Eating My Words: Ewan McDonald
GRAHAM is a big man. Big enough to have been a onetime Auckland rugby rep (I think it was onetime, when a couple of bigger-name players were injured, but he may have been asked to play twice), with a big voice (Gilbert & Sullivan arias are his forte, after a couple of reds), and a very big man in his chosen career, banking.
And a man of small pleasures. One small pleasure comes his way on Friday nights, when he drives to a tried, tested and trusted purveyor and buys fish’n'chips for the family. Takes them home and spreads out the paper for everyone to dig in.
He is particular – very particular, to be precise – about where he buys them. The choice of fish, the batter, the cooking, the cut of the chip, must be just right. His current haunt is somewhere in Onehunga; I can’t tell you any closer than that, because he took me there, but I was blindfolded and had to swear an oath that involved hopping on one leg and promising to do things with a goat if I gave away the secret.

TIME WAS when every Kiwi family did the same as Graham. That would be when I was in short pants and knobbly knees (it was Wellington College uniform), delivered the Evening Post after school, and went with my little brother to pick up the family’s Friday feed from Bay Road Fisheries in Kilbirnie. All those are memories now (apart from the knees, which may still be around somewhere).
Tony Simpson, who has done more than anyone to chronicle New Zealand’s gastronomic – okay, culinary – history, believes our first fish’n'chip shop opened long before World War I, and points out that until 1965 Roman Catholics – about 15% of the Kiwi population – were prohibited from eating meat on Fridays.
North Islanders preferred snapper until catches declined in the 70s; hoki, shark (the species formerly known as lemonfish) and tarakihi took over. Mainlanders ate gurnard and blue cod. Whatever: fish’n'chips were always eaten with slices of white bread – there was no other kind – and butter. Never margarine. Because there wasn’t any: until the 70s you needed a medical prescription to buy marg. True.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING. Nowhere was this better displayed than in the Friday night fish’n'chip ritual. This was not the joyless rote of burger or chicken drive-through, order, swipe card, pick up at the next window.
Mum would phone Bay Road Fisheries with the order. Stephen and Ewan would be dispatched to collect it, a 10-minute walk across the Catholic girls’ high school tennis courts, through someone’s backyard, cross the road WHEN THE BUZZER GOES, then down Bay Rd to the fish shop. If we were lucky, there were only two or three orders ahead of ours on the peg. If we were not … they had old Reader’s Digests.
When we got the newspaper parcel – the very same newspaper I’d spent the soaking afternoon delivering from the sacks across the crossbar of my Raleigh pushbike – we had to tear a hole in the top, let the steam out, and slather over the aroma all the way back up Bay Rd, over the road at the crossing by Mrs Norman’s bookshop, through the backyard, across the tennis courts, and home. Woe betide Stephen and Ewan if we sneaked a chip. We had two big brothers. They counted, in more ways than one.
And then – all too sadly overlooked in the hubbub of modern life – Mum and Phyllis had perfected the art of preparing the dinner table before Dad drove the Morris Oxford into the carport at 5.30. That bread and butter, salt and pepper shakers waiting. The parcel, now torn open, placed in the centre of the table to show that when Mum asked for two pieces of fish she got three, six she got seven.
More chips than Mum, Dad, four boys and a sister could eat. And a family argument between those who insisted on drowning the newspaper in tomato sauce and the others who doused the dish, more delicately, with vinegar. I was on the vinegar side of the table until aioli came along, but that’s another story. Or maybe another part of this one.
However you sliced it – and the chips, not fries, they’d come later with other, faster food, were always thick and straight-cut – it was an economical meal. And one where the whole family had to sit, together, and eat, and meet, around the dinner table.

