Give it some Welly ...
Hungry as a horse, thirsty as the Sahara, I checked out our capital city’s annual food-fest, Wellington On A Plate.
Iarrived in Wellington ravenous, ready to eat not just a horse, but an entire herd. I needed to fill my face, pronto, and there was no time to waste.
First, I cut Island Bay into bitesized chunks, like dumplings floating in the salty soup of Cook Strait, and swallowed them whole. Next, I lathered black bean sauce onto Oriental Bay, then tucked in with chopsticks.
I wolfed down buttery slices of Vogeltown, burnt my lips on Scorching Bay, threw back tots of rum in the bustling barrios of Cuba St. I noshed it up in Newtown, munched my way around Miramar, slurped down seafood in Seatoun. My hunger knew no bounds.
I came, I saw, I ate. I drank a lot of beer. It was, after all, my job. I was a visiting journalist in the capital, checking out the annual food and boozefest that is Wellington On A Plate.
The event’s publicist had searched high and low for an outof-town journalist with sufficient stamina to undertake this assignment, and after weeding out the lightweights, I got the nod.
Within 30 minutes of dropping my bags at the hotel, I was wandering the crowded concrete catacombs under Wellington Stadium at Beervana, where dozens of breweries had set up to serve more than 300 beers.
I sampled stouts and ales, IPAs and lagers, APAs and sours, and saisons and bitters, but kept away from that vicious cloudy abomination that is wheat beer.
There was beer made with lychees, lemongrass, sour cherries, boiled mussels. There was beer with top notes of skunk sweat and bass notes of jockey’s saddle.
I tried it all without fear or favour, and discerned that the brewery of the day was Wellington’s own Garage Project, which was celebrating its fifth birthday with a stand that looked like a giant beer-dispensing cake.
As the afternoon wore on, a great joyousness descended upon me, though I also noted a distinct drop in articulacy and coordination. By closing time, I found myself in a cloud of dry ice at the ‘‘silent disco’’ run by Choice Brothers brewery, who beamed a playlist of stonking Bowie tunes direct to each dancer’s headphones under a glittering mirror ball.
The following morning, I took my daughter along to the Wellington Chocolate Festival, where the nation’s finest chocolatiers were indulging in all manner of handmade artisan action, melting and moulding and tempering and tutu-ing about. Would we like to try some single origin Dominican dark with a sliver of blue cheese, and dip marshmallows in the chocolate fountain? Oh, alright then.
For lunch, I was invited to ‘‘challenge my perception of what’s best between two buns’’, which sounded like a very rude proposition indeed. It turned out I was to appraise a selection of 116 gourmet burgers that had been entered into the Burger Wellington competition, with the city’s best restaurants and food trucks locked once more into their annual battle for supremacy.
There were burgers named Lamb Shank Redemption, Cuba Doodle Doo and Deer Oh Dear; burgers made from ground pheasant, bone-marrow butter, quail eggs, soft-shell crab, and caramalised beetroot.
The winner has yet to be announced, but my vote goes to last year’s champion, Egmont Street Eatery. Its 2016 offering was the toe-curlingly delicious ‘‘Sichuan Two-tooth’’, which saw a hand-cut mutton pattie between pillow-soft steamed Chinese bao buns, then topped with Sichuan sauce and pickled celery.
You want fries with that? Tough luck. Supplying the golden salty crunch alongside this particular burger was a little stack of crispy octopus tentacles.
The following morning, the rain subsided and your correspondent headed out into the sunny streets for another day of marathon eating, drinking, and being intermittantly merry.
Things got off to a bumpy start with a mediocre breakfast at Ti Kouka, who may want to reconsider the chewy orange jandalrubber lumps known as ‘‘brassica fritters’’. But all was not lost.
A few hours later I ate a lifeaffirming brunch of kahawai escabeche, red peppers and hazelnut pesto at Nikau, surely the most dependably delicious cafe in this tucker-centric town.
After a kick-a** dinner at WBC in Victoria St, I ended up at a house-warming party in Island Bay and met a man with a gruff voice, overactive eyebrows and a loud floral shirt. He was unexpectedly charming, articulate and opinionated. He was Labour leader Andrew Little.
On the final evening, I found myself in a windlashed marquee on the waterfront where local craft brewers Te Aro Brewing and Lord Almighty laid on a lavish three-course spread, with one catch: between mouthfuls of Welsh rarebit mussels and barbequed quail, we had to get in among great steaming piles of malt and hops and make our own IPA. This was slave labour, of course, but they fired umpteen fine ales into us so that we would overlook that fact. At our table, a hose-clip blew out during the cooling process, flooding our vat with tap water and buggering our brew, but nobody seemed to care.
Next morning, tired but happy, mildly hungover, and several kilos heavier, it was time to catch a cab to the airport and head for home.