New Zealand Time

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Restaurants

I think I need to clarify some of my comments regarding the food. I think my expectations were high given that it was wine country and a big grower of various animals. I think it was more the style of food that made most of it unremarkable. I would say the food at a number of places was English "pub grub". This would be fish and chips, meat pies, sausage rolls, bangers and mash, etc.

I did eat in several places that I wanted to mention and recommend to anyone that is heading over there. The first place was the dinner at Treetop. Since this is a resort, you can't just go there for dinner, but it is included in the evening. Very nice!

The second dinner was at Botswana Butchery in Queenstown. This was recommended by the partner from our NZ office that I met at Treetop. It was a great meal with good wines, appetizers (sauteed whitebait), main and a good cheese course with a nice port!

The third dinner was at Pravda in Wellington. Great appetizer that had a bit of everything, and then had the pork belly. Too full for the cheese course. This was recommended by Linda (her favorite restaurant) from Auckland.

The other great meal I had was lunch at the Curator's House in Christchurch. It was a beautiful day and I had a nice meal (house specialty of their own homemade chorizo) and some good wine while sitting outside enjoying the gardens. I notice they had won a number of awards and it seemed to have a great dinner menu.

It seemed like one item that almost every nice restaurant had for dinner was pork belly. While you find this in the states, it is not common everywhere. Pork belly is made into bacon in the US. Since they don't serve much "streaky bacon", they must serve it for dinner at nice restaurants. I had it several times and it was very good.

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