FISH’N'CHIPS was always so. So far as anyone can tell, the idea originated in the United Kingdom in 1858 or 1863, as a cheap food for the working classes when trawlers first plundered the North Sea. We know the result now, but then it was one of those happy accidents that have marked great moments in cuisine.
Like that time when some hunter-gatherer in Central Europe – why has history not recorded his name? – looked at the big, hoofed animal on the plain across the river and thought, “Wow! If I can trap and kill that giant beast, I can cut him into pieces and put his flesh on the fire for a few hours and call it … barbecue!” And his mate thought, “Gee! I should wash the dirt off this funny round root and put it in the embers beside the beast and call it … jacket potato!”
There has been quite a lot of argument about what exactly the Belgians have contributed to history, but no one can take away the fact that they invented French fries. They have sauteed potatoes carved into the shape of fish since 1680, at least.
We’re not sure when the fad crossed the Channel but Charles Dickens, one of the most reliable chroniclers of 19th Century English life – he was the editor of several women’s magazines, so we can trust every word he wrote – mentions a fried fish warehouse in Oliver Twist, published in 1838. Further north they took to fried spuds.
A marriage was made in heaven, or somewhere around Manchester, a little less than 200 years later. One story that anyone who has a skerrick of romance in their bones would wish were true goes like this: fried-potato shops spread south from Scotland until they met up with fried-fish shops spreading north from London.
It’s highly possible because the Scots would have got bored with fried potatoes and no-one had yet experimented with the culinary possibilities of the Mars Bar. Think: Billy Connolly, bored, Friday night. “Och, nae bluidy taties agin. Ah’m gittin’ on ma Harley an’ gettin’ a wee summat tae tart it oop wi’ …”
Joseph Malin opened the first recorded fish’n'chip shop in London in 1860 or 1865; a Mr Lees pioneered the concept in Manchester in 1863.

PERHAPS: there are several perhaps. It might have been the beef dripping or lard used in traditional frying, even if it has long gone, replaced by vegetable oils, such as peanut oil, which has a relatively high smoke-point.
Or the batter. Chippies traditionally used a water and flour batter, adding a little baking soda and vinegar to lighten and create bubbles, or beer, or milk.
It could have been the newspaper. In Commonwealth countries fish’n'chip shops wrapped the meal in greaseproof paper for hygiene, covered by newspaper to keep the heat in and absorb grease (and to keep small boys’ hands warm on a Wellington night). Some official busybody said the newspaper ink was poisonous and would kill us; newspaper wrapping was outlawed.
Maybe it was the arrival of flashier, better advertised, sexier, happier meals like Big Macs and KFC. Or even just the cost of fish.
Whatever. In 2005 curries and sushi edged ahead of fish’n'chips as New Zealanders’ favourite takeaway. A NZ Herald-DigiPoll survey reported that 31.6 per cent picked Asian food as their most common choice of takeaway; 28.7 per cent ordered fish’n'chips. Pizza tempted 10.9 per cent, hamburgers 8.9 per cent and KFC 5.8 per cent.
So Kiwi fish’n'chip shops have changed to serve a new market, one that spends $21 of every $100 of its food budget on eating-out or takeaways. They offer panko-crumbed squid and blackened snapper. If not changed, evolved to catch a new generation: in the seaside town of Whangamata at New Year, chippie owner Merv Jackison told the NZ Herald his staff was working 14-hour days to fill orders. Folk were happy to wait up to 90 minutes for their shark’n'taties.

SO WHAT about the little kid who used to run down the hill to Bay Road Fisheries on Friday nights? He has a theory about fish’n'chips that has grown stronger with the decades, and now that the ultimate fish cook, Rick Stein, is coming to New Zealand with his stage show, I feel the need to share it. It’s this:
I always want fish’n'chips. See the sign above a chippie, pick up the faintest sniff of frying while the scooter’s waiting at the lights, and I’m gone.
It’s the childish thrill. The naughtiness. The “I know it’s bad for me but I’ll take the dogs for a really long walk tomorrow and work it off, honestly” promise that I have not very much intention of keeping.
I cajole Jude into meeting me at Mt Eden / Maungawhau with a parcel of beer-battered snapper and chunky chips. The cheap, working-class meal runs out around $25 these days, several tads more than my mother paid – and yes, I am tempted by the Moet-battered snapper and chips, $38.50 a head (or fillet) from our local chippy. The Domain is just around the corner … These days Hush Puppy, the 18-year-old whippet, and Bianca, the Maltese, sniff around the fries that were once too much for a Mum, Dad, four brothers and a sister.
Rick and Chalkie, were he still around, would understand the need for us and the dogs to pig out once a year, to keep alive those memories of the Ultimate Kiwi Dish. And chips.

