Graze at the Portlander

A couple of weeks ago I was invited by the lovely people at the Portlander to head in one freez­ing even­ing, along with a num­ber of Ins­tagram­mers, to feast on their new graz­ing concept. From our sig­na­ture long bone OP rib-eye presen­ted at your table, to our on the bone grass fed Sir­loin dry aged in house […]

Five questions with Wanda Harland

Full dis­clos­ure: the Wel­ling­tonista is all about nepot­ism. So we thought it was about jolly time we sat down (well, emailed) our Martha, who has been a very import­ant part of the ‘ista since like 2006 at least (although she is much less of a bad influ­ence on us now than she used to be), […]

Naked girls. Reading. In Wellington.

In advance of Naked Girls Read­ing; the moth­er­hood edi­tion this Sat­urday at the Fringe Bar, I put a few ques­tions to its pro­du­cer, Hugo Grrrl. Okay, first off. Naked girls read­ing – what in the heck is this? And who are you? Naked Girls Read­ing is exactly what it sounds like – it’s com­pletely naked […]

Saint Fabiola fabulousness

Last Fri­day we had a lovely time at the open­ing of St Fabiola on Lom­bard Street (you may have seen us tweet­ing about the pies from Pickle and Pie, because, you know, pri­or­it­ies), so this week, we caught up with the own­er Kirsten for a chat over email. What’s your back­ground before the shop? I’m an […]

My predictions for Wellington on a Plate 2018

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 […]

Pig & Pinot – we’re as happy as pigs in mud

As you’re no doubt aware from watch­ing Short­land Street, it’s duck-hunt­ing sea­son. Usu­ally this means that Cloudy Bay would be doing duck & pinot noir pair­ings around the coun­try, but this year they’ve decided to do some­thing a little dif­fer­ent and pos­sibly a little more access­ible – pinot noir & pros­ciutto – “bring­ing you the […]

Chasing the Black Dog with beer

Last night we went to the open­ing of the new Black Dog brew­ery on Cuba Street, and, spoil­er alert, it was bloody delight­ful. All pics were sup­plied by the pub­li­cist because if you fol­low us on Twit­ter, you’ll know I can­’t pho­to­graph for shit. A con­fes­sion: I had nev­er been to the old Black Dog […]

Zoom zoom Zoomy?

We wrote about Uber when they first came to Wel­ling­ton so I’m not here to regur­git­ate the many cons (though this ‘game’ about the life of an Uber driver is worth a play, sim­il­ar to Action Sta­tion’s Pick A Path). The obvi­ous truth is that for pas­sen­gers, Uber is super con­veni­ent. Now there’s New Zea­l­and-based […]

Review: Kátya Kabanová

Kátya Kaban­ová was the first opera I ever saw, back in 1996 when it was here for the Inter­na­tion­al Fest­iv­al. I was 16, and we got $5 tick­ets to the dress rehersal through drama class. I was over­whelmed by the music and the draaaaama and the rain on stage and the cliff that rose up on hydraul­ics […]

In which we solve all traffic problems forever

In purely coin­cid­ent­al tim­ing just before an elec­tion, the Nation­al Party is hand­ing out new roads in an Oprah-like fash­ion. You get a road, and you get a road and YOU get a road. How we’re going to get a couple of bil­lion dol­lars of new roads out of a budget full of holes for […]