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Addendum to our first day:
Instead of taking the whole day to relax, like we planned, we walk around all of the Auckland CBD (Central Business District). The Sky Tower is pretty cool, but we pass on paying $25/piece for a good dose of vertigo. Just as we got to it, a guy jumped off the top. He was on cables of course, but it was insane. He definitely had his “O” face on afterward.
By the early evening, we’re exhausted, yet hungry. We laze out and grab food in the hotel, get a little drunk and then crash around 9:00.
On the subject of food: Some may not care about food like I do, so I’ll separate my food commentary from the rest of the journal. Those who dare can read on.
Food: Our first day of food was fairly disappointing for me. While the plane food was far better than expected, finding good food in Auckland proved more difficult. First on the agenda was finding a good breakfast that would satisfy our varied tastes. Auckland has a lot of small breakfast places, that have about five things on the menu. One of these things
Too cool for school
Anyone need a date?is always an All Day Breakfast and another is usually Eggs Benedict that comes with either bacon, salmon, or veggie. We ended up settling at one of these places and getting a small breakfast snack, but further study is needed for days when a bigger breakfast is necessary.
For lunch we meandered into the
Middle East Café. I got the Chawarma (which is a grilled lamb “pita”) and Juni decided on the falafel sandwich. The falafel was pretty typical and tasty, but the chawarma was quite odd. The “pita” it was on was more like a thin, folded piece of toasted ciabatta bread. Which wasn’t bad, per se, but it felt a lot less like Middle Eastern food and more like a Panini or a torta. The lamb was ok, but it had nothing on the lamb at
Falafel House and I expected more.
After an extensive search, we discovered that there is no Zagat’s or anything remotely like it for New Zealand. I’m thinking that if one wanted to make some cash and have a damn good time doing it, touring the country, eating, and writing a book of this nature could be quite profitable. We did finally find a small magazine of Auckland’s best restaurants, and found a traditional sushi bar that they recommended. Unfortunately, it was pretty far from where we were and the hotel Japanese restaurant was reviewed pretty favorably, so we decided that was the easiest route.
Our meal was fine, but nothing special beyond the fact that the waitresses were all in kimonos. The menu was pretty varied, but when I asked for the selection of fish for the day (sushi and sashimi were on the menu) I was told that everything was the chef’s choice between the 7 or 8 fish they had that day. We decided on a sashimi platter and a few appetizers (including chawan mushi for a stoked Juni). The sashimi platter was fairly typical with the exception of a giant oyster that Juni enjoyed, a fully shelled prawn who wouldn’t stop looking at me, and some chu-toro, which wasn’t much to write home about (wait, what am I doing?). We also had a fair bit of premium cold sake, which turned out to be the same sake I get at
Rumblefish (Kara-tamba). The meal was pretty mediocre compared to what I’m used to, and expensive to boot, so hopefully tomorrow we’ll have more luck.
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Em
non-member comment
New Zealand lamb
I thought it was supposed to be...good.