Tomor­row begins that most magic­al time of the year. The stu­pid film fest­iv­al has released my friends from its evil clutches and it’s time to eat, eat, eat. We’ve been cov­er­ing Wel­ling­ton on a Plate for a  long time now and I think we’re get­ting pretty good at know­ing what’s what. So here’s our thoughts.

First of all, read our advice from last year the year before last (oops, our lazy bad). Yup, some of the res­taur­ants are closed now, but as always, you want to avoid the places that are put­ting their reg­u­lar food on their WOAP menu and char­ging more for it.

Think glob­al, act loc­al. Try lunches at places near your work (if you work) where you might not nor­mally go. At the same time, on week­ends or even­ings, maybe try some­where fur­ther afield – WOAP would be a great time to try Topor up the coast for example, or last year’s blue cheese cheese­cake in Rata at Zeal­and­ia makes me happy to recom­mend it for a week­end vis­it – even if you don’t par­tic­u­larly care for birds.

Tak­ing bite-sized bites of WOAP is easi­er (and cheap­er!) this year with things like the DONUT POPUP STORE (we’re very excited about this!), the mother­truck­ing popup Match Wine Bar, the Gar­age Pro­ject Milk­bar with pies and fried chick­en,  and the Foodtruck Trail­er Park (this year’s equi­val­ent of pulled pork).

We’re pretty excited about the Clash of the Cock­tails (and the use­ful web­site that lets you search by spir­it, though it would be bet­ter if you could also search for “any­thing but shell­fish” for the canape) match­ing. Because one of the WOAP spon­sors is the Spir­its Coun­cil who are so into pro­mot­ing sens­ible drink­ing that they even gave us glass­ware marked with stand­ard drink sizes as part of the launch swag, it would be very very irre­spons­ible of us to sug­gest pol­ish­ing off as many of the cock­tails as you could in one night. Unless you delib­er­ately plan out your crawl to go from one end of town to a next drink at the oth­er end, and then back again etc. After all, Lux is on! Time for a good walk around!

As far as events go, I’ll report back from Din­ing Through the Dec­ades and Aus­sie Rules. They’ve been going hard try­ing to pro­mote the Mind­food Pro­du­cer Awards Din­ner tomor­row night so I’d guess there’s a lot of tick­ets left if you have a big group. Heath­er has some advice over at Word on the Street about get­ting in train­ing for Beer­vana. Are you going to any­thing? We’re happy to take your guest reviews!

I haven’t even looked at the bur­gers or Dine menus prop­erly yet (my day job is much busier than in pre­vi­ous years, obvi­ously), though frus­trat­ingly I’m stuck out in Thorndon so there won’t be too many lunches for me. But as usu­al I’ll be look­ing for deli­cious-sound­ing things in places I might not have been to before, or places that I know will be amaz­ing based on pre­vi­ous exper­i­ences (aka Ti Kouka). See you at the table?

PS – you should book for the bur­gers and Dine menus whenev­er you can. It will make your life less dis­ap­point­ing!