June 2010

Could James Bond make a chef's platter half this attractive? Photo by David Lansing.

So anyway, I went in to have lunch at The Vintry although my real reason for stopping in was to get the bartender, Mike Smith, to tell me more of his story. Last week when I was in there, Mike told me that he was originally from London where he’d been in “the wine trade and luxury food division,” and then had moved, on a whim, to Matakana after doing a Google search for “Farmers Markets New Zealand.”

Something about all that just didn’t sit right with me. Who just gets up and decides to abandon London, very quickly, so they can go work in a wine bar in a little village in New Zealand?

Anyway, I sat down at the bar and ordered a chef’s platter and a glass of Takatu Pinot Rose. While Mike was in the kitchen working on my lunch, we had a little chat. I asked him what, specifically, he had done in London.

This and that, he said, his back to me as he shaved meats onto a cheese board.

Like what sort of “this and that?” I asked him. He stopped cutting meat, wiped his hands on his apron, and without turning to face me, said, “Ever heard of the MI6?”

Well, yes, of course. This is the British Secret Service, the counter-intelligence and security agency where James Bond and Miss Honeypenny worked.

“You worked for MI6?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer me and went back to shaving meat.

Remember Chuck Barris, the impresario of “The Gong Show”? A very whacky guy. Back in the ‘80s, he wrote a “memoir”—Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—that, in 2002, was turned into a farcical film with George Clooney and Sam Rockwell, among others. In both the book and movie, Barris claims to be an assassin for the CIA. In fact, in the book he said that he went on frequent foreign trips in connection with prizes awarded on his game shows as a cover for his purported assassination assignments.

Now usually, the CIA just routinely refuses “to confirm or deny” stories about its operations and who works for them. But after Barris’ memoir was published, they took the very unusual move of having a spokesman label his book “ridiculous.”

A game show host is an assassin for the CIA? Almost as absurd as a London bartender working for the same outfit James Bond is supposed to have worked for. But I will say one thing for Mr. Smith—he makes a mean chef’s platter. And who knows—maybe someone will come along and want to make a movie based on his story. It’s happened before.

Ceiling of the Paradiso cinema with its 32,000 paper flowers on the ceiling. Photos by David Lansing.

I went back in for lunch at The Vintry yesterday to see if I could get more of Mike Smith’s story (to get caught up, read http://davidlansing.com/?p=3457). More on that tomorrow. This little wine bar and café is located in the lobby of the town’s only cinema complex, which is quite convenient if you want to see a show while enjoying a nice glass of Brick Bay Cabernet Sauvignon or maybe a little Ascension Chardonnay.

Imagine: you’re sitting at a wine bar gnoshing on some chicken satay or seafood fritters, sipping on your white wine, and your date says, Oh, gosh, it’s about time for the movie to start, so you just pay your bill, grab your wine (after asking Mike to top it off), and walk across the lobby to the theater. To finish your wine there. How civilized is that?

This would never happen in the U.S. There are just too many rules and regulations to get past. And eventually, of course, even if it