Restaurant Critic #6 - The Foodstore - Auckland Viaduct

Occasionally I get the opportunity to be taken out to dinner, for work purposes.

Happened that this happened on Tuesday this week.  We'de been sitting in the SkySport bar Grill having some of their fine craft beers when it came time to eat. Now we could have had the burgers and fries but since it was only the two of us I suggested something else.

So The Foodstore it was.

Based at Auckland's Viaduct Harbour, is New Zealand's first unique live food entertainment experience. With the country's only true "open" and "interactive" kitchen you will get up close and personal with NZ's best chefs as they create their culinary magic

Indeed they have the kitchen based in the open in the restaurant for all to see, and there is even a camera training on one station so that you might catch a glimpse of you dinner being served on one of the TV screens dotted around.  Seems kind of odd to have a quality restaurant and TV's playing.

It was a quiet night out at the Viaduct, even though the weather has been fantastic and so sitting wasn't a problem and we sat outside under a heater.

Wait staff were attentive and there were a lot of them around.

Drinks. Well I'd been on beer, and I'd had enough so I had a cranberry juice that wasn't very pleasant, thin and watery. The Whiskey wasn't available either that my visitor wanted, so he opted for something generic.

Starters:

Them :  Goat's cheese ice cream and beetroot salad. Served raw with fennel and balsamic dressing.

Me: Crispy pig's head terrine, with shallot, sultana and caper dressing on a a celeriac puree

Theirs was visually stunning! Mine was nice, but not spectacular.

Mains:

Them: pumpkin gnocchi, with roast pumpkin puree, char-grilled peppers, goat's feta, red onion and chilli

Me: Fiordland crayfish linguine, with a saffron and cream sauce.

Theirs was very orange, and "not what I expected" but they ate it all. Mine was served in what I thought was a strange way, in like a dessert bowl, and the portion seemed small.  Seemed a little undercooked, but wasn't, really moorish and took me no time to polish it off.

Dessert:

I think I won this with : The Pineapple Lump. Dark Chocolate marquise with honeycomb and pineapple sorbet.

They had chocolate hazelnut cheesecake, with Frangelico ganache, sour cherry compote and creme fraiche.

Mine was visually stunning, the sorbet was astounding and this was the dish of the night for me

Their's was served in a glass, again something I thought might have been strange

We were there a couple of hours chatting about this and that, I finished the night fed and happy, not over full, and not wanting to stop of a maccas on the way home.

Would I go again? Yes I think I'll take MrsPdubyah there.

Should you go? Well of all the places on the Viaduct this is near the top of the list of places you should stop at, it's interesting there is a lot going on and they know their stuff.

 

The one with the Tooth Fairy.

I found the today when I was looking for something else.

It's a note from my daughter from many years ago to the Tooth Fairy about a tooth that had fallen out, but that she had been playing with, which had then become lost.

Yes it's in purple, yes that's a picture of the tooth that was lost. Note that this isn't to scale.

This folds in the middle and here is a 'front' page, it's like a miniature card.



There are some things you just can't buy.

(she slept with this under her pillow for the Tooth Fairy to find, she did get her gold coin).

Related articles

• Affidavit for the Tooth Fairy


• The Tooth Fairy Cometh

Foursquare, now there's a thing, I became the Mayor!

I was Foursquare Mayor of my house, the street I live in, the street I drive down to get into my street, the bit of the motorway I get stuck on in the morning, a few local businesses and one or two places I shopped at, and quite a few that I didn't. I was mayor of a couple of shopping malls.

I was at one point Mayor of the place I worked and of three of our competitor companies. I became mayor of a car park, and a playground. I was mayor of the 3 different versions of the hockey stadium.

I think I had 17 mayoralties all going for me at one point. Clearly I'd missed the point.

And you know what the useless thing about foursquare was? That someone could take my mayoralty from me, and being ever so slightly OCD that's not going to work out for me. Or them, because then it became a staking game where all I would do it redouble my efforts to become mayor again, and rob them of "Mayor of playground" title that I so covet!

Never mind that it has a business application, I'm sure that some companies have fantastic offers and incentives to check-in to their establishment, a loyalty card scheme, I was mayor of 17 places, all for my own ego.

