To Logan Brown (2 hats), Ortega Fish Shack, The Lar­der, Char­ley Noble and Taylors on Jack­son (1 hat each) – Logan Brown being the only non-Auck­land res­taur­ant to be awar­ded 2 hats in 2014 (rat­ing along­side Baduzzi and The Grill by Sean Con­nolly, and just one point below Masu and Kazuya). Well done Wel­ling­ton!

Now what’s this hat busi­ness I hear you say?  You’re def­in­itely not alone in feel­ing a bit unhat­ted…

The Aus­trali­an Good Food and Travel Guide (AGFG) developed the hat rat­ing sys­tem in 1977 to reward excep­tion­al chefs. Accord­ing to their web­site, hats are awar­ded for the food alone based on the French Mich­elin mod­el of rat­ing, and by anonym­ous experts din­ing (and pay­ing) a’la’normal cus­tom­ers.

The exten­sion into NZ over the last two years appears to alloc­ate points slightly dif­fer­ently across food, ser­vice and ambi­ence (see a much clear­er ver­sion of the below on the Cuisine Good Food Guide). I under­stand the judges (still anonym­ous a’la’nor­mal cus­tom­ers) start at the max­im­um points in each cat­egory and then deduct half marks for each ‘fault’.

Appar­ently a per­fect score has nev­er been awar­ded in the his­tory of the hat sys­tem, and very few near per­fect scores, so it appears to have some rigour.

The inten­tion is to have a sys­tem that provides some ref­er­ence of qual­ity din­ing exper­i­ences, so it will be inter­est­ing to see how this sys­tem is taken up over com­ing years.

Good Food Guide Ratings

It also got me think­ing about how eas­ily we tend to for­get about long-stand­ing res­taur­ants like Logan Brown as we rush from new estab­lish­ment to new estab­lish­ment giv­en they’re so set in our psyche that we just assume they’ll always be there. But they just may not if they don’t get sup­port (wit­ness Mar­tin Bosley’s end and the White­house open­ing with a new [prob­ably less form­al] concept at Clyde Quay around Octo­ber).

LB Sean and Steve

So if we want to retain some (any?) places of this caliber in Wel­ling­ton, maybe we all need to give them anoth­er look. There are often options that’ll give you a good taste of their qual­ity without break­ing the bank, in the case of LB $49.59pp pre-theatre 3‑course meal as long as out at 7.30pm, $35 Sat­urday high teas or a gust­at­ory exper­i­ence for a fixed price up front that might not end up being all that much more than hav­ing 5 tapas some­where else at $15+ each ($95 five-course or $125 sev­en-course Sat­urday night degust­a­tion).

So how about it Wel­ling­ton, do we want to sup­port a few of the good high end places as well as the new and excit­ing?