At the Wel­ling­tonista, we don’t often give props to less con­sciously hip­ster places like One Red Dog, even though their con­tin­ued suc­cess shows they have a devoted fol­low­ing. Today we dis­covered one of the reas­ons why this devoted fol­low­ing might exist.

Our little fam­ily-of-four had emerged from the Kids Anim­a­tion ses­sion at the Para­mount very hungry. Where, among the zil­lions of Cour­tenay Place eat­er­ies, could we take the girls for lunch?

There actu­ally wer­en’t that many open, and those that were did­n’t really appeal, or wer­en’t in The Book. Finally, and only just before the girls’ hun­ger got the bet­ter of their man­ners, we slipped into One Red Dog in Blair Street.

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It was quiet inside, with a hand­ful of oth­er fam­ily-type punters already seated. Without delay we were shown to a com­fort­able booth and handed our menus and a glass of water each. The girls were giv­en cray­ons to col­our in their menus; and their res­ult­ing quiet indus­tri­ous­ness lead to such an increase in the gen­er­al level of our par­ent­al san­ity that we felt com­fort­able enough to order a glass of wine each.

The chil­drens’ menu was one of the best we’ve yet seen, primar­ily piz­zas and pasta and thank­fully devoid of any trace of that staple of the lazy res­taur­anteur, chick­en nug­gets. The eld­er chose her own pizza, a ham cheese and pine­apple vari­ant; while the young­er chose a bowl of ham cheese and tomato pasta. We chose a chick­en salad and lamb salad for ourselves.

We did­n’t have to wait too long for the food to arrive. And, in anoth­er nice touch, the girls’ food was­n’t too hot to eat! Yes, there’s noth­ing worse, from the per­spect­ive of a four-year-old, to wait through an inter­min­able hell of deli­cious food smells, the sight of oth­er people eat­ing, and your own empty stom­ach, only to find that your food, when it arrives, burns your mouth. This has been the cause of a num­ber of unfor­tu­nate and embar­rass­ing scenes over the years, and we par­ents were grate­ful to be spared anoth­er such.

Both girls enjoyed their selec­tions enorm­ously, with the eld­er fin­ish­ing off the young­er­’s por­tion. Our own salads were deli­cious, and would not have dis­graced many of the fan­ci­er cafes around town. In all, we were very happy with the food, and would go there again. Oth­ers may argue that One Red Dog’s piz­zas per­haps aren’t the finest in Wel­ling­ton (Boulot, Scopa, and even my nos­tal­gic favour­ite Calzone do bet­ter) but as we saw, pizza is not the only string to the Dog’s bow, and in any case the over­all exper­i­ence was sev­er­al streets apart from the usu­al dreck that char­ac­ter­ises the unfor­tu­nate ghetto of “fam­ily din­ing”.

So there you have it. For a quiet, fast, sane, and reas­on­ably priced (take 30% off with your Enter­tain­ment Book) lunch with kids (and prob­ably your eth­nic-food-phobic older rel­at­ives) give One Red Dog a whirl.