Mo’orea

The second part of our Tahitian adventure begins! Once again up with the lark, to ensure we could catch the ferry across to Mo’orea, another island in the Windward Islands group of the Society Islands archipelago, one of five archipelagos that make up French Polynesia. We left the hotel to cross the road, as the ferry terminal is directly opposite the Kon Tiki hotel. We went upstairs to board, and were promptly sent back downstairs and told to deposit our luggage there. This we did, and received more information from the luggage guy than anyone at the hotel, travel company, or ticket gates had given us! In what was probably his third language, to boot.

We headed to the back, café area of the passenger cabin, and got some beverages before settling in for the 45 minute voyage. We dealt a few bridge hands to practice our bidding, and the journey was over in a flash. Once disembarked, we located our luggage and our bus driver, who held our suitcase back to be put on last. This means we would be first to disembark, I surmised…correctly, as it turns out. A short 5-minute drive and we were at Sofitel Mo’orea. This never happens to me! Invariably, when there’s a bus dropping people off at multiple stops, mine will be the last stop. We checked in, and were told that although our room wouldn’t be ready until 2pm, we could drop off our luggage and take advantage of the bar and restaurant. Somewhat unburdened, we wandered around the grounds to get our bearings, before heading back to the Pure restaurant for lunch. After lunch we waited until our room was ready, then got ourselves sorted and went out for another wander, this time equipped with camera, to photograph the local bird life. This seems to be a little more diverse than in central Pape’ete, with zebra doves, red-vented bulbuls, waxeyes, chestnut-breasted mannikins, and the occasional tern flying overhead.

We're not in a lagoon bungalow

We had a look inside the pearl shop but there was nothing there that took Nicola’s fancy, so we went back to the main reception and booked ourselves onto tours of the island, by land and by sea, for the next two days. That was about as much as we could do, so we headed for a dip in the pool before going to our welcome reception and cocktail at 5:30. Afterwards we stayed in the bar for another cocktail, then had dinner in the Pure restaurant - local fish grilled with salad, and a Thai prawn noodle which Nicola pronounced "not very Thai". There was the occasional peanut and some fish sauce, but that was it.

 

 

 

Cooking Class

We’d booked a Polynesian cookery class for Tuesday morning, so we were up with the lark(-ish) to get breakfast (This proved to be a mistake) before heading into town and finding the location on Rue de Paul Gauguin. He's kind of a big deal in these parts. 

We located the place easily in daylight, and were greeted by cheffe Albane and her assistant Marine. We met two women from the USA who were also taking the tour. She explained what we were going to do, then took us back downstairs into the market, where she chatted to, and shopped at, various stalls in the marché, all the while explaining the products we were selecting, and in some cases (e.g. the rambutan) trying before buying. She explained about the non-food parts of the marché, and we noted some places to visit again this afternoon. Then we headed back to her kitchen, and donned black aprons. “This isn’t Masterchef, is it?” I enquired. “Is one of us going to be sent home?”    

Albane explained about the uses of coconut and its importance to the economy of Polynesia. We kinda knew all this already, having been subjected to the same lecture in both Tonga and Rarotonga. We were preparing two sweet baked dishes, a cake and a macaroon, under Albane’s direction. Once these were in the oven, we moved on to fruits and savouries. I was in charge of cutting the thon (tuna) that we’d bought in the market to make the i’a ota, the local version of the dish known as ota ika or ceviche around the world – basically, raw fish marinaded in lime juice and coconut milk. Once that was prepared, we were ready to sit down and eat. It was still only 11:30 and I was not very hungry having had an omelette for breakfast, but we tried everything, including green mango with Chinese spices, the cake and macaroons we’d made earlier, and the i’a ota; also the local fruits, a type of pasty made with pâté, breadfruit, cooked banana and taro dipped in a marinade sauce of coconut and garlic. By far the hit of our efforts was the i’a ota, but the rest was good, too. We sat around, chatting and eating – Polynesians have no set courses, and don’t distinguish between sweet and savoury, so everything is served at once, and you can eat meat followed by sweet followed by savoury again. 