• Rick Stein’s Food Odyssey, ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland, 4-5 August; St James Theatre, Wellington, 7-8 August. Tickets: 0800 BUY TICKETS or (09) 357 3355. Details: www.lunchbox-productions.com

Politically and Gastronomically Correct Fish’n'Chips

Fish’n'chips? The package, the picnic, the plonk … that’s a kind of magic that can’t be truly replicated at home. However, Jude ran a fish’n’chippery in an Auckland seaside summer one long hot summer and this is her 2010 dinnertime take on the Ultimate Kiwi Meal:

Pan Fried Fish
1-2 skinned and boned fillets of some sustainable catch per person. Wash and dry with a paper towel. Roll the fish in flour seasoned with salt and pepper or with dried herbs. Melt butter in a frypan. When starting to sizzle add the fish and cook for 3-4 minutes each side.
Rosti Potatoes
Peel 1 large potato – organic, natch – per person. Boil in salted water for about 5 minutes. Drain and cool, then grate on the coarse side of a grater. Heat some butter or oil in a frypan to hot but not smoking, season potatoes and knead them into loose fritters (no more than 1.5 cm / half-inch thick). Press them into the pan, cook for 5 minutes until golden brown, flip and cook the other side.
Braised Leeks …
Pour a small amount of chicken or vegetable stock into a frypan, add some rinsed and sliced leeks, cover and gently cook for 10-15 minutes. They can be dusted with fennel or mustard seeds.
… with Easy Hollandaise
2 egg yolks (free range, of course)
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup very cold butter
Stir egg yolks and lemon juice with a wooden spoon in a small heavy saucepan. Keep heat low and stir briskly all the time. Add half the butter and stir until it has melted. Then add remaining butter, stir again until it has melted and the sauce has thickened. Serve at once.

Eating My Words – Ewan McDonald

GENTLE READER, you may feel I’m being harsh here. After all, you may say, it’s a seaside town on a Saturday night in midwinter. Give’em a break.

But hear me out. This is a town where many well-heeled (and well-groomed, and well-dressed, and even better motored and boated) Aucklanders own holiday homes. They spend a good many weekends here. It is also a place promoted to overseas visitors.

Frankly, I’m over this very Kiwi approach to service. In fact, this place took the Kiwi approach to its ultimate: it was largely DIY. The person who’s not to blame is the waitress. Our hearts went out to her even before she dropped a tray of glasses and crockery on the flagstone floor.

It’s the management that couldn’t give a fig (assuming they knew what one looked like in its natural state, or where to source it, or what to do with it) about the food, the cooking, or their patrons’ experience.

Keeping the customer dissatisfied is all too common in our “service” industries. There’s an island not far off Auckland that specialises in it. To think that we’re worried about whether we’ll have enough Parties Central, or hotel beds, or buses, for the Rugby World Cup visitors. We should be worried about what, and where, they’ll eat. That goes in spades for all the other tourists who save for months to get to this side of the world. And the backbone of our
eating-out business: the locals.

AS WE PAID and left, I did some mental arithmetic. “We won’t be coming back tomorrow night,” I told the others. “Go figure,” said Eamonn.

“Already have,” I said. “It’d be $170. It’s a public holiday and they’d add 15 per cent for the service.”

“There’d have to be some first,” said Jude.

The holiday surcharge crept in when the Clark Government amended the Holidays Act in 2003. Staff had to be paid time and a half and were entitled a further day’s holiday for working on a public holiday.

Mostly as a political protest, to a lesser extent as a way to pay the wages, many in the hospitality industry started to charge a 10 or 15 per cent public holiday surcharge on top of menu prices.

The chicken – or anything else on the menu – has come home to roost. TV3 reports “a new poll” (no, they didn’t say, and I can’t find the source anywhere) shows 70 percent of New Zealanders will avoid places with a holiday surcharge.

TV3’s anonymous survey indicates:

• 40 per cent of New Zealanders still go out to eat on public holidays, but avoid places with surcharges.

• 33 per cent say a surcharge deters them from going out altogether.

• 27 per cent say surcharges have no impact on what they do.

In response Mike Egan, the Restaurant Association president who runs The Arbitrageur and Osteria del Toro in Wellington and the Monsoons Poon in Wellington and Auckland, wrung out the 10-year old dishcloth that, while some cafes in busy areas can afford to open without a surcharge, others have no choice but to charge extra – or close.

