2AWA: Most Needed

Here are the nom­in­ees for the Most Needed cat­egory for the 2nd Annu­al Wel­ling­tonista Awards (2AWA)

Wel­ling­ton most needs:

Wel­ling­ton’s pretty close to per­fec­tion, but there are a few things that we need. More smart people to par­ti­cip­ate in loc­al elec­tions so we don’t end up with Kerry again. A liv­ing wage for the Wel­ling­tonis­tas. More celebrit­ies, appar­ently. And also these things:

(nom­in­ees after the jump)

A. A tiki bar

For a coun­try that actu­ally has Tikis as part of the cul­ture we have no way to cel­eb­rate that cul­ture by drink­ing ourselves silly in some sort of tiki related man­ner. How hard is it to nail some bam­boo to the bar, serve drinks in pine­apples, coconuts and Tiki mugs? Until we get a prop­er tiki bar you can find us sit­ting in the tiki­fied corner of Hadyn’s lounge drink­ing Zom­bies from his scor­pi­on bowl.

WINNER!!!
B. Light rail to the airport

In case you haven’t noticed, the Wellin­gonista are very pro-pub­lic trans­port. Unfor­tu­nately, the coun­cil aren’t. Light rail won the vote at the last Wel­ling­tonista awards, but still has­n’t been imple­men­ted. That’s just not good enough. After all, we are offi­cially the self-pro­claimed offi­cial voice of the people, and we demand it!

C. Muji

We have to been to the Japan­ese design chain Muji many times. Thrice in Lon­don, twice in Par­is and over and over again in Tokyo. Every vis­it had a bad effect on our wal­lets but a sooth­ing effect on the eye and mind. Wheth­er it was bags, or pants, or design­er sta­tion­ery or lin­en or fur­niture or cit­ies in a bag, we could­n’t get enough of the Muji stuff. They opened their first store in New York recently, it also happened to be the first store in Amer­ica, so Wel­ling­ton might be a ways off yet, but we can dream right?

D. A 24 hour diner

There’s only so far kebab shops can take you. Kenny’s and Mid­night Espresso are not enough – we need to get all Amer­ic­an­ised. We need a diner with cosy booths and bot­tom­less cof­fee to fuel our intel­lec­tu­al dis­cus­sions. We need a place to go after our late-run­ning gigs so we can talk shit. We need a place to hook up over curly fries and bur­gers. We want to be able to order waffles at 3am.

E. Wagamama

For some of us it was over a dec­ade ago, yet still we have fond memor­ies of noodle chain Wagamama’s ori­gin­al below-ground level Soho and Blooms­bury branches and their min­im­al­ist decor, long tables, and their cheap(-ish) but tasty and great take on Japan­ese noodles. So we were, it has to be said, mildly jeal­ous to find that a branch (or three) had opened in Auck­land. Per­haps the concept is get­ting a little old, and per­haps Wel­ling­ton’s own Chow could be argued for instead, but nev­er­the­less we’d love to see a Wagamama here.

Vot­ing opens on Novem­ber 19.