By about midday we were sated, so we took the cakes we’d made, boxed up by Albane, back to the hotel.

After a bit of a rest, we decided to head back to the market, and investigated shops selling t-shirts, wraps, and pearls (Tahiti is famous for its cultured pearls). We also visited the pearl museum and learnt about the history of pearls and  the cultured pearl-making process. As we made our way back to the hotel, the air felt distinctly muggy and hot, so we may be in for some thunderstorm activity…hopefully overnight so it will clear the air a bit.

At a little after five, we headed upstairs to the rooftop bar, called Reeftop (I see what they did there), to drink cocktails and watch the sunset.

 

Les Misérables

Les Misérables is playing in Wellington for a three week run. We’d bought tickets, like, ages ago (i.e. before we left for Europe), so off we went. It’s the first production in the newly-strengthened St James Theatre, which has been closed for the last three years after being assessed for earthquake strengthiness, and falling short of the required standard.

We decided to go for cocktails first at CGR Merchant, one of Wellington’s premiere cocktail lounges on Courtenay Place. I had a gin infused with carrot cake concoction, and Nicola had a floral fizz of some kind. If they published their menu online I could tell you what they were. Our plan was then to trot around the corner to Mr. Go’s, our Go-to (see what I did there?) Asian food place. Unfortunately, it seems everyone else had had the same idea, and the place was packed. The maître d' found us some space at the bar, and we ordered dumplings, Korean chicken wings, and bok choi. Despite the busy-ness, the food was delivered in short order and we had plenty of time to consume it.

St James looks much the same as it did before, or at least as I remember it. Maybe there’s a few more columns in the foyer? We were in the stalls and had a good view of what was going on.

The production is a bit of a marathon. If you know the story, and the film, you’ll know that they do go on a bit…this one was over three hours including interval, so it was a bit wearing on the buttocks. The seats in St James haven’t been modernised, but they’re a bit better than the Opera House, at any rate. The interval didn’t come until we’d got through two hours of musicalizing. It was all done to a high standard with a revolving stage to assist with the scene changes, and a big barricade for the second half, and a cast of thousands…OK, maybe around thirty. We finished up at around quarter to eleven, and poured ourselves out into the darkness of Courtenay Place.

 

Feast Your Eyes – Inconceivable!

Feast Your Eyes is a regular feature run by the Roxy cinema in Wellington. We’ve been to a couple of similar events before – Sweet Bean and Hunt For The Wilderpeople. Like many of their now-regular programmes, it started as a WOAP event, but is now run throughout the year. The idea is to take a classic film and create a dish and a cocktail to accompany it. It’s not as full-on as the Eat The Film events that they also run – most recently, with Flash Gordon as the film.

This time around it was The Princess Bride. This is a film now considered a cult classic, but at the time of its release it wasn’t particularly successful. Most people have never seen it on the big screen (including me) so this was an opportunity to watch it in all its glory, and also to quote all the most recognisable lines.

We turned up early, and after a short wait queued to get our cocktail – the Dread Pirate Roberts’ rum & coke, made with both light and dark rums, lime, cola, and gunpowder. I’m not much of a cola drinker, but managed to force it down without too much difficulty. The food offering was a dessert – A Dweam Wivvin A Dweam. It was a Whittaker’s chocolate mousse mixed with hazelnut cream, meringue and strawberries – a kind of Eton mess with added chocolate, if you like.

Note the cocktail is wearing a black mask

And so to the film: I assume you’ve seen it, and know all the key points – “as you wish”; shrieking eels;  “inconceivable!”; “nobody can survive the fire swamp!” “You only say that because no-one ever has!”; rodents of unusual size; and of course “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” It was a rollicking good laugh, and we all called out the lines at the right moments.

