Tomor­row is my favour­ite launch of the year – the Wel­ling­ton on a Plate pro­gramme. In advance, and without hav­ing looked at their web­site, here’s what I think it will include (or not) so we can look tomor­row and see if I was right or wrong.

  • There’s always a trend­ing meat (wow is that a ter­rible phrase). Years ago it was pulled pork but now you can even get that at Pizza Hut, it’s totally passe. We’ve seen beef cheeks, last year every­one seemed to be doing poultry (we remem­ber the one place passing off chick­en as tur­key when they ran out in pre­vi­ous years) so this year I’m pre­dict­ing pastrami/corned beef to be mak­ing it big. I think we’ve seen an increase in Jew­ish-style deli din­ing, and I reck­on this is up & com­ing.
  • Mean­while, baos are every­where in Wel­ling­ton right now so I also expect to see a lot of bao buns, and Viet­name­sey fla­vours even in places that aren’t Asi­an-cuisine styles nor­mally.
  • From gos­sip we’ve heard, the best cock­tail com­pet­i­tion has­n’t had a huge uptake in pre­vi­ous years, which is easy to under­stand. Most people have to eat lunch so it’s easy to jus­ti­fy spend­ing on a bur­ger to get in on the action, but the price of a cock­tail & canape is often the price of a bur­ger so it makes sense to fill your belly instead. I would not be sur­prised to see the cock­tail com­pet­i­tion ele­ment of Wel­ling­ton on a Plate eased out.
  • That said, we’re expect­ing to see spir­its play­ing a lar­ger role than they have in the past, giv­en the growth in boutique gins around the region.
  • Hope­fully the team have done a thor­ough proof-read­ing and sense check of all names of all entries, so we won’t have a repeat of last year.
  • Last year we tweeted extens­ively about our hope for a Mck­en­zie Broth­ers vs Bresolin Broth­ers hos­pit­al­ity death match (the win­ner is our bel­lies). This prob­ably won’t hap­pen but would­n’t it be great if it did?
  • This is not a pre­dic­tion, more of a request. Can we please just all settle on one hasht­ag and use that? Thank you. We humbly sug­gest #welly­ona­plate and also #bur­ger­welly for bur­gers. Thank you
  • We know the fest­iv­al is in safe hands with Beth at the lead (and look at how Wel­ling­ton has grown now with all its ramen places and rooftop bars since that post five years ago) and we’re really look­ing for­ward to see­ing what’s new.

Finally, the single best Wel­ling­ton on a Plate event we went to last year was the Hawthorn Loun­ge’s cock­tail degust­a­tion that made dishes inspired by clas­sic Wel­ling­ton dishes (like Nikau’s Kedgeree). The warmth & gen­er­ous­ity of that night (along with the bloody deli­cious drinks) made it abund­antly clear what a fam­ily the Wel­ling­ton hos­pit­al­ity scene is, and it was just such a pleas­ure hear­ing all the stor­ies about the makers. We hope more events this year will bring the love in the same way.