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?