Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon has nothing on Wanaka, where everyone knows the bacon, the bacon’s mates and where it went to school. Lisa Scott spends a weekend hopscotching a smorgasbord of organic connections, boutique cellar doors and foodie backblocks.
Epicureans are wily and hard-working problem-solvers in Wanaka, a town where people want to know where their food came from and meet its makers, a town quietly going plastic-free. The lack of affordable/available restaurant space has seen the rise of tiny restaurants in the form of food trucks. Burrito Craft is at the heart of this new nucleus, because nothing says, "I’d like to teach the world to sing" like authentic Mexican food served in the alps by a Scotsman with a moustache.
The kitchen is small - "We sometimes have five people in there, you get used to dancing," says owner Marc - but the food is big on taste and value.
Locals prefer to eat here rather than try to buy the ingredients at the supermarket and make it themselves. With coriander, chilli and lime juice, mushrooms and jalapenos, the super-tasty fish tacos are a favourite; fresh chillies from up north: Carolina Reepers, the hottest chillies in the world. Washed down with a bright orange Mexican soda as the sun dips behind Buchanan range. Don’t ask staff to make yours hot if you’re just showing off: the spice-o-meter starts at mild and goes all the way to face-melter.
Everything is prepped day-of and the packaging is 95% biodegradable.
Burrito Craft are also fans of Rhyme and Reason’s Food Truckin’ Fridays.
Rhyme and Reason is what you get if you cross a microlight-making mechanical engineer with a fussy-pants brew queen: stupendously good beer. That’s no raw claim in a town with more craft breweries per head than any other.
Jessica Wolfgang is a perfectionist so competitive when it comes to hop hopes she’d arm-wrestle herself. Partner Simon Ross turned his inventor’s brain to designing a $5000 bottling machine (the competitor’s cost $120,000). He has installed roughly 50 so far: "I get married to every brewery I sell a bottling machine to," he says.
Ahem.
Jess is more a one-vat (at a time) woman. Her latest concoction, Black Ice, is a stonking tipple, drunk in the sun.
Rhyme and Reason also sell Maude Wines, whose tasting room is just across the paddock, and it is testimony to the "all’s fair" community vibe that Jess pours a glass of ruby red pinot, judged best in New Zealand last year and says, "here taste this, it’s amazing".
After many a wanderer knocked and pleaded or simply walked in demanding to try some, Maude (named after Mt Maude on the east side of Lake Wanaka, upon the slopes of which the grapes are grown) opened a tasting room.
"We gave in," says Dan Dineen, who with wife Sarah-Kate and extended family makes these award-winning pinots and rieslings.
I need a steadier, so it’s on my bike and off to Venus Coffee, only available at supermarkets and restaurants in Wanaka.
Manufactured in a mysterious location using beans from Guatemala, Peru, East Timor, Cuba and Sumatra, as Mt Iron’s afternoon shadow casts a shark fin over the latest subdivision, after a knock so secret it makes the Freemasons look like blabbers, a man I’ll just call "Mr Bean" brews us a shot of Smokey Joe, hands down the strongest coffee I have ever had, guaranteed to have you jabbering if not jittering. Venus supplies the local foodies (if they ask nicely) and Jim of Ode is grinding theirs when we arrive. I stop talking long enough to book a table for tonight.
First, though, lunch at Red Star Burger Bar, a Wanaka institution (in case you’re wondering what the connection is, Mr Bean was one of three partners who started it 15 years ago).
At Red Star Burger Bar it’s your way and the highway. They don’t just do the massive burgers they’re most famous for, smaller versions of the menu are available, and every burger can be served as a salad if bread’s not your thing. They cater for vegans and vegetarians; the wants and needs of a woman your age.
New owner Scott, a chef by trade with a background in luxury lodges and demanding divas, ensures everything is prepared fresh daily, including all the sauces. What is it about Wanaka foodies that they’re so keen to promote each other?
"It’s all about supporting local businesses. We’re all in this together; owner/operator entrepreneurs are taking a huge risk. But be smart, work hard and you’ll pull it off. Have you been to Ode?"
Ode organic restaurant is only five months old and already busy as a blue-bummed proverbial. Conscious dining, literally food for thought, the pescatarian dish, "What becomes of the broken pipeline?", features Otago surf clams and mussels cooked in squid ink jus: what your food would look like if there was an oil spill off our coast.
This is fine dining gone organic, a trip around the best New Zealand has to offer: "ode-to-kune" carrots, Foveaux Strait squid caught by "Aaron" this morning (nice to be on first-name terms with your fisherman), polenta made from Nelson corn (Lucas, half Italian, had polenta every night as a kid and always wanted to make it better than his mother), baby turnips from Brydone farms in Oamaru, asparagus so young you feel like a pervert, purple kumara from Dargaville.
Jim and Lucas might dress casual but they’re serious about food. This is mindful eating. Dessert is "an almond a leg", almonds from a derelict nut farm cracked into the crumble, Jazz apples from Alexandra.
Lucas runs himself ragged, cooking everything, serving it and talking to the customers about each dish. We had the three-course dinner; I can only imagine the state of him after the eight-course degustation menu. Ode’s motto is "whatever you need", just give them 24 hours’ notice to service your dietary requirements.
This is eating as an experience, an ethos, eating with eyes wide open.
Mine are closing, however. Thus far and no further. I save Charlie Brown crepes for breakfast.
Made in a little green caravan so cute it gives you pangs of nostalgia, to an authentic French recipe, "it’s not only a crepe," says Adrien, "but a piece of happiness".
The only thing missing is an accordion, but you could always bring your own.
Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free or full-dairy-meat-aterian, crepes are for breakfast, lunch and dinner, a treat after a bike ride, a day on the lake or apres skiing.
Hailing from Brittany, crepe-making is tricky, the gesture required very traditional, only years of practice can perfect it. Watching your crepe being made is a marvellous bit of theatre.
Everything at Charlie Brown is homemade: the salted butter caramel, the almond cream, the lemonade and hot chocolate.
Having eaten myself to a standstill, sated, delighted, educated and waited upon, Monday’s cereal is going to be a crushing disappointment.
