Best of Wellington 2015

One last hurrah from me: Alexander Bisley, my regular Wellington correspondent, has put together this list of the best of the city as at July 2015 - a great set of notes to put in the back pocket ahead of a weekend trip to the capital ...

Good Night, and Good Luck

Appropriately enough at this Anzac-y time of year, this is my final post. 

I started writing here five years ago as a way of sharing my eating experiences with friends and family but also, if I'm honest, auditioning for a job as a paid restaurant reviewer. That happened soon enough and I'm so grateful to Simon Wilson, the editor of Metro for giving me a shot.

While I was writing monthly for Metro I could do the blog at the same time but, as regulars will have noticed, postings have fallen away since I've got two new weekly deadlines in New Idea and Sundayu Star-Times and today I start a third, as eating out editor for Viva in the Wednesday NZ Herald. 

There's truly no time left to blog and nothing to say here that I can't say in my new weekly review. My new editor has given me free rein to write as tangentially and critically as I like, so it's a good time to jump off the blog and onto viva.co.nz and, of course, into the weekly hard copy edition.

Thanks for the encouraging words and occasional tips. I'll leave the blog up for the time being - I had to look up my own quinoa porridge recipe just last week - but there'll be no more guilt about not contributing more often. Good night, and good luck. 

Incredible New Ramen Restaurant in Mt Eden

It’s easy for cheap restaurants to get a strong following quickly in Auckland, because people who use Instagram can afford to eat there. While fine dining power hitters like the French Café, The Grove and Sidart need one or two years and one or two awards before a buzz develops around them, somewhere like Peasant on Dominion Road can open up and within a couple of weeks most of Auckland has seen their fresh spring rolls through a Lo-Fi filter.

The Election Special

For lunch on Friday I decided to eat the full tasting menu at The French Café, to celebrate all the MC and copywriting work I’ve been getting through my new website jessemulligan.co.nz. Actually, I haven’t had a single enquiry through my new website yet due to not enough potential clients flicking through 13 pages of Google results to find it when they search my name, but my tech guy tells me I can improve my Google ranking by including the jessemulligan.co.nz web address as much as possible on other websites I contribute to. I reckon if I’m clever people won’t even notice me doing it.

Some of the best food in Auckland is in the last place you'd expect

I worked in radio for ten years, not many of which I enjoyed except for the theoretical enjoyment you get from being paid each week to entertain people. Bear in mind this theoretical enjoyment also applies to cheerleaders, buskers and people who dress up as mascots at sports events. It’s not enough to overcome the dread you get each evening about going into work the next day.

The Food Event of the Year

I have two feel-good things to share with you tonight. One will make you feel good in a worthy, making-the-world better sort of way. The other will make you feel good in a hedonistic, get-in-my-belly sort of way.

The Egg Trick

I just came back from a week of mostly good eating in Los Angeles, a city whose name alone can make any sentence glamorous. And with good reason: I stumbled upon both Jeff Goldblum and Glenn Close in different places on the same day.

“This is like a Big Chill reunion!” I almost said, temporarily forgetting that I wasn’t actually in the Big Chill, I just watched it with my dad on his V8 video machine. If you haven’t heard of the V8 format, you must be stupid because it’s totally the best picture quality and will one day overtake both VHS and Beta, at least according to the propaganda my dad was disseminating to anyone who would listen at the time.