Standing under the soaring wooden arches of Old St Paul’s in the centre of the capital with a glass of Garage Project Sauvin Nouveau beer feels slightly sacrilegious, but this piece of 19th-century Gothic Revival architecture and the programme for New Zealand’s largest food festival definitely have something in common, they both look incredible.
The 2015 programme is extensive and festival director Sarah Meikele told the collection of restaurateurs, brewers, wine makers, growers, artisan producers and media at Old St Paul’s her vision to turn the festival from New Zealand’s biggest foodie festival, to Australasia’s.
There are over 130 festival events and Taste got a sampler of a few of them over a weekend of concerted eating, but for the full list visit their website.
Event highlights include Burger Wellington, where 80 eateries compete with their best creation between two bits of bread, vegan chickpea bun, or lettuce leaf. Entries promise to run the gamut from mind blowing to palate puzzling, and many will be matched with a beer from local craft wizzes Garage Project.
There’s Capital Cocktail, a creative cocktail matched to tapas, not to mention Beervana, which is now running in concert with WOP, so the hop heads will be puckering up all over the city during the two weeks of August 13-30.
Taste popped along to iconic Wellington restaurant Hummingbird to taste their WOP offering after the launch party. A smattering of local and international media arrived in the downstairs private dining room at Hummingbird – it seats 18 and has its own kitchen attached, so we could watch head chef Helen Turnbull in action.
The great thing about Wellington on a Plate (or any self-respecting food festival to be fair) is that it is a showcase of fantastic local food producers – not just the restaurants, cafés and food trucks that transform the raw ingredients. Helen has chosen to focus on two main local producers for her WOP menu, Libertine Blends teas and Love Honey.
The three-course menu has two options and we sampled slightly reduced versions of the whole menu (or we attempted to). The first starter of crispy kale, shaved pecorino, roasted hazelnuts, prosciutto, Love Honey honeycomb and fresh pear salad was lifted by the honeycomb and a balance of textures. I love a good broth, and the second starter of Cloudy Bay clam and mussel broth with wasabi pearls, contained little chucks of delicate and sweet clam meat with little hits of heat from the tiny green pearls.
My pick of the mains was the Yellow Brick Road Moroccan spiced hapuku with Libertine Blends Mint tea purée, fried chickpeas and lemon. That may have been because by the time the braised beef cheek with beetroot, smoked mash potato, black garlic and Love Honey jus arrived, I was too full to eat it.
The hapuku was perfectly cooked with subtle spicing and nice citrus hints. The huge piece of tender beef cheek that followed, resting on a subtly smoked mash with a rich, umami jus was popular around the table, but most of us were reduced to sampling a few mouthfuls before admitting defeat.
Coming from a family fairly obsessed with lemon tarts, the lemon meringue and Libertine Blends Kapow tea tart was a treat; just the right balance of sweet, tangy filling and golden shortcrust Kapow Tea pastry. It easily eclipsed the rhubarb Libetine Blends Runaway Rose tea and pistachio jelly tip ice cream for me. It’s the safer option, but there is a certain filial requirement to find and report back on lemon tarts wherever they may lurk.
I do usually prefer something a bit unusual when touring food destinations, and Jacob Brown was happy to oblige at the Larder in Miramar.
I’d already sorted out my lunch of lambs’ kidneys with Dijon mustard, wild bacon, cress and radish and liver with a side of lambs brain croquette, from the regular menu – that’s not too outré as Jacob has a reputation for his skills with offal.
But his WOP events promise a little bit more of the unusual; he’s doing an Aussie Rules menu using meats like kangaroo, crocodile and emu, “with a bit of Vegemite in there somewhere”. There’s a fin-to-tail offering called Red Herring – which is using fish offal, and Grubs Up, a menu involving insects.
Insects are popular in most indigenous cuisines of the world, probably excepting Western cultures – with the obvious exception of snails. However, you only need to walk through the markets of Kowloon in Hong Kong to see insects piled up in various states of creepy crawliness to see their ubiquity.