Flash Gordon

The Roxy Cinema, our local, has a regular event called Eat The Film. This started as a special event during Wellington On A Plate, but has been so successful that they have started to do it regularly throughout the year. The premise is that you watch a classic film, and are fed and watered with food and beverages either featuring in the film, or based on events in the film, interpreted and brought up to date by the chef at Coco At The Roxy - the restaurant attached to the cinema. We’ve been to a similar event before, when we saw Elvis Presley in King Creole.

When The Roxy announced that they would be doing Flash Gordon as an ETF event, we naturally jumped at the chance, and booked tickets immediately. When I say “immediately”, this was in February 1PC (Pre-Covid), for an event initially scheduled for April. But, you know the story from here…

The event has been moved twice, and they finally decided to go ahead with it on 20^th and 21^st September. As we are still under Level 2 restrictions (although they are due to be reviewed today) they split it into two sessions so that they could distance the seats, having people sitting only in alternating rows.

One of the advantages of the delay is that they were able to use a new, digitally-remastered version of the film, upping the quality (of the image) substantially. Sadly nothing could be done about the quality of the acting, with such luminaries as a pre-Bond Timothy Dalton, Topol, Max Von Sydow, and Brian Blessed amongst the supporting cast.  

We showed up half an hour early, and whilst waiting in the upstairs lounge they screened one of the first episodes of the original black and white serial, starring Buster Crabbe, from 1940. It was hilarious! This was followed with screen images of various comics, books, and other products available through the years, showing the history of Flash Gordon.

At 6:00 we filed into our designated social-distanced seats. Each seat was furnished with Ming’s Magnificent Mezze, and accompanying cocktail of Hot Hail. Whilst we tucked into this, the cinema manager gave us a brief introduction into how Eat The Film works, and also about the film, after first establishing that there was a considerable proportion of people who hadn’t (a) been to an ETF event before, and (b) seen Flash Gordon before. The menu is shown below. As you can imagine, a considerable amount of glassware and crockery build up during the performance, so a bag is provided to stack your used implements in.

Ming's Magnificent Mezze

The film is, of course, completely hilarious, and we were able to laugh, join in at appropriate moments “Gordon’s ALIVE?!” “Open fire! All weapons!” Dispatch war rocket Ajax” etc etc. All good fun, and tasty food and cocktails, as befits Coco At The Roxy’s chef and barman.

Tom Skelton 2020 Visions

Remember going out? That thing we used to do, where you’d go “out of doors”, and see other people, and maybe have some food and drink too?

We did a “going out” a couple of weeks ago, and I have failed to document what turned out, in fact, to be one of our last “goes out” this year… we also did pub quiz (which we won!) but that’s a weekly thing anyway. Or it was.

When the New Zealand Fringe Festival was still going on, we booked tickets to see Tom Skelton’s show at BATS Theatre. We drove into town early, anticipating the usual five o’clock snarl-up that goes on along Cobham Drive. Nothing. No hold-ups at all. We whistled through, and found ourselves parked and at a loose end in Courtenay Place shortly before five o’clock. What to do? Well, CGR Merchants opens on the dot of five, so we surprised the barman by heading straight there and ordering pre-prandial cocktails – a Jamaican Me Crazy for me, and a Siren’s Song for Nicola. We then walked the short distance to Ortega Fish Shack – a restaurant we haven’t been to for far too long. It’s one of Wellington’s established…er…establishments, and continues to offer excellent seafood in a relaxed, some say quirky, environment.

The show was at 7:30, and we were in the foyer awaiting the opening in plenty of time. We went  up to the top – the Studio – where we looked out onto a set comprising a table and a couple of chairs. Then Tom Skelton himself appeared, and started talking to us about his adventures in life, since being diagnosed in 2010 with a rare genetic disorder that left him with 10% vision in one eye, and none in the other. His show recounts the story of his life, how he got through the various challenges, and what he would have done differently had he been able to see. He’s very, very funny, and does a lot of jokes that a sighted person wouldn’t be able to get away with.

