On Mon­day night, some of the Welling­ton­ista went along to the launch of Social Cook­ing, a new cook­ing school based in Herd Street, so this fly tagged along too, buzzing over­head.

The launch was held inside the City Mar­ket space, not actu­al­ly in the class­room itself, where stands were set up by var­i­ous pur­vey­ors to tempt us with their wares — Mac’s, Mon­tana, the Fly­ing Bur­ri­to Broth­ers, and though they were less sign-point­ed, Oste­ria Del Toro and Mon­soon Poon, all of whom are asso­ciates of the school, with their chefs being teach­ers.

Giv­en that the event was free to any­one who reg­is­tered, and there was no doorlist, it was rather crowd­ed and there was a long wait for mar­gar­i­tas. In fact, the event shut down ear­ly because of a lack of glass­wear. Dis­as­ter! Not ear­ly enough to skip a speech from Ker­ry Pren­derghast­ly. Appar­ent­ly she’s still around and was asked to do an encore of her “I’m so fuck­ing great” speech from the Fish­head launch. Dou­ble dis­as­ter! In this case, she threw in talk about a dif­fer­ent cook­ing school which she is tak­ing full respon­si­bil­i­ty for bring­ing to Welly. Kind of inap­pro­pri­ate, and we had to lis­ten to it with­out a drink in our hands. Also, we appre­ci­ate that spon­sors are impor­tant for any event or venue, but woah, what a reacharound they got in all the speech­es. It would have been nice to have a lit­tle more atten­tion paid to the kind of peo­ple who might come along and come to the class­es (espe­cial­ly since a lot of the class­es are now sold out), and we prob­a­bly did­n’t need the les­son on how Face­book (appar­ent­ly) works. Did you know you can ‘like’ things?

That aside, we buzzed over deli­cious ceviche, and salt­ed caramel mac­arons from Hip­popota­mus. Welling­ton­istas think the school — which empha­sizes drink­ing with cook­ing — sounds like a good idea. As long as the class atten­dees aren’t too much like the crowd at the open­ing, who with all the sense of enti­tle­ment of a pack of rich baby boomers were absolute­ly dread­ful at giv­ing way to let peo­ple through.