Te reo with your ‘fush’ and chips
So, that’s one fish, a scoop of chips and a language class?
Christchurch restaurant Fush, a seafood eatery in Wigram, has started offering free te reo Ma¯ ori classes to diners.
The first class kicks off at 8pm next Monday. More than 2000 people have expressed their interest through the restaurant’s Facebook event page.
The plan is to run the onehour evening sessions every Monday for a month. If it goes well, restaurant co-owner Anton Matthews said he would run more.
He said the classes were designed for beginners and would be in an informal environment.
For Matthews, it was the ‘‘preservation and normalisation’’ of te reo that led him to start the course.
‘‘I was brought up speaking te reo Ma¯ ori at home and at primary school, but it wasn’t until I got to high school that I realised how unusual I was,’’ Matthews said.
‘‘It’s one of Aotearoa’s three official languages . . . I only speak to my children in te reo Ma¯ ori and we’ve always made it a part of the Fush culture too.’’
Fush’s menu was bilingual and Matthews and his staff often use Ma¯ ori phrases with customers. The restaurant opened in November 2016, managed by Matthews and his family.
He hoped the classes would build people’s confidence to incorporate te reo into everyday language.
‘‘The feedback has been overwhelming, we might well have created a bit of a beast! But isn’t that so cool,’’ Matthews said.
‘‘For me as Ma¯ ori, it makes me incredibly proud and excited to think that our native tongue will be commonplace in restaurants, supermarkets [and] playgrounds.’’
Matthews said one of his proudest moments was when his 5-year-old daughter Te Aria¯ Aroha started speaking to him in te reo.
‘‘But I noticed that even she felt that Ma¯ ori was a language reserved just for home. She would speak perfect Ma¯ ori to me at home, but the moment we would step out of the house, she would speak to me in English,’’ he said.
‘‘It was at that moment I decided my focus needed to be on the normalisation of te reo Ma¯ ori so my kids felt confident and proud to speak their native tongue while out and about.’’