Dinner at Giddy-Up

The Welling­ton­ista got invit­ed along to try out some of the dish­es and have a beer at the Gid­dy-Up Mus­sel Bar, tucked away on Man­ners Street oppo­site Arty Bees book­shop. It sound­ed like a nice place to try out for a Fri­day evening din­ner, so I took up the invi­ta­tion and went there with my fam­i­ly recent­ly.

We intro­duced our­selves to Max­ine and Heath, the proud own­ers of this inter­est­ing­ly dec­o­rat­ed space. Max­ine explained that they’d been trav­el­ling over­seas and noticed that mus­sels were often the basis of local seafood spe­cial­i­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly through France and Spain, where you could eat the local shell­fish tapas style. They won­dered why no-one had thought to do this in New Zealand, giv­en our fan­tas­tic green-lipped mus­sels, and start­ed Gid­dy-Up to fill this gap.

The idea is self-ser­vice — you order and come up to the counter to col­lect your food, and after­wards take your plates back. There are lim­it­ed uten­sils as almost all the food is designed to be eat­en with fin­gers or, in the case of the mus­sels, eat­en from the half-shell.

Max­ine told us they get their live mus­sels shipped twice week­ly from the Hairy Mus­sel Com­pa­ny down in the Sounds (itself anoth­er busi­ness born of a pas­sion for mus­sels), and brought out a cou­ple of plat­ters for us to try.

On one was sev­er­al tasty bruschet­ta; a cou­ple of utter­ly fan­tas­tic mus­sel frit­ters; a lit­tle pile of love­ly smoky fish bites and some cajun style cala­mari; and on the oth­er was a selec­tion of dressed mus­sels. We par­tic­u­lar­ly liked the bruschet­ta, the cal­i­mari and and the mus­sel frit­ters and between us we pol­ished the lot off pret­ty quick­ly. We decid­ed to order some more mus­sel plates and some bravos — a tapas-style pota­to dish.

We par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed the cheesey bacon bravos; but some of the mus­sel plates were a bit hit or miss. The Chilli Blast plate — dressed with a paste of tamarind, chilli and corian­der — was great; but the Green Envy plate — dressed with a over­ly creamy but fair­ly weak Thai-green cur­ry style sauce — was not so good. How­ev­er the Aotearoa Sal­ad — a ceviche — found great favour.

We did have a few prob­lems with some of the big­ger mus­sels, which weren’t ful­ly heat­ed through and were also a bit large for some of us to eat com­fort­ably with­out uten­sils. When we raised this after­wards Max­ine said that the mus­sels deliv­ered that week were a lit­tle larg­er than nor­mal. Usu­al­ly the mus­sels are steam-cooked ear­li­er in the day, then chilled. They are reheat­ed in boil­ing water just before eat­ing, and per­haps their size required a lit­tle more reheat­ing than was expect­ed.

If you are look­ing for a place for a quick, rea­son­ably priced meal before head­ing fur­ther down the street for the night Gid­dy-Up cer­tain­ly deliv­ers. If you are look­ing for a show­case for food that’s NZ-mus­sel relat­ed you’ve found your spot, too (and Max­ine notes that tourists are often very pleased to find Gid­dy-Up). If you mus­sel-pho­bic and are wor­ried about going there with mus­sel-lov­ing friends and not hav­ing any­thing on the menu you could eat: don’t be con­cerned — there are a few oth­er very good menu items you can have.

I’d go back for some mus­sel frit­ters and bravos, I think, and my co-din­ers would come back for the ceviche and the cal­i­mari and a few plates of (small­er) mus­sels.