Author: Joanna

More food reviews that you can stomach

So y’all asked for more food reviews with pics, so today I am going to do short reviews of the fol­low­ing places:

1. The Ambe­li
2. The Grill at the Dux­ton
3. Lager­field as a func­tion venue
4. St John’s Restau­rant

I hope you don’t mind that I’ve put them all in one post.

Eat and eat and eat: win a voucher for the Occidental

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Richard who you will find hid­ing away at Munchen Burg­er get­ting his borsct on. This week we’ve got our last prize to give away, thanks to cel­e­brate Welling­ton on a Plate, thanks to the love­ly Pos­i­tive­ly Welling­ton Tourism, we have a $100 vouch­er to The Occi­den­tal to give away.

New Zealand’s Next Top City

Writ­ing recaps of New Zealand’s Next Top Mod­el is some­thing that I’d nor­mal­ly do over at Pret­ty Pret­ty Pret­ty, but since the first episode of Sea­son Two was filmed in Welling­ton (nice work, Pos­i­tive­ly Tourism!), I thought I might put up some thoughts on all the places that they shot.

• The girls stay at
  The Muse­um Hotel, which one girl describes as “pris­tine”, while anoth­er express­es sur­prise that they’re not stay­ing in a back­pack­ers’ to save mon­ey. It’s cute that she knows about bud­gets, and hope­ful­ly she’ll learn about prod­uct place­ment soon­er rather than lat­er. The Muse­um Hotel is indeed a gor­geous space, and the bath­tubs are so big that you could prob­a­bly fit all 13 girls in at once. There is in fact a clip of them all sit­ting in a spa lat­er but I could­n’t fig­ure out if it was at th hotel or out at Boom­rock.
• For their first cat­walk expe­ri­ence, the girls are charged with stomp­ing around the Water Whirler — which we’d already read about on Stuff. It was reas­sur­ing to see how bad most of the girls were at walk­ing in heels, but a warn­ing: if you’re think­ing about try­ing to recre­ate this scene, secu­ri­ty guards will have a very dif­fer­ent idea about what ‘fierce’ is. You are not allowed on the Water Whirler.
• Because every tourist ven­ture needs a mon­tage, we get to see the girls with Solace in the Wind (a less polite per­son than me would com­ment on how Mr Solace appears to be more ani­mat­ed — and artic­u­late — than some of them) and get­ting excit­ed about shop­ping in the Old Bank Arcade.
  

Set your brain on fire with Ignite

So many pre­sen­ta­tions are like real­ly real­ly weak broth, with only a hint of actu­al con­tent float­ing around in far too much weak sauce. If only we could turn up the heat on that soup and sim­mer it down to a con­cen­trat­ed jus burst­ing with flavour and taste. Would­n’t that be awe­some? No filler, just killer! That’s what the Ignite series of talks aims to do: 

Have you ever been to a 60-minute talk and lament­ed that there was only five min­utes of good con­tent?  Imag­ine if you could hear only that five min­utes…

that’s Ignite Welling­ton!

Come along to the sec­ond Ignite Welling­ton and be inspired, amused, edu­cat­ed and amazed!  We have an array of tal­ent­ed Welling­ton speak­ers, who will each speak for five min­utes on top­ics that range from couch­surf­ing and Ernest Ruther­ford, to Out­doorKnit, wall­pa­per and build­ing the dream!

At the heart of Ignite is its fast-paced for­mat.  All pre­sen­ters must give their talks in just five min­utes — using 20 slides that appear on screen for only 15 sec­onds.

The evening will start with an Ignite Con­test, which will help par­tic­i­pants unleash their inner cre­ativ­i­ty.  The last event had teams build­ing the tallest pos­si­ble struc­tures out of spaghet­ti and marsh­mal­lows

Ignite is hap­pen­ing on Tues­day August 3, at the Para­mount The­atre from 6.30pm-10pm. Ignite is free, but you need to reg­is­ter in order to guar­an­tee a seat. For more infor­ma­tion, includ­ing the full list of speak­ers, check out their site. You can fol­low also them at @ignitewelli and become a Face­book fan

Eat and eat and eat: win a voucher for the General Practitioner

 Con­grat­u­la­tions to Nicole and her fan­tail for win­ning our Rata com­pe­ti­tion. This week, to cel­e­brate Welling­ton on a Plate, thanks to the love­ly Pos­i­tive­ly Welling­ton Tourism, we have a $100 vouch­er to the Gen­er­al Prac­ti­tion­er on the cor­ner of Willis & Boul­cott to give away.

The restau­rant gets its name from the build­ing’s orig­i­nal pur­posee — it was con­struct­ed for Dr. Hen­ry Pollen in 1902, with his fam­i­ly liv­ing on the top floor and surgery on the bot­tom. Leg­end (or just hearsay?) has it that not too long after that moved in a troop of ladies to take care of oth­er needs of the body besides med­i­cine, before even­tu­al­ly it was refur­bished as a posh restau­rant we once took my grand­moth­er to, but I can’t remem­ber the name of it.

So, speak­ing of stick­ing things in buns, part of Welling­ton on a Plate is Burg­er Welling­ton, in which over 30 Welling­ton restau­rants and cafes are cre­at­ing spe­cial burg­ers and you get to vote for the win­ner. The Gen­er­al Prac­ti­tion­er’s con­tri­bu­tion sounds espe­cial­ly good:

Band Substances

An unfor­tu­nate num­ber of Welling­ton­istas are rather fond of mak­ing rather ter­ri­ble puns quite fre­quent­ly, which means a lot of my time is spend mak­ing “Badoom chish!” sounds. Imag­ine how much cool­er it would be if the jokes were bet­ter and instead of me, there was a whole damn band play­ing the rim shots. Wait, you don’t want to have to imag­ine it? You want it to be real? Well, have we got the gig for you then!

Remem­ber TAWA-nom­i­nat­ed Rob­bie Ellis and the bus lane you put through his heart? Well, he’s been work­ing on a new show called Band Sub­stances:

It’s musi­cal stand-up com­e­dy with a full band!

Join some of Welling­ton’s favourite musi­cal come­di­ans:

• Gabriel Page
• Sarah Harpur
• Car­lo & Cyn­thia Wake­field from Young and the Wit­less IV
• The Fringe Bar Opera Soloists and more!

It’ll be Band to the Bone! (Jo’s note: BADOOM CHISH!)

The show has with Jerome Chan­dra­hasen as MC and Rob­bie as musi­cal direc­tor.

Rebels in so many ways

 Remem­ber the good time y’all had last year at the TAWAs? Sure, a lot of that was us up on stage, but also, it was the Klezmer Rebs, play­ing rol­lick­ing­ly good tunes. So we imag­ine you’d like to see them again, yes?

Good news, friends! They’re play­ing a gig next Fri­day July 30th at the Bath House, with Rodri­go Bros, The Char­coal White, Sam Man­zan­za Africa Rhythm Band, Rose’, Rus­sell Self, Han­nah Howes, oSka and more yet to con­firm. The gig is to raise mon­ey for the Sea Shep­pard and Pete Bethune. 

Come out and show your sup­port for oppo­si­tion to whal­ing.  All bands are donat­ing their ser­vices and all pro­ceeds go to the Sea Shep­herd Soci­ety to help them con­tin­ue their direct action against whalers in our oceans.

Yes, there are divid­ed opin­ions on the Sea Shep­pard’s tech­niques and Pete Bethune in par­tic­u­lar. What’s not up for debate? How much fun it is to have a jol­ly good dance.