Back from New Zealand

February 29
It’s been two weeks since my return from New Zealand. My cubicle is cluttered with bottles of Antipodes water (counterintuitively pronounced an-TIH-puh-dees), my cufflink collection enhanced by a new pair — one cufflink a silhouette of the North Island, the other of the South Island — my DVR set to record every episode of Flight of the Conchords, to which I was introduced by the audio-visual system that I enjoyed during my trans-Pacific flight, flying business class, thank you very much.
Look at the seating in business class. That thing actually unfolds into a bed at the press of a button. It’s magic. I could live in Air New Zealand business class.
But my trip to New Zealand really ended in Matakana, which from what I can gather was once a little country town and is now a food-oriented getaway for wealthy Aucklanders. There’s a farmer’s market and cute shops with books and knickknacks and art galleries and a high end “butchery” and an organic ice cream shop. You get the idea.
We met in the home of Cuisine magazine food editor Lauraine Jacobs, who if she isn’t the doyenne of the greater Auckland culinary scene certainly could be.
She hosted a casual luncheon for us, and for her house guests Janie and Gary Hibler — Janie’s a food writer based in the Portland, Ore., area, so Bill already knew her, which is an amusing coincidence — along with Kim Crawford, who makes wines of that name, and some other representatives of New Zealand products, including Wayne Startup from The Village Press, an olive oil company, and Karen Brux from Zespri, the big kiwifruit company. I’d met Karen through IFEC, which isn’t that coincidental or amusing, but indicative of how disconcertingly small the food world is.
Also at lunch was Simon Woolley, the founder of Antipodes Water Co.
Kevin had brought along some sausage that a friend in Queenstown had made. Lauraine didn’t like it, but I did.
Here’s Lauraine with a big bottle of Moa beer, which we drank along with Kim Crawford’s wine and Simon Woolley’s water. We also sampled Stonecutter Scotch Ale from Renaissance Brewing Co.
I mostly ate outside, at a picnic table under a gigantic umbrella, and somehow still managed to get sunburned. That Kiwi sun is murder, I tell you.
After lunch, Bill and I were pitched by Wayne, Karen and Simon about olive oil, kiwifruit and water (Kim Crawford left without pitching, apparently content to let the wines speak for themselves).
Did you know that Zespri sets prices for farmers based not on the size of the fruit but on its brix content? It seems like such an obvious way to help improve the quality of fruit, but I don't know that anyone else does it.
Here's what kiwifruit looks like on the vine.
We were supposed to spend the afternoon sailing, but the weather, once again, was inclement, so we repaired to our individual villas, where I updated my blog and took a nap in preparation for dinner, also at the home of the Jacobses.
Joining us, along with the Hiblers, was Sam Lewis, director of New Zealand Trade & Enterprise’s food and beverage taskforce, and an extremely interesting guy who spent a bunch of time overseas. I sat between him and Lauraine, and Sam and I had a great chat about life choices and values and stuff — at least I think we did; we drank a lot of New Zealand wine.
We must also have spoken about science fiction, as “Iain M. Banks” is written in my notes.
And we ate a delicious lamb dish that Lauraine made — a shank marinated with kaffir lime and other things. I told her about Bernie Oliver’s moves to sell the meat of Merino hoggets and she actually shuddered with disgust. Lamb, she insisted, should be served very young and mostly milk-fed. And I must say her lamb was the best I had in New Zealand.
I also see in my notes that she likes barrel-aged Sauvignon Blanc, showing that she doesn’t have qualms about going against conventional wisdom.
The next day we got up early to meet with Ian Langridge, Jim Dollimore and others at Snells Beach to take a barge to one of their oyster farms.
We did this in the wind and rain as New Zealand’s summer continued to elude us.
Their specialty, believe it or not, is frozen oysters that they sell on the half-shell. And you know what? They taste like oysters on the half shell.
This is a picture of one of their older farms, at which horizontal sticks are laid out within range of the tide. Microscopic young oysters are caught there and grow.
From there we met up with Lauraine again at Matakana market, a farmers market that also has prepared food, so I had a Vietnamese steamed dumpling (bahn bao) and a sausage in flat bread with rocket and sweet capsicum sauce (or, in American, arugula and sweet pepper sauce).
Here are Lauraine and Kevin in the market.
Then we wandered around the area, to that fancy book store and butchery I mentioned above, as well as an organic ice cream and sandwich shop called The Blue Ice Cream Cafe. It was the only organic ice cream and sandwich shop I had ever been in that had Eminem playing on its sound system (“Haile’s Song,” but still...). I drank a long black (which is what Antipodeans call a double espresso), and ate a blueberry ice cream cone.
We were leaving New Zealand that day, so you’d think we would have been done. But we went on to Brick Bay Wines in Matakana to drink and have a snack and then drove out to a kiwifruit farm to meet Carlos Verissimo, who shared with us information about the high water demands for kiwi fruit and its specific temperature needs (it needs to stay below 7° Celsius for a certain length of time for the fruit to set, but if it gets much below freezing the vines suffer).
From there we headed to the airport, so let’s just close this up with another picture of kiwi fruit — this time gold ones.

