Rotary Forum has a question to ask. We have a rare opportunity: Wellington is what we make it and you can be part of shaping it. Now in its second successful year, this highly topical community forum asks; what kind of city and region do we want? How should community views be expressed in local […]
Do you follow us on Twitter? A lot of you do. But you might miss our tweets in amongst all your very important updates from sportspeople, so here’s what’s been going on. We talked about a new Mojo opening in the Telecom building on Willis Street, and what a relief that was since it was […]
Grab yourself a great big vivid and mark off December 8 as the day of The Sixth Annual Wellingtonista Awards. Now go ahead and scribble out the day after as well, as you will be too partied out to do anything then. Obviously, we’re quiet because we have all kinds of plans afoot, but for […]
(Just kidding) Like parents — or how we imagine them to be — we are immensely proud when one of our snotty brats achieves recognition for the things at which they excel. And in this case, Oor Tom has been featured in the My Favourite Table section in Wednesday’s Dom Post Capital Life supplement, being recognised for […]
Happy brings back its Vinyl Friday sessions for 2011. Our own Tom Ackroyd will be spinning his 12 inches with vim and vigour from 5.30pm (until 7.30). Here is a little information about Tom (and the other DJ on the night); “This week we have two incredibly exciting, cost-efficient DJs: GREG COBB was born in […]
We’re not going to bother telling you about Webstock because a) you should already know all about it and b) there was only one ticket left as of this morning (although there are still tickets to the ONYAs available, so get on that. Instead, we’re going to tell you about two related events that we […]
So, we’re still partying at Mighty Mighty right now. Tom’s probably on his seventy-fifth martini, Martha is telling us all how much she loves us, and Jo is probably trying to cause a boobquake all by herself, but we figured we’d come back from the future to tell you all who the winners on the […]
We’ve got the movers in at Wellingtonista Towers. Please bear with us while we get things straightened out.
The Oaks complex sometimes seems like a hospitality Bermuda Triangle: fast-food joints and dodgy convenience stores jostle with bars of almost unrelenting crapness. But something’s about to land that looks much more promising: Memphis Belle Coffee House.
With a barista who just came second in the regional champs, a serious-looking range of Flight beans from their Napier home base and glimpses of an interior that looks vastly more sophisticated than its predecessor (not that that’s saying much), Memphis Belle might just put the Oaks curse behind it. It should be opening this week, and definitely seems worth checking out.
On the other hand, it looks like it might be lights out for a bar that was never exactly this fly’s favourite place: Electric Avenue. There was a skip outside this weekend, gradually filling with neon-painted MDF as the gaudy interiors were ripped out. It’s quite possible that it’s just a particularly violent renovation, but it all seems rather sudden, and their Facebook group has been silent for a month. Is there anyone out there who will admit to being a regular and can confirm or refute its demise? And what are the chances of getting a decent bar to replace it? Given the location in Munter Central, I guess the most we could hope for is a bar that can at least spell its street address on its website.
NZ History have recently added an amazing tea towel, thought to be from the mid-1960s, listing the coffee houses of Wellington.
It’s very cool to see such a list of classy joints that our forefathers and foremothers ran, making Wellington such a good coffee town.
Only a couple of these places are still in existence today (and the Matterhorn’s specialty is no longer "Continental cakes"). I wonder what businesses can now be found in these locations.
(And it’s interesting that in the days before the Beehive and the Fern Ball, the icon of Wellington was, er, the National War Memorial, and National Museum and Gallery.)