So that’s the show. An hour or so of a blind bloke telling you about his life. If you get a chance to see him, do so, although he’s probably not going to be touring much at the moment.

The Pink Hammer

The Pink Hammer is Circa Theatre’s marquee production for September. We decided to book early, taking advantage of our Friends’ rates.

First, obviously, dinner. We half-concocted a plan to try Wellington’s latest high-end adventure in taste, but looking at their location and times of opening, it just wasn’t going to be possible to get to Atlas either before or after the show without being terribly rushed. Which you don’t want…so we’ll try that another time.

We’d driven in with plenty of time to spare, as there’s sometimes a bit of traffic around Evans Bay and Oriental Parade. But not on this occasion, so we had half an hour before they evening service started at increasingly-favourite Field and Green. We walked around the corner to Courtenay Place, and had a cocktail at CGR Merchant. Then we popped back to Field and Green for a main course. Time slipped away from us there as well, so we made a firm resolution to come back after the show for ice cream. Fortunately, it’s just a hop and a skip from Circa. We collected our tickets and settled in.

Four women turn up in a shed for a course for women to learn how to do woodwork. A fairly straightforward premise, you’d think. But where’s the teacher? They’ve all paid in advance, and they’re rightly miffed. Not as miffed as Woody, however, who’s shed it is, and who knows nothing about it. Turns out his wife has organised this without his knowledge, and her whereabouts are currently unknown.

So, the women decide, Woody must teach them woodwork. He is, after all, a carpenter, and they’ve paid for tuition. Woody doesn’t really like the idea, but is coerced to go along with it. First up, he asks what project they’d all like to do. Louise wanted to learn general skills so that she could do some repairs around the house; Annabel wants to make an old-style bookcase for her Dickens collection; Siobhan wants to make a dog kennel for her vet boss’s dog, with whom she plans to have an affair (the boss, not the dog); and Helen wants to build her own coffin.

Wait, what? Why do you want to make a coffin? We dig deeper into the lives of all the characters, and what appears on the surface is revealed to be covering up a can of worms, which is duly opened. Each character has something to reveal, and as they do so, like soup, the plot thickens.  

There are some very funny moments. Woody is portrayed at first as typical man in his man-cave, but is soon revealed to be as in thrall as the women. It all unfolds at the end with the completion of Helen’s coffin, on the day of the Melbourne Cup. The play reaches its emotional climax with a shocking scene.

Suitably stunned, we crossed back to Field and Green for ice cream. Honey and fig, and peanut chocolate and salted caramel, since you ask. Nicola had marmalade and plum with white chocolate.

Absolute Non-Sense

We haven’t really made inroads into the Cocktail Wellington part of Wellington On A Plate much, but I thought we’d go to CoCo At The Roxy and give their cocktail a try. The head barman there, Ray Letoa, is known for his extreme cocktail making. We tried his Miramar Fizzy Pop the first year of the competition, and came back last year to do a master class in cocktail making, where he showed us (and we drank) all his previous entries.

This year, though, he’s gone too far. The cocktail isn’t even a drink! Here’s its description: A rum sour in the form of a bird's nest, made of a dark chocolate nest, spiced kataifi twigs with a Rum lemon curd, accompanied by an illuminated deep blue sushi with cured watermelon, yuzu wasabi and citrus ocean fog. It looks like this:

Nicola, very sensibly, chose to have the Miramar Fizzy Pop instead.

As advised by our waiter, I first had the sushi, then finished with the egg. The sushi is underlit by an small electric candle which changes colour. The egg contains the alcoholic lemon curd, and was quite tasty, but you wouldn’t think you were drinking a cocktail in the accepted sense. We’ll see how it fares in the competition.

Feast Your Eyes

Our final event of the Wellington On A Plate season is a film showing at the Roxy Cinema. The Roxy, with its attached restaurant CoCo, has pioneered food and film experiences for a number of years, and now regularly host “Eat The Film” events where a film is shown, and whenever food or drink is mentioned or consumed in the film, a similar dish or drink ( or one inspired by the sequence) is served to you whilst you watch the film.