adventures in music

February 29

“Hey man, do you know where I can score some coke?”
I like wearing a suit on the Lower East Side. It’s sort of like wearing a mohawk in Midtown. It sets you apart, lets you make a statement that you’re comfortable enough in your own skin that you don’t have to look like everyone else. The possible drawback in either case is that you could easily be mistaken for someone involved in the drug trade.
My friend Kenyon was performing at The Mercury Lounge on Wednesday, and that’s always bound to be a good time. But the annual C-CAP fundraiser was going on across town, at Pier 60 on the Hudson River, honoring chef Alfred Portale, pictured here with his daughter Victoria. So I went from the latter to the former, wearing my black pin-stripe suit, discussing the state of the world with my Pakistani taxi driver (he’s a Clinton supporter, arguing that the Clintons are very much loved overseas and the United States needs to rebuild its global reputation).
I actually got to The Mercury Lounge in time to see the very last song by The Dirty Pearls, who were playing to a packed house.
Then as I headed to the bar to buy a beer (Brooklyn Lager) a droopy-eyed young man asked me the question with which I started this blog entry.
“Nope. Sorry,” I said, and shrugged an apology.
“Really?” he said. He seemed half disappointed and half incredulous, as if I were holding out, keeping my cocaine to myself for reasons he didn’t understand. What’s the point of being a drug dealer if you’re not going to sell your cocaine to local fiends?
Had I been a drug dealer, he would have had an excellent point.
Beer in hand, I went back to watch the performance of A.I., which was opening for Kenyon’s band, Unisex Salon.
A.I. was a remarkably androgynous-looking trio of Californians, wearing long bangs that covered their faces (including their big masculine noses, hence the androgyny). I later described the haircut to my colleague Sonya Moore, who nodded with mild boredom and said “a scenester haircut.”
The lead singer was an old high school friend of Kenyon’s, and I think I would have enjoyed them, but they had all sorts of technical difficulties and had to reboot their computer to run their synthesizer or something. It was sad, because if you’re performing, you have to perform. Your equipment not working is not an excuse. Jump around on the stage and bang pots with a broom handle if you must, but entertain your audience.
The band made its way in fits and starts to their last song, and as they played it the lead singer and guitarist sort of wandered off to the back of the stage, apparently uninterested in the very polite and patient audience for which he was playing.
So I left the room in the middle of their song — which I think is really rude, but A.I. clearly didn’t care — and got another beer.
Kenyon was very, very excited to be performing on stage for the first time with his older brother Stephen, who's a composer and is working with Kenyon to produce his first album, which will be released someday, probably soon.
I took some pictures, but I gave Kenyon red eye, so he looks like the devil.
Actually, Kenyon would probably like to look like the devil, so, here‘s one of those pictures, on the left.

Kenyon introduced me to a metal-working jeweler named Michael. He called her “Michael the girl,” although she goes by “a girl named Michael.”
She borrowed my camera and took extremely unflattering pictures of me (it happens; good pictures of me are difficult to take), but a pretty good one of herself (on the right), and also not a bad one of Unisex Salon.
Obviously that’s Kenyon in the middle. Brother Stephen is on the left.
I had arrived late at the C-CAP benefit, so I didn’t get a chance to eat much, so after Kenyon's show I was thinking of going to Bereket for a doner kebab, but instead went to Philly’s for a cheesesteak.

The Artist Chef on ABS-CBN