I’ve nev­er been afraid of eclec­ti­cism. A dash of Kiwiana and a touch of fad­ed grandeur can go down a treat if served with a gen­er­ous slug of hip­ster irony (see Mighty Mighty). A grab-bag of Nana kitsch can turn into some­thing resem­bling con­cep­tu­al art if it’s assem­bled with wit and flair (see Auck­land’s North­ern Steamship Com­pa­ny). But some­times it all goes hor­ri­bly wrong.

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I know! Let’s grab some swatch­es of loud old car­pet and put them in gold frames along the bar! Ooh, let’s get some ran­dom balustrades and stan­dard lamps to mix in with the left­over expen­sive design­er chairs from the last place! Hmm, needs more cross-stitch to go with the weath­er­beat­en weath­er­boards and sev­en pat­terns of wall­pa­per. Flo­ral-paint­ed female tor­sos will add some art­sy class above the uri­nals. But it needs to be blok­i­er, so let’s add dozens of TV screens to show our brand­ed Flash ani­ma­tions when the footie’s not on, and the piece de resis­tance: a map of New Zild made out of Tui caps. Maaaate! [Read more]

Of course, the menu match­es the decor, find­ing new and dizzy­ing ways to match Asian, Ital­ian, Cajun and even Irish ingre­di­ents in com­bi­na­tions that would test even an inver­te­brate’s stom­ach. On the oth­er hand, the wine list is short and pre­dictable, no doubt churned out by a cor­po­rate strat­e­gy, and the beer selec­tion is sim­i­lar­ly unin­spir­ing.

A hand­ful of the above ideas, either evolv­ing organ­i­cal­ly as he expres­sion of an eccen­tric indi­vid­u­al­ist’s per­son­al­i­ty or com­posed with deft humour by a tal­ent­ed design­er, could have worked a treat. But when it’s all com­bined into a slick and con­scious­ly con­trived “wack­i­ness” with the sheen of an nascent fran­chise ready to spread from Queen­stown to the Hutt, it’s enough to make the dirt­i­est of flies long for the clin­i­cal per­fec­tion of min­i­mal­ism.