The man who ate Lincoln Rd
Steve Braunias made it his mission this year to eat at each of the 53 food joints along West Auckland’s ‘ soul- destroying’ Lincoln Rd. As the end nears, will he survive?
he man who ate Lincoln Rd strays from modesty for a second to announce one of the great milestones in New Zealand literature.
Throughout 2016 I’ve written weekly episodes of my travels along Lincoln Rd in West Auckland, where I’m determined to eat at each and every food joint dotted along its wildly popular shores before the year is out, and this week I reached food joint number 40.
There are 13 to go. The end is in sight. I’ll get there if it kills me, but hopefully it won’t.
Actually I’ve long suspected that death might be one of the themes of my Lincoln Rd junk food marathon.
The series belongs to the tradition of quest literature; and all quests, as exciting metaphors for our progress in life, end in death.
Almost as soon as I started on the journey, on a lovely summer’s day in February, I became afraid that I’d never finish it. That I’d expire along the way, keeling over and gasping my last breath inside some chicken shack or other.
The man who would have eaten Lincoln Rd but died trying.
I’m all good. Fat, unfit, but all good. As it turned out, though, death has become one of the themes of this series.
To write about Lincoln Rd every week is to write a diary, and the Lincoln Rd diaries in the Herald these past few weeks have recorded and dwelt on the death of my brother, Paul.
He died recently on a Monday night at Tauranga Hospital. He was 66. Gone, taken out.
The day after he died I went through our texts.
There was one where he took great delight from a letter in the Herald by Sir Bob Harvey, who made rather disparaging remarks about the man who ate Lincoln Rd.
Paul wrote: “Made my day, that letter! I needed a good laugh.”
I rolled with the brotherly punch, and asked about his health. It hadn’t been good. “I’m all good. Not looking forward to winter though.”
A death in winter, a funeral in Tauranga; and then, as ever, a return to Lincoln Rd.
I ate at food joints 39 and 40 on the same day this week, and I got there on foot, walking from my house on the Te Atatu peninsula via the thundering Northwestern Motorway. I recommend it. It’s a kind of nature walk.
A bridge crosses Henderson Creek, that beat- up urban riverine passage — which, miraculously, has fish in it.
The walk helped to clear my head, blow away some of the cobwebs of mourning.
It felt good to be close- up and personal with Lincoln Rd, see it at its source, peeling away from the motorway exit alongside an abandoned orchard, a shed strangled with chokos, and a run- down house with a Bob Marley poster in the window.
That shack must count as one of the most famous houses in all of Auckland.
Lincoln Rd is Auckland’s second busiest street for traffic; more than New Windsor Rd, Te Irirangi Drive, even that golden pylon mile, the Mt Wellington Highway, with more than 40,000 motorists roosting on it every day, all of them sooner or later gawking at the run- down house with the Bob Marley poster in the window.
I go to Lincoln Rd because everyone goes to Lincoln Rd. It’s a map of what we do and how we eat.
It’s got the shrieking netball courts at Te Pai Park and it’s got Waitakere Hospital and it’s got the biggest Pak’nSave in New Zealand. It’s got 53 food joints ( all year I thought it was 55, but I made a counting error), many of them franchises.
Lincoln Rd is a monument to the concept of the identical menu, the same thing cooked the same way by teenagers and other minimum wage slaves busily processing stuff that resembles food and may even be food.
to set up their own food joint on Lincoln Rd ought to know what they’re getting into. Mr Burger didn’t seem to have a clue.
It opened at the beginning of the year and was gone by wintertime. It was a hopeless operation, bare and cold and witless, run by a guy who had no experience in the food trade. He’d managed a Chipmunks kids adventure playground, and put bronco chips on the menu.
Few customers ever ate at Mr Burger. I’d go past during the day and go past at night and it was almost always empty, barren.
Dylan Reeve noticed, too. The director of David Farrier’s brilliant documentary, Tickled, has a finely developed sense of tragedy, and got in touch with the man who ate Lincoln Rd to express his feeling that something terribly wrong was going on with Mr Burger. When the food joint finally went under and Mr Burger was goneburger, we exchanged sad messages.
It had been like watching some poor schmuck head out to Hollywood with high hopes but nil talent. Mr Burger got eaten up and spat out. Lincoln Rd is a tough market to crack; for some, it’s where dreams go to die.
What went on behind the scenes at his dismal food joint? Where is he now? I’ve been urging Dylan to track down Mr Burger, and film him for the subject of his next documentary.
There are a million stories in the naked bazaar of Lincoln Rd, probably; and about as many chickens slaughtered every — month? week? day?
Until I took on the superhero identity of the man who ate Lincoln Rd, I never really appreciated the vital role that chickens play in feeding the people, fast.
Essentially Lincoln Rd is one chicken shack after another. It ought to commission and erect a statue of a chicken. A really big statue, as momentous as the trout in Rakaia or the bottle at Paeroa.
Lincoln Rd, and the certainties of death and chicken.
And the search for enlightewnment, which is the purpose of all who set out on quests. Bilbo Baggins found it in a ring. Lancelot and that lot looked for it in the Holy Grail — or, as Robert Irwin put it, writing about Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th century classic of the Knights of the Round Table: “The quest for the Grail is the quest for meaning of the Grail.”
What’s the meaning of Lincoln Rd? Does Lincoln Rd have a meaning? In that strange little 1922 masterpiece, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, the hero’s quest is to “fully understand what it is to be human”, as Irwin wrote.
That way lieth my quest on Lincoln Rd.
Every now and then, as I’ve filled my face with chicken tenderloins, chicken tikkas, and chicken et ceteras, I’ve felt close to an understanding of the human condition. It was a sense that we’re all in this together. We’re all eating the same junk. We’re all in the drivethrough ordering chicken something, we’re all adding another wrapper and another straw to a mountain of crap, which will one day erupt into a toxic greenhouse gaseous apocalypse that will bury us all. Other that that, we’re all good. I’ve seen so much simple happiness on Lincoln Rd. Families out for a meal, the kids running around. Big dudes actively refuelling, little old ladies picking at crumbs. Lincoln Rd is a zone of good cheer. It’s the human spirit bursting through the tombs of the strip malls; it’s a triumph of the will. To be human is to sit a while with your loved ones and eat something that resembles food and may even be food.
Memento mori: remember we will die. Today, we eat, live, drive out west along Lincoln Rd.
Until I took on the superhero identity of the man who ate Lincoln Rd, I never really appreciated the vital role that chickens play in feeding the people, fast.