This was pretty much what we were expecting with this event. They were showing five films inspired by the five senses, and we’d selected the final film, Sweet Bean, which was all about taste. Sweet Bean is a Japanese film, and it centres around the making of dorayaki pancakes, which contain a sweet bean paste called an. When we arrived we were served with an okonomiyaki – a Japanese pancake; and a cocktail, Before The Sun Shows His Face (a line from the film) made up of apple, lemon, cherry blossom, and ginger mixed with Zenkuro New Zealand sake and Roku Japanese gin, and served with a salted plum.

That turned out to be all the comestibles served with this event. We settled down to watch the film. It’s about the relationship between the pancake maker, his customers, and an old lady who makes the bean paste.

Meet, Mix & Mingle

Wellington On A Plate draws to a close, but we have one last event – possibly the last event of the whole competition?  – to attend: Meet, Mix & Mingle at Coco at The Roxy.

For the past four years, WOAP have been running a Cocktail Wellington competition along the same lines as Burger Wellington: competitors are asked to design a new cocktail, and accompanying tapa. In the first year, this competition was won by Ray Letoa, chief mixologist and barman at Coco at The Roxy. I remember drinking this three years ago.

In 2016, the competition was won by…Ray Letoa, from Coco at The Roxy.

In 2017, it was won by…Ray Letoa, from Coco at The Roxy.

We’re still waiting for the 2018 result.

In this event, Ray took us through the three winning cocktails, with their accompanying tapas, as well as this year’s entry. He also explained his inspiration for the cocktails, how he works, took questions from the audience, asked the audience some questions of his own, and generally entertained us for two hours. With cocktails and food. What’s not to like?

First up, he introduced the Miramar fizzy pop – a combination of gin, pomegranate juice, ginger and lemongrass syrup, mango foam, dried raspberries, and dry ice. He explained the use of dry ice in cocktails and the effects he can make with them. He also explained that he has a background in chemistry at university, which helps a little. He invited us up to the stage to try making this cocktail ourselves:

Next up, the 2016 entry: a cocktail without a spirit base. In this drink Ray combines red wine with a secret mix of foraged herbs and spices, and a bitters of his own concoction. This was the Welly(on)wood. At the time it was served with a tapa of dumplings containing foraged ingredients served on Wellington driftwood, which he was unfortunately unable to reproduce for this event…so we starved for this round. Ray is not he kind of guy to foist some substitute or inauthentic ingredient on us. Meticulous is his middle name.

The 2017 entry was Sonntag’s Journey, a remake of an old-fashioned cocktail. Ray used a little-known unaged bourbon, then aged it himself using a barrel bottle. This was accompanied by pulled pork sliders with his own chilli chipotle sauce, and slaw.

The final cocktail of the evening was this year’s entry. He’s again rung the changes by collaborating with Fortune Favours brewery to create a pina colada beer, and enhancing this with rum, adding toasted coconut syrup, lime juice, and a mango-pineapple foam. Served in Vietnamese coconut shells! He explained the difficulties he’d had importing those into New Zealand, with our strict biosecurity protocols. He also explained why he was using ice (the barman’s enemy) instead of CO₂ for this cocktail – as it was topped off with beer, adding CO₂ would have had the whole concoction foaming all over the place. This was served with a beef rendang and pineapple slider.

At the end, he asked us which was our favourite. The majority vote was for the Miramar Fizzy Pop, so he offered us another round of these! We staggered out somewhat woozily and caught an Uber home.

Nelson

It's long weekend time again - Labour Day - so we decided to take a mini-break to Nelson. We visited Nelson 3 years ago and figured it was about time we went back. Last time we did (some of) the Abel Tasman track, so decided to go in the other direction this time.

