WOP: let’s hear it for the Floyd

I have clearly timed career moves badly, because in the hungry wait for Wel­ling­ton on a Plate I was unem­ployed and spent large parts of the day dream­ing about where and what I would eat, but now it’s on, I have a tem­por­ary job and it’s not in the CBD. Dis­aster! How­ever, it turned out […]

WOP: Give me shelter

So, Wel­ling­ton on a Plate – it’s quite good, yeah? While Joanna is a (deli­ciously) seasoned pro, this is my first year sampling the culin­ary delights of the fest­iv­al of nomz. So I figured I should share my find­ings. Here are my first two exper­i­ences – Mar­tin Bos­ley’s and Fox­glove.

WOP: Eating the other cheek

Miss Hungry & Frozen said the oth­er day “I think cheeks are the new shanks”. Read­ing vari­ous Dine menus for Wel­ling­ton on Plate, they are indeed every­where. You won’t hear a com­plaint about that from me. Instead, you get to read about how I had beef cheeks for lunch and then din­ner on Thursday. Atlanta […]

WOP: A deluge of dreadfulness at Monsoon Poon

Our mouths have been work­ing over­time this week, with all the Wel­ling­ton on a Plate action going around. Of course Tues­day had the abor­ted attempt at Lager­field and then eat­ing off the reg­u­lar menu at Fra­telli. Tonight we’ve got reviews of Mon­soon Poon, Atlanta and Bettys for you, which to sum up were DREADFUL, decent […]

Some Italian jobs

1. The Medi­ter­ranean Ware­house in New­town has under­gone some renov­a­tions tak­ing out the wall sep­ar­at­ing the pizzer­ia from the ware­house, so now there’s an exten­ded deli counter and you dine among the shelves. The price of an indi­vidu­al pizza may have gradu­ally increased $4 over the past couple’o years but now you can get a bowl of […]

Wellington on a delicious plate

It has been a couple of weeks now since the launch of the Visa Wel­ling­ton on a Plate pro­gramme, and we have been very remiss in not telling you about it. Your cred­it card, how­ever, will thank us, as many of the events are now sold out. The launch was held in Mojo’s roast­ing premises […]

TAWA5 Best Event

There’s always some­thing to do in this town we love, but these are the pick of the crop, and are circled in red on our cal­en­dars. We’re count­ing the sleeps until next year’s events!

WOP Review: the $35 lunch at Foxglove

 Some­time last week I took my sis­ter to lunch at Fox­glove. We both star­ted with the car­a­mel­ised onion soup in a cob bowl with gruy­ere cheese and white truffle, which was less liquid than we expec­ted, but it was deli­cious. Just look at it:

It was pretty filling just by itself, so I was anti­cip­at­ing a small por­tion for my main. Instead, I got two glor­i­ous bits of beer battered mar­ket fish with green pea gribiche (which is pretty much just tar­tar sauce) AND then they brought out fries and salad to go with it. Yum!

My sis­ter, mean­while, had con­fit chick­en leg with cray­fish ravi­oli and mush­room cream.

What I tried of it was tasty, with a sur­prise cit­rus zing. Our Magrain Sav was deli­cious as well, full size por­tions served in full size glasses (take note, Finc!). Ser­vice was great, until we tried to pay, and were left flounder­ing for about ten minutes while we were also wait­ing for our cof­fees to go, because lunch had taken about an hour and twenty minutes. Oth­ers have com­plained that the ferns by the door are smelly, but we were on the oth­er side of the res­taur­ant so we did­n’t notice.  Based on the qual­ity of the food, and the gen­er­ous servings of it, I would def­in­itely return to Fox­glove, as long as I had plenty of time to spare. 

WOP: Cupcakes and Cocktails

 On Monday night my sis­ter and I went to our first Wel­ling­ton on a Plate event – the way sold-out (they added a couple more ses­sions even) Cup­cakes and Cock­tails at Martha’s Pantry. Giv­en that neither of us is a slouch in the kit­chen or bar, we wer­en’t sure how much we’d actu­ally learn from the event, but since cup­cakes and cock­tails are two of our favour­ite things, we thought we’d give it a go. And when we walked in the door and saw that the McK­en­zie broth­ers were doing the mix­ing, we knew we were in safe hands. 

I fig­ure I’ll do this post basic­ally just a series of cup­cake porn pho­tos. You don’t mind, do you? Good. 

This was what was wait­ing for each of us at the tables – sand­wiches to nibble on, cup­cakes, icing and the cup­cake recipe. We were also giv­en Winter Pimms Punch to drink.

piping

We had a couple of demon­stra­tions about dif­fer­ent ways to pipe, and were let loose on our own cock­tails. 

piping

You can see here that we had vary­ing tech­niques and levels of suc­cess with that. 

Then, before too much icing could acci­dently end up in our mouths, Justin McK­en­zie, wear­ing one blue glove that was kind of creepy let us in on the magic for­mula for cock­tails: two parts strong, one part sweet, one part sour. It’s so simple, I wasted all that money in Hooch and Hawthorne and Cuckoo for noth­ing!

cocktail ingredients

WOP Review: the $25 lunch at Finc

pork belly For my first Wel­ling­ton on a Plate meal deal, I decided to go to Finc, with the delight­ful com­pany of a friend I’d just seen killed twice on Sat­urday night. People have dif­fer­ing opin­ions about Finc, but for myself, I’ve always found it great in the even­ings and very aver­age at lunch­times. For pork belly, I would take the plunge.