Do lies come with that shake?

You may have seen a lifestyle col­umn in this week­end’s Dom­Post where Hadyn Jones bemoaned the “fact” that you can’t get milk­shakes at cafés in Welling­ton, and blamed this on the idea that Welling­to­ni­ans are too cool and stuck-up for such things. There are just a few things wrong with this:

• Just off the top of our lit­tle insect brains, we came up with Fidel’s, Mid­night Espres­so, Sweet Moth­er’s Kitchen, Espres­so­holic, Maranui and Off­beat Orig­i­nals as not­ed enablers for the shake-addict­ed.
• Those are hard­ly obscure, hard-to-find under­ground estab­lish­ments. If the Dom­Post’s esteemed cor­re­spon­dent is not aware of their menus, then one has to ask: just where has he been hang­ing out?
• If any­thing, those are the sort of places pre­ferred by the cool kids, so it’s hard­ly a hip­per-than-thou atti­tude that is keep­ing the oppressed milk­shake down.
• And final­ly, if he did hap­pen to ask for a milk­shake in one of the more upmar­ket restau­rant-style cafés, then I believe the staff would be quite jus­ti­fied to respond “No, we don’t serve milk­shakes. Nei­ther do we serve lol­lipops, Rashuns or hot dogs on sticks. We’re a café, not a dairy, burg­er bar or provin­cial tea­rooms cir­ca 1983.”

But there’s clear­ly a nos­tal­gic han­ker­ing for gelati­nous con­coc­tions of arti­fi­cial flavour and indus­tri­al-strength sat­u­rat­ed fats, giv­en the num­ber of local estab­lish­ments that do serve them. So, please help out the Dom­Post’s con­fused and bemused jour­nal­ist by let­ting us know where your favourite milk­shakes are: which place has the best shake, the best val­ue and the best range?