We flew out on Sounds Air on Saturday morning, picked up our rental car and drove out to have a look at Havelock, a small town between Nelson and Blenheim. We stopped along the way at Pelorus Bridge - site of a famous barrel scene in The Hobbit:

Looks awful

We drove on to Havelock and stayed there for lunch at the Slip Inn... a pub by the slipway (do you see what they did there?) into the lake, where all the boats are.

Then we headed back to Nelson and checked in to our motel. This turned out to be the same place as we stayed in last time...chosen not at random, exactly, but by careful evaluation of the place. The owner told us that it was cheaper to book with him direct, so I didn't let on that I was actually using Hotels.com points to pay for the room!

We went out for cocktails at Harrys, (they don't believe in apostrophes) followed by dinner in Hopgood's. I rang the changes with the twice-baked cheese soufflé to start, then headed for tradition with the beef fillet. Nicola had the cured salmon, and the vegetable cannelloni.

A word about twice-baked cheese soufflé: it’s an easy thing to get wrong, and I am used to the master, Jacob Brown, doing his version at The Larder. In this case, the actual cheese soufflé was pretty good; but there was so much else going on on the plate (apple, beetroot, walnuts, vinaigrette, salad) that it detracted from the dish. Less is more, man, less is more. 

The next day, we drove out to the wine districts of Nelson. After some toing and froing due to some of the cellar doors opening at ten and others at eleven, we eventually tasted wines at Kahurangi Estate, Neudorf (which is pronounced "Newdorf" in New Zealand) and Seifried (pronounced "Sighfreed"). 

Now, Nelson is noted for its aromatic wines - think riesling and gewurtztraminer, as well as good chardonnays and also some sauvignon blancs. I left the sauvignons alone, and concentrated on riesling and chardonnay. At Kahurangi, we tasted a pretty outstanding riesling...but on trying to buy some of it, we were regrettably informed that they had actually sold out. "Oh well", said the cellar door manager, "no point offering the rest of the bottle here for tasting. Would you like it?" So we ended up with a free bottle of rather good riesling as well as our purchases! As we all know, the best wine in the world is free wine, just as we know what the fastest car in the world is (answer below). 

Neudorf is a small vineyard with a great reputation. We tasted some of their wines and were duly impressed. At this point, the question of weight came up...everything we bought would have to be carried back on the plane, so we had to somewhat curtail our buying to two bottles, as we still wanted to get to Seifried.

Neudorf vineyard. What a hellhole.

At Seifried, we got hold of some of their trademark Sweet Agnes dessert wine, which I had sampled at Hopgood's the previous night. It really is a top drop. They also make wines from some unlikely grape varietals, some uniquely so in New Zealand...with mixed results, in my opinion. Interesting to taste, but I'm not buying any. Their chardonnay, however, is award-winning and rightly so, and I availed myself of some. I've stuck it in the cupboard under the stairs and will look it up again in about 3 years' time. 

After a hard morning's wine tasting (don't worry, I spat it all), we drove down to Nelson Lakes national park for some lunch, a walk, and general exploration. As we came out of our lunch venue (one of two available in the small town of St. Arnaud, which is on Lake Rotoiti) we bumped into one of my fellow students from EIT, Eva, who I'd met when I did my wine tasting week in September. New Zealand is a small place!   

We went for a walk around the lake, which was very picture-skew:

We took a different route back, via a shortcut which I'd previously spurned as being "not a state highway" (such roads can turn out to be gravel tracks without any warning) but turned out to be a paved road and probably knocked half an hour off our journey home.

In the evening we had a bad Indian (all the good restaurants in Nelson are closed on a Sunday), followed by the rest of that good bottle of riesling from Kahurangi.

The fastest car in the world is, of course, a rental car. Thank you, Jeremy Clarkson.

Dining Through The Decades

We’ve been to Zibibbo for the last two years dégustation menus – last year’s was Splash Around The World, featuring seafood from 6 different continents including Antarctica, and the year before that was Quack Around The World, which did similarly for duck. This year’s offering was slightly different, being a journey through time, with dishes based on (but thankfully not always fully authentic) the different cuisines which were popular in New Zealand over the last five decades.