I’ve had snails a few times and probably unwittingly eaten the odd ladybird and caterpillar in a salad, but when Jacob whips up a quick amuse bouche of crickets for me to sample it looks a bit intimidating. Jacob tells me it’s just a matter of Western perceptions and suggests we’ll all soon be chowing down on bugs, the same way we took to sushi.
And apart from the sight of the little fried crickets perched on the top of the plate of kale chips, minted yoghurt and cumin there is nothing intimidating about the flavour.
It’s extremely subtle, perhaps with a slight mustiness, and an aroma redolent, of, well, bugs. It’s the readily available source of protein and lack of environmental impact that makes insects such an appealing food source. Asian food styles infiltrate New Zealand fairly readily so this is a good chance to see what you can do with them.
Te Aro craft stars Garage Project have got some molecular mixology going on for their WOP event.
They’re planning a diner themed pop-up at central city café PreFab with the star of the show their two-tap flat white. Garage Project owner Jos had just returned from pouring the beer at the Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Fest, which he calls the ‘Coachella of craft beer’. The beer was extremely well received and was one of the top 10 beers of the festival as rated by influential craft brewing magazine Paste.
Their version of the café staple involves two separate beers: the bottom layer is a double espresso stout, and it is topped with a nitrogenated cream ale that is poured like a flat white, from a stainless steel milk jug.
They’ll also be showcasing other sweeter styles of beer with their diner concept, like their Cereal Milk Stout, which is full of “bottom of the bowl goodness” with lots of cornflakes and maize in the mash, and brewed with milk sugars to make a sweet stout. There’s Ziggy’s Carrot Cake, carrot cake ale, with carrot, nutmeg and crystallised ginger served over nitrogen to give it a super creamy head – they spray the glass with and orange syrup to give it a spritz of citrus too.
They’ll also be pouring the popular Cookies and Cream Ale, brewed with Belgian yeast, dark caramelised malts and milk sugars, and teamed with a beer cookie made by Moustache Milk & Cookie Bar beer cookie made with dark stout, dark Whittaker’s chocolate and premium Dutch cocoa topped with toasted beer marshmallow meringue.
For more sweet treats there’ll be Dough Momma’s American-themed pies as well as Wooden Spoon boutique freezer. Wooden spoon will have their cherry bomb ice cream – dark chocolate mixed with kirch-soaked cherries and roasted, salted almonds – which is made in collaboration with Garage Project and their Cherry Bomb imperial porter.
Garage Project are also getting a chef in to do a savoury range of food – just for a bit of variation before diners launch into the sweet stuff.
Taking a walk down to the Wellington waterfront I meet local gelato maker Graham Joe of Gelissimo Gelato & Sorbetto, who supplies the ‘sweet stuff’ to numerous restaurants and cafés around Wellington.
He’s not doing anything for Wellington on a Plate – so far. For Graham, it’s a matter of waiting until local chefs give him a call to request a bespoke gelato flavour to go on one of their WOP dishes.
Restaurants needed to submit their recipes ideas in February, but it takes some of the chefs to the last minute to remember they’ve included an ice cream component that Graham will be supplying – he just doesn’t know it yet.
Graham has made all manner of wacky flavours for Wellington chefs, things like fish liver or wakame gelato, or his favourite oddity: green coriander and mushroom confit gelato, which he made for One80° Restaurant executive chef Chetan Pangam – the chef, Graham says, who always comes up with the most unusual gelato requests.
Graham is just waiting for the fun to start as the August festival approaches. And that sentiment goes for most of Wellington – and Auckland too – if the festival sponsors have their way.
Taste popped along to their sensory experience down on the Auckland Waterfront last week, where Visa has built a state-of-the-art space cube installation. It’s a virtual reality appetizer that engages all the senses – it’s a very clever piece of marketing and it might just motivate a few extra Auckland foodies to make the trip down to the capital.
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