More Auckland vs Wellington malarky

Recently menus.co.nz put up a piece called Auckland is the capital of cuisine – not Wellington, and then asked a number of Wellington food bloggers to respond. The Auckland internet seems to be very short of space, as our response was edited quite heavily(*) despite sticking to the word limit (and links changed to promote […]

Joanna had a lot of (Silere) lamb (at Hummingbird)

A couple of weeks ago, I went for dinner at Hummingbird, and as well as eating fish tacos with my girlfriend (oh grow up!), we ordered the Lamb for Two. What we got was lamb shank with couscous, chargrilled flatbreads, the creamiest hummus ever, baba ganoush, some pickles and the most amazingly tender and flavoursome […]

Review: Richard Meros Salutes the Southern Man

“Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” muttered Laurence Fishburne in 1999, proffering a pill-toting hand to lead us through the impending eschaton. Another decade, another looming ontological singularity, and whose palm are we to grasp? A glance down Courtenay Place offers the obvious answer: beckoning on the threshold, a towering Gandalf with more storeys […]

Middle of Middle Earth Market and Movies

There’s a hobbit-abrewing in this wee city of ours. Today we’ve got another guest post from HeatherC from Foodie Gems of Wellington all about the markets going on. Get in quick!  If you’re a LOTR fan, you could do worse than get yourself down to Waitangi Park for 6pm each of the next three nights […]

Christmas Shopping – Part 1

For many Christmas is about the newest shiniest toys and things that break within 10 minutes of the box being opened, a season of malls, bad music and chain stores. But those people are not us, oh no, for we know that Wellington is an abundance of boutique shops and delightful markets. So with the […]

Give pottery for Xmas gifts, gain a mother’s love

You know what’s a nice thing to do? Buying pottery to give to people as gifts. You know what else is a nice thing to do? Pimping your mother out. Awww yeah. It just so happens that my mother is a potter, and she’s having her annual pre-Christmas open house at her studio/gallery this weekend […]

Some food-related things that are good right now

We went to Charlotte, the new steakhouse at 201 Cuba Street that is in the house with the checkered past. The service was very friendly, and the steaks were cooked beautifully. They are busy because they had a stupidly cheap Groupon deal, but it is worth making a reservation for, if you are of a […]

Review: The mousetrap

Agatha Christie’s The mousetrap is now in its sixtieth year of continuous production. It opened in 1952 (1952!) and is quite possibly more famous for being famous now, rather than the quality of the work. As part of the celebrations of the show’s longevity, 60 professional productions have been licensed around the world. The Australian […]

Gabrielle McKone at Photospace

And in more photography news, anyone who’s a fan of Wellington photographer Gabrielle McKone’s daily photoblog can see 850 of them, on the wall in an exhibition at Photospace, 37 Courtenay Place. Over the last five years Gabrielle has posted 1900 images, one a day, mostly out and about in Wellington. The exhibition opened last Friday […]

A benefit auction for Phil Jacobs

A few years ago my son’s point-&-shoot needed a simple repair. I realised I had no idea where to go to get cameras fixed. Were there even camera-repairers any more? When they break, don’t you just buy another camera? A friend said “Oh, there’s that guy on Jackson Street – he fixes everything”. “That guy” […]