Featured posts.
You can just picture little Samrudh “Sammy” Akuthota running around his parents’ restaurant as a nine-year-old boy – garnishing his mum’s curries at the pass, helping prep entrees after school and delivering dishes to the diners with his signature pearly grin Full article “Thirsty work”
The food movement has a tendency to deify heirloom seeds, and for good reason — they store incalculable genetic value and maintain diversity in a food system which has been engineered towards monoculture farmed with industrial chemicals. Full article “Frontiers of flavour”
Barbecue is a serious pastime in Texas. In Austin, folks line up outside the doors to Franklin Barbecue at six in the morning so they are first in when it opens at 11. Full article “The Truth”
Matt Lamason didn’t realise when he started Peoples Coffee in Wellington 14 years ago that one day it would provide a platform from which he could do some utopian walking. But lessons from his adventures in pursuit of the perfect bean reinforced the principles he had been inspired by in his studies, and inspired him to aim for the horizon. And now, as they say, he’s ‘making a path by walking’, Full article “The Good Oil”
Finding good staff is no mean feat for restaurants in New Zealand. With much of our hospitality talent seeking experience abroad, we have a vacuum of local talent, which is eagerly filled by visitors from abroad. Full article “Immigration”
We like crowdsourcing information as well as funding at Stone Soup. And we like celebrating exceptional food as well as hidden gems. So we asked some questions of possibly the best source of information about where to eat, our country’s most celebrated chefs and restaurateurs. Full article “Where Restaurants Eat”
By Sarah Smuts-Kennedy
I have to confess I am already a fully signed-up cow-shit lover. Full article “Not just a load of crap”
I recently interviewed an inspiring group of food thinkers – chefs, critics, farmers and eaters* – and asked them whether we could define New Zealand’s food culture, whether we had a distinct cuisine and whether it mattered. Full article “Home, land and sea.”
7:10am, Haneda Airport. Outside is a thick vichyssoise grey fog that bleeds seamlessly into the sea.
We take off into the soupy air, shadows of freighters and fishing boats hanging in the murk below. Full article “Kumamoto”
Avondale, originally called Te Whau, is famous among food lovers for its Sunday market, and in fact was the site of early Auckland’s market gardens. I recently visited Avondale old boy Tom Scott of Homebrew, @Peace and Average Rap Band fame. Tom’s music is full of cultural and social observation, Full article “Flat whites and white flats.”
Every Monday night in Auckland’s St. Kevins Arcade a small crowd gathers at the top of the stairs as the clock inches closer to 6pm. Most people seem to know each other one way or another – from the government housing on Grey’s Ave, from sleeping on the streets, or from the surrounding offices, restaurants and shops – but they are all here for the same reason, to have some dinner. Full article “Feeding bellies, not bins.”
So, dear Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Full article “Raj Patel – Letter to a Young Farmer”
by Nick Loosley
Ben Bostock is curious and infectiously energetic, he can’t sit still and paces as he talks on his phone which rings constantly. He is humble and totally transparent when explaining his work. This is refreshing in an industry that is notorious for keeping secrets, farm gates firmly closed to the media. His knack for keeping things simple and focusing on the crucial elements of his operation have seen Bostock’s Organic Free Range Chicken expand quickly. Ben makes a great farmer. Full article “Organics: Radical? Or just good business?”
“Shouldn’t every community be fed as much as possible, locally, by the people that live in that community?”
Interview and photography: Aaron McLean Full article “Community Unity”
What the city’s ex-refugees can teach us about the current migrant crisis
by Eve Watling
Photography: Aaron McLean
Full article “Celebrating the New Year with Auckland’s Cambodian community”
“..the penny dropped for me that food is seen as this really benign and irrelevant thing, but it’s actually everything. And it pertains to every aspect of life on this planet. The environment, politics, trade and economics, health and wellbeing, preservation of culture; food is pretty much the single most important issue.” Full article “Askew One”