cucumber/wasabi sorbet, and the wonderful cold smoked quail brest with a curious pea/mint mousse.


We ate handsomely from the cheese trolley and enjoyed a "symphony of cherries, chocolate and hazelnut".


Leaving Marlborough and heading back south, we stopped in at The Store at Kekerengu, a stylish cafe halfway between Blenheim and Kaikoura, for a strong coffee and shared slice of cake.


After a night up in Hanmer Springs (where we soaked in the hot springs and mineral pools), we drove to Waipara Valley for more grape grazing. We hadn't heard of many of the Waipara's wineries (other than Pegasus Bay), and were delighted to discover some lovely pinot noirs and rieslings, as well as the 2010 Bascand Pinot Gris from Waipara Springs that was ridiculously good (and a steal at NZ$19 a bottle).


In Christchurch (or CHCH, as I learned it is called), we stayed in a fantastic self-contained heritage cottage Mayque Cottage on Caledonian which we can't recommend highly enough. Beautifully kitted out, startlingly cheap and in a handy location. We spent an afternoon wandering around town, browsing in shops and noting the earthquake damage to older buildings.


On our last day we went to the Banks Peninsula and drove down to Akaroa. The dramatic landscape and harbours are due to the twin craters of a massive ancient volcano.


Akaroa is a cute, slightly kitsch village whose French street names tout its Gallic connection (it was briefly settled by the French, before the Brits claimed New Zealand as their own). We stopped off at The Pepper Tree for a sandwich in their garden.


Akaroa harbour. Gorgeous colour of the water.


All in all, a lovely trip! Next time though, I'm definitely going to Central Otago (pinot nerd) and Queenstown. Any tips for me in either of those locales?