Egan told TV he believes customers don’t mind paying extra as long as they get a quality experience. “I don’t think it’s the most important thing at all. New Zealanders are widely travelled and they understand restaurants work on tiny margins and anything that upsets those has a huge detrimental effect.”

Sorry, Mike. That poll, and any number of consumer forums on dining and travelling websites, and letters to the editors, indicates your punters do mind. Nor do they buy the story that it’s common practice overseas – because it ain’t.

For far too many years, I’ve worked in an industry that couldn’t survive, or meet its clients’ and the public’s expectations, without vast numbers of folk from different trades and professions working on public holidays.

You expect a daily newspaper to come out on the day after Labour Day, or Queen’s Birthday, or Anzac Day, with photos of people at the beach on Labour Day or at war memorial parades on Anzac Day.

That means journalists, photographers, editors, production staff, press crews, delivery truck-drivers and runners have to work on public holidays.

You don’t pay an extra 50c for your paper. The advertisers don’t get charged an extra 10 per cent for their space. It’s part of the annual, expected, budgeted cost of running a business.

Same goes for … oh, just about any enterprise that opens on a public holiday.

Why should cafes and restaurants be any different? Particularly when there are more people out and about with discretionary time on their hands?

If they’re still whinging about the Holidays Act, the restaurateurs and café proprietors need to move on. If they’re not, they’re gouging us. My protest against their protest is not to go into any eatery or drinkery that imposes a surcharge – and I’m clearly not alone.

Eating My Words: Ewan McDonald

THE restaurant-café-bar had been empty but for three or four blokes playing pool and one barmaid (are we still allowed to call her that?) polishing her nails rather than the boss’s glasses when we dropped in a couple of hours earlier to see if we needed to book for dinner.

You know the time and place: seaside, north of Auckland or any other city, baches, holiday weekend, not too many places open, best not to take the chance. “You don’t really need to book,” said the barwoman, “but I’ll pencil in your name anyway. Seven o’clock?”

This being New Zealand on a holiday weekend, it was raining cats and dogs and blowing something far more zoological by 7. John le Carre’s world-weary spy George Smiley reckons there is nothing so depressing as a seaside town in the rain; I have often tried to beat Smiley, or le Carre, to the outcome of a story but this time I was quite happy to give him the last word.

The carpark was now full and we had to walk all of 20 seconds to the door. Inside, we realised why: the bar was throbbing. Not that it was the only place in town, nor the only one open, but they had a touring band playing at 9. We slithered out and across the hall to the restaurant half of the café-bar-restaurant trilogy. It wasn’t throbbing: one of we four, Eamonn*, is a doctor but he was off-duty so I didn’t think I should ask if he could detect a pulse.

Two families filled 12-seater tables. A couple left as we arrived but I’m sure it was nothing personal. In the corner sat a man alone. Very Mulgan.

The menus and wine list were on the table which saved the lone 16-year-old waitress one task.

Being by the water – well, the tide was lapping just past the petrol station and across the mangroves – there was much seafood. It came in chowder and fritters and beer batter and pan-fried.

The other three were determined: I thought about steak, making the point that the seafood had probably also come up State Highway One, possibly a day or three earlier than us. “Fish of the Day” could mean they’d cooked the box of hapuka on Thursday and the John Dory on Friday. On most New Zealand menus, “fish of the day” is right up there with “Chef’s Salad, freshly picked from our garden” as a breach of the Trade Description Act.

But there was plenty of choice: you could order fish or steak with fries and salad or mash and veges.

Sandy* went to the counter and brought us four glasses of water. The waitress found our table and took our order. Pretty straightforward though someone wanted kumara chips instead of mash but with the veges and not the salad, that sort of thing.

Five minutes later the waitress came back for the drinks order. Ten minutes later Sandy decided she’d watched the wine, and glasses, sitting on the counter long enough and went up to collect them. Just as the waitress emerged from the bar with Eamonn’s beer. Well, almost: he’d asked for Mac’s Black, they’d run out and substituted Monteith’s Black. Already opened, figuring he was a Kiwi and wouldn’t complain. Eamonn is not a Kiwi.