To start with, the Seventies. The Seventies were, generally, pretty dire food-wise wherever you were in the world. One of the features of a Seventies dinner party was, apparently, a cheese ball. This was basically a concoction of cream cheese, with added cheese, and covered with nuts. Thankfully, I think our chefs sourced their cream cheese from somewhere slightly better than the Philadelphia cheese which was the main ingredient in the Seventies. The accompanying chicken parfait was also a more modern take on the chicken liver pâté of that era. Wine wasn’t a big thing in New Zealand in this decade either, so it was served with that quintessential cocktail, the Harvey Wallbanger.

  

The Eighties were the decade of decadence, champagne and glamour. This was reflected in our next course, which was the defining starter of that decade, the prawn cocktail. Served with a  glass of champagne, of course. The Marie Rose sauce was, to my mind, a bit lacking in bite – a dash of Worcestershire sauce would’ve livened it up a bit. But the prawns were undeniably modern, in that they had a texture other than cotton wool, and an actual flavour.

The Nineties were the era of the celebrity chef, and this was represented by Pierre Koffman’s classic recipe, pig’s trotter. This was the mainstay at La Tante Claire, his London restaurant of yore. The trotter is deboned and stuffed, in this case, with black pudding and other ingredients. The outside of the pig’s trotter is sticky and gelatinous, which some people find not to their taste, although I really enjoyed it. Fear not the pig’s trotter! Next time Jacob Brown at The Larder is serving one, I shall give it a try (he’s very much a nose-to-tail chef). This was washed down with an oaky Chardonnay from Cooper’s Creek in Hawkes Bay. The chef was trying to find one of the big, buttery, oaky style chardonnays which were all the rage in the Nineties, but no-one makes them like that any more, so this was actually a nice wine – quite dry, but with a bit of oakiness to it.

  

Now we’re moving into more modern times, and the final main course of the evening was a fusion dish – fillet of beef with Asian vegetables (bok choi), a laksa hollandaise and short rib spring roll. I felt that the laksa flavour didn’t really come through in the sauce, but the rest of this dish was excellent. This was quite a departure for Zibibbo, as they usually concentrate on Mediterranean flavours and styles, and so they had a bit of fun with Asian flavours in the kitchen. This was served with a  classic Central Otago pinot noir from Rua Point.

At this point the chef Adam Newell came out to give us a short run-down on the inspiration for each dish, and also to introduce his returning prodigal head chef, Glen Taylor who has re-joined the restaurant after some time away. Glen then introduced the final course, which was the molecular gastronomy dessert. Basically, Glen had gone wild with all the toys in the kitchen, and come up with a deconstructed lemon tart with blackberry pearls, blackberry foam, and yoghurt and thyme gelato. This was served with another cocktail, an iced tea poured from a teapot with dry ice giving the impression of being steaming hot…but it was cold! Will wonders never cease? The cocktail was made with tea, ginger, pomegranate and vodka.

Zibibbo is firmly cemented in our list of places to go and I look forward to what they can offer us for next year’s degustation. This year’s was definitely a winner!

Did I Believe It?

New Zealand is currently in the clammy grasp of its Comedy Festival – unlike most comedy festivals, this is a nationwide event, not just confined to one city. We went to see Did I Believe It? at the Foxglove Bar & Restaurant.

The show was presented by three guys and one woman, and followed the format of Tomorrow’s World and How?, but with comedic material and satirical purpose. Sounds familiar? Yes, it’s the NZ version of Look Around You.

 Tonight’s subject (sponsored by 42 Below) was vodka – the how, why, what, where and when of vodka. It contained much funniness, and also included 2 42 Below vodka cocktails in the price of admission – a uniquely Kiwi one to start with called a Falling Water, comprised of feijoa-flavoured vodka, Ch'i,  and cucumber; the one served at half-time was a Moscow Mule.

Afterwards we dined downstairs at Foxglove, where we had some rather good lamb and venison.