And you can only be mayor or wannabe mayor. You can't be a councillor or assistant to the mayor, it's all or nothing. You can earn "badges" for various things, these are but trivia compared to be being Mayor.

They had a mayor only party at skycity one time. You could only get in if you were mayor of somewhere, how whacked is that? Do they still have that every month? Don't know never went, never was going to, and couldn't understand why I would.

So I stopped using it, since it appears to be a solution that has no problem, a pissing competition for the OCD, and a terribly gauche way of showing off your coffee habit.

I read the news today. Oh Boy!

There were/are 3 things that prickled me this morning on the news, which in no particular order are

1. Roman Polanski. - Moral indignation from the elitist bleating about cultural significance of his works and how he should be granted clemency. I say "What about all the good things Hitler did?" It's not good enough to claim it's 30 years - it could be 300 years, 3 years, 3 days it would not make a difference, plying a teen with alcohol and drugs to have sex with them isn't legal, wasn't then, isn't now. IF Mr. P had any backbone he would have stayed to clear his good name. He Didn't.




2. Some Cellist is playing his thing in Auckland, and the advertising goes something like "acclaimed as a phenomenon by The Herald (a newspaper). Not, you note, acclaimed by Mr.Billy Perkins, Staff Writer, as a phenomenon, but hidden behind a facade that "The Herald" implies gravitas. The Herald speaks we listen!




3. Ministerial allowances. So an MP has been dobbed in for claiming an allowance on a house he owns and lives in. The bureaucracy that condones this is not configured to catch people out, but to ensure that the allowances are meted out to the claimants. The bureaucracy is in place to serve the bureaucracy, no other reason. They don't check the validity of the claim, but only the receipts and mathematics are correct so they can process the claim. All care no responsibility.

As to claiming the allowance or perks, which employee for any company given a list of claimable things would not go out of their way to ensure they could claim everything, and which employee would be the advocate and loop-hole advisor to others to allow maximum claim under "the rules"

The only people going on about this are the indignant people who cry "public trough" at the drop of a hat - you know they typically are "I know my rights" type people.

Sure the allowance is a rort. It always has been. And this would be the top of a scary iceberg if we were really interested in looking in detail at everything that MP's could and probably do claim from a daily newspaper, magazine subscriptions, stamps and a lot of other things.

Just saying.

I read the news today. Oh Boy!

There were/are 3 things that prickled me this morning on the news, which in no particular order are

1. Roman Polanski. - Moral indignation from the elitist bleating about cultural significance of his works and how he should be granted clemency. I say "What about all the good things Hitler did?" It's not good enough to claim it's 30 years - it could be 300 years, 3 years, 3 days it would not make a difference, plying a teen with alcohol and drugs to have sex with them isn't legal, wasn't then, isn't now. IF Mr. P had any backbone he would have stayed to clear his good name. He Didn't.

2. Some Cellist is playing his thing in Auckland, and the advertising goes something like "acclaimed as a phenomenon by The Herald (a newspaper". Not, you note, acclaimed by Mr.Billy Perkins, Staff Writer, as a phenomenon, but hidden behind a facade that "The Herald" implies gravitas. The Herald speaks we listen!

3. Ministerial allowances. So an MP has been dobbed in for claiming an allowance on a house he owns and lives in. The bureaucracy that condones this is not configured to catch people out, but to ensure that the allowances are meted out to the claimants. The bureaucracy is in place to serve the bureaucracy, no other reason. They don't check the validity of the claim, but only the receipts and mathematics are correct so they can process the claim. All care no responsibility.

As to claiming the allowance or perks, which employee for any company given a list of claimable things would not go out of their way to ensure they could claim everything, and which employee would be the advocate and loop-hole advisor to others to allow maximum claim under "the rules"

The only people going on about this are the indignant people who cry "public trough" at the drop of a hat - you know they typically are "I know my rights" type people.

Sure the allowance is a rort. It always has been. And this would be the top of a scary iceberg if we were really interested in looking in detail at everything that MP's could and probably do claim from a daily newspaper, magazine subscriptions, stamps and a lot of other things.

Just saying.