Sometime during the 30-minute wait for our meals Jude stoked the fire (and I mean that in a strictly Promethean way) because there’s nothing worse than being cold and hungry and if we couldn’t do much about one we could relieve the other.

Sandy noticed that Mum, Dad and four kids at a table across the room had meals in front of them but weren’t eating, figured they were missing a set of cutlery, so took one to them from an empty table. “Oh no,” said Mum, “we’re still waiting for one meal.” The last supper arrived in the bat of an eye, assuming that it takes a bat about 10 minutes to blink.

It was now time, or well past time for our meals: I was not disappointed in the gurnard, because I’d expected to be. Nor in the white sauce with something that may once have been genetically related to parsley. Nor in the mash, apart from it not being kumara chips.

Jude and I realised why they hadn’t specified the cuisine style of the vegetables when they were served in little dishes atop the dinner plate. You’ve beaten me to it: the cauli and carrot and broccoli had been cut or peeled much earlier in the proceedings and microwaved, though possibly someone had punched “00:2″ instead of “2:00″. Never mind, I like ‘em barely cooked and crunchy.

Sandy probably won’t mind me revealing that she likes to chat over the dinner table and has a thing about waiters trying to take her plate away while she’s in full conversazione. She had no worries about that here.

We split the bill: four mains, one enjoyable bottle of pinot gris, duly enjoyed: $73.50 for each couple.

TO BE CONTINUED

* Names have been changed to protect their credit cards

Record numbers of foodies turned up to the The Food Show in Auckland this year, with a massive 41,548 people turning up to the event on 30 July – 2 Aug this year.
That’s 5,000 more visitors than a year ago.

Not even a glimpse of the ‘Recession’ there!

Dona White, the Founder & owner of The Food Show, is delighted with the show popularity, which has been running for a decade now. Dona says: “Our culinary confidence as a nation has increased enormously over the last decade, and The Food Show is proud to have been part of that exciting evolution.”

Well done Dona & the team at The Food Show – we LOVE what you do!

It’s apparently a case of ‘you get what you pay for’ when purchasing ‘cheap’ fish at some NZ fish & chip shops.Vietnamese catfish or ‘basa’ is an ultra-cheap species of fish farmed in the highly polluted Mekong Delta. Since March 20, MAF Biosecurity has approved imports of the cheap fish.

In June 2009, 15,000kg was imported by Shore Mariner, one of New Zealand’s largest seafood suppliers, and has been largely bought by fish & chip shops and producers of ready-made meals and crumbed fish.

Director of “Talley’s” Andrew Talley, campaigned against the imports, saying basa is farmed in the “most putrid and polluted waters anywhere in the world”.

“It’s harvested with slave labour, with no environmental regulations and no health and safety regulations, which enables them to produce a product at about a third of the cost of New Zealand product.”

He said Vietnamese catfish was sold as orange roughy, sole, tarakihi and also ling in various countries, which meant that people could be eating basa without knowing it.

NZ Herald reports that none of the fish and chip shop owners in Auckland they spoke to said they sold basa.

Basa-free zones includes John Dory’s in Herne Bay, who only use fresh john dory, tarakihi or snapper. Also Happy Takeaways in Westmere offer frozen hoki and higher priced snapper & tarakihi.

Source: NZ Herald.co.nz 5 July 09

Owen Sinclair, executive chef and owner of the Killer Prawn in Whangarei has won Regal Salmon Innovative Northland Chef of the Year.   Owen beat 9 fellow chefs to win at the 2008 Mataariki Industry Awards.

Owen says  “I feel honoured to be rewarded for all my efforts over the past 15 years.  It’s also great for the whole team to be recognised – I rely heavily on my staff to support me and drive the restaurant.”

Source: www.foodworks.co.nz 22 June 2009

Two of Wellington’s  nightspots were voted amongst the best bars in the world.   Motel on Forresters Lane (Tory St) and Matterhorn on Cuba St were voted 7th & 12th place respectively in the annual survey released by Australian Bartender magazine this week.

These two bars were the only New Zealand ones in the top 20 from the Asia-Pacific region.

Last year, Matterhorn won “Bar of the Year” for the third year running, at the 2008 NZ Bartender magazine bar awards.  Motel was the winner of “Cocktail Bar of the Year” at the same awards.

Source:  www.foodworks.co.nz (23 Jun 09)