Lost in ‘THE MOMENT’
Date nights used to be so simple.
Before escape room puzzles, adult mini-golf and life drawing classes for couples, people just went out for dinner. Sometimes (albeit before colour television) they went out for dinner and a dance.
Today, we’re obsessed with Doing Stuff. To be clear, this is completely different from Getting Stuff Done — a situation that often involves an ironing board or a trusted brand of cleaner.
The modern couple sees life as an experience. It is not enough to eat cavatelli. They must mix and knead and shape the cavatelli, preferably in Puglia, pausing only to take photographs because theirs is a storied existence and, if that story is not on Instagram, people will think they are dead.
Once, we grabbed a burger and chips. Now we book flights to Wellington and order two all-double beef patties with melty American cheese, pickled carrots, sweet and spicy pickles, barbecue sauce and herb mayonnaise stacked atop a Rongotai Bakery mince and cheese pie in a milk bun with shoestring fries and stout gravy. (Potentially true story. “Pie-curious” was The Green Man Pub’s entry in the annual Burger Wellington competition. It cost $29, not counting flights, transfers and accommodation).
Travellers loftily declare they’d rather pay for an experience than a “thing”. When they get home, they spend three months compiling a full-colour, large-format Snapfish album featuring every ramen noodle they slurped in Tokyo. Their friends would rather swallow whole chopsticks than peruse the pictures they already ignored once on their socials.
Our appetite for dinner with a side of experience is endless. There’s a restaurant that serves organic chicken empanadas and a tango lesson after the alfajores? There’s a place where you can learn how to break down a raw, dead cow before consuming a 12-course steak and offal-centric dinner? This is how we Thursday now.
We are not the first generation to turn lunch into A Moment. From garden parties and supper dances to innuendo-stuffed cabaret nights and the murder mystery work dinner, we’ve long played as we ate (did you even 1992 if you didn’t don a flapper frock and stab Donald from accounts at the buffet table?).
What has changed, perhaps, is the integration of food and experience. The serving spoons used to be adjacent and now they are central. Recently, for example, I attended a preview of Bon Appetit, an immersive Stella Artois dining experience hosted by brand new Auckland restaurant Osteria Uno Eatery, in Birkenhead.
The menu highlights famous food scenes from Flashdance, Pulp Fiction and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. It costs $65 a head and features crayfish, gold leaf, two beers and just enough entertainment to both ensure — and, importantly, allow — conversation. It is the perfect date night and a copybook example of the trend to “storied” dining.
Not everyone gets it this right. Sometimes you literally have to watch wine ferment before you’re allowed to match it with your duck. One hands-on dinner I attended required six well-frocked (and visibly shocked) guests to scrub and debeard a sack of mussels before they were allowed to cook and eat them. I went to a sourdough-making class that came with a pizza dinner and a complimentary jar of starter that has now eaten 10kg (and counting) of flour and most of my Saturdays.
The modern brunch is bottomless, lunch is a collab menu with a winemaker and dinner is from a food truck that you know about only because you’re on the secret mailing list (you will follow this up with a cocktail from a bar that you know about only because you’ve been given the secret password). Limited numbers! One night only! All sold out!
Will we ever just grab a burger before a movie again? When will our desire for better dinner stories end? (Actually, I can tell you that: approximately 90-120 minutes after it starts, because today’s restaurants absolutely depend on a second sitting.) Want another artisan cocktail featuring four types of chilli sucked through a straw made of recycled banana peel? Please move to the bar where the stools will be as precarious as a career in hospitality.
When did date nights get so complicated, asks Kim Knight