WOAP: Dining through the Decades

This is going to sound a bit sil­ly, but I choose my Welling­ton on a Plate events look­ing for val­ue for mon­ey.  The sil­ly part, obvi­ous­ly, is that no one needs to drop over a hun­dred dol­lars a head on din­ner, but if you’re look­ing to have a degus­ta­tion and matched wines, you’re going to spend more than that on a reg­u­lar night. So if we accept this Shel­ley Bridge­manesque premise, Din­ing Through The Decades at five cours­es and matched drinks, for $140 plus rage-mak­ing Tick­etek fees, is a bar­gain. Espe­cial­ly once I found out that Glen Tay­lor from Tay­lor’s on Jack­on Street, for­mer­ly of Hum­ming­bird, was now a chef-part­ner in the restau­rant. So I booked myself and three oth­ers in for a trip back through time. Tonight was sold out but there are still tick­ets for Mon­day the 17th left. Run, don’t walk. Oh, and if you are going to go — beware, there are spoil­ers ahead…

First up, Har­vey Wall­bangers as there was­n’t much decent wine being drunk in the ’70s in New Zealand. Our glass­es got filled a cou­ple of times. That was nice. Also nice? These giant cheese balls, served up with par­fait. If you’re won­der­ing about the cheese to bread roll ratio, well, what are you, some kind of Air New Zealand patron?

I had a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that Prawn Cock­tail would fea­ture on the menu, so I got in touch with the restau­rant to say that I can’t eat shell­fish or crus­taceans (well, I can eat them and I like them, but then they exit my body, rapid­ly, from both ends). Nev­er­the­less, I prepped my com­pan­ions to the pos­si­bil­i­ty that they would have to eat my prawns for me (oh god the pain) but I was delight­ed to receive a salmon cock­tail instead, diced in cubes and I believe mari­nad­ed in beet­root. Yum­m­mm. There’s a rea­son that Glen is the Ora­cle for Ora King Salmon, and that rea­son was in the glass. The oth­ers were a lit­tle jeal­ous of my salmon actu­al­ly, but also thor­ough­ly delight­ed with their prawns.

We’d worked our way through balls &  con­ver­sa­tion about key par­ties, then cham­pagne and stock mar­ket crash­es, so it was time to turn our atten­tion to the ’90s. I’d nev­er actu­al­ly heard of Pierre Koff­mann before, but that’s what Google is for, after all.

The sig­na­ture dish of the restau­rant was pig’s trot­terwith chick­en mous­se­line, sweet­breads and morels.^[2] Celebri­ty chef Mar­co Pierre White has called this “favourite dish of all time”.^[4]

 

His trot­ters were deli­cious, and the big oaky chardon­nay they’d had to work extra hard to find was a very fine match. Ooooof what an intense­ly rich dish though. Actu­al­ly read­ing this descrip­tion makes me realise that what I thought was a SPECTACULARLY meaty mush­room must have been a sweet­bread, which I had been intro­duced to by Glen in the first place. Cir­cle of life, etc.

The next course, the con­fu­sion of fusion, made me, and I quote myself here “pick up my plate and lick it out like we met on OKC”.

I like my fil­let more on the blue side but if you’re pop­ping out 75 cov­ers at once it’s total­ly under­stand­able that they’d be served  medi­um rare. They were still deli­cious, and I have nev­er felt quite so glad to see a veg­etable on a plate as I felt about that bok choy. The Ota­go pinot noir was much more famil­iar ground than the but­tery chardon­nay of the pre­vi­ous dish, and I was super pleased to get a top up too.

Then Adam Newall came out to talk about what we’d been eat­ing, and dragged Glen out to explain the mol­e­c­u­lar cook­ing of the dessert. They were hav­ing fun, dessert was ridicu­lous with its foams and spheres and decon­struct­ed lemon tart­ness, but it was also deli­cious. The cock­tail was­n’t a great match — two sweets togeth­er was a bit of a clash, but it was a good drink for the 2010s.

Real­ly impor­tant­ly, as well as the food and the drink being amaz­ing, ser­vice was impec­ca­ble AND tables were split up so we did­n’t have to hear any­one talk­ing about their invest­ment prop­er­ties and they weren’t sub­ject­ed to our lengthy meat puns. Hope­ful­ly. It was not a cheap din­ner, but for the qual­i­ty and quan­ti­ty of what we were served, it was enter­tain­ing, mem­o­rable and there­fore good val­ue. If you’re in a posi­tion where you’re able to do so, you should def­i­nite­ly go along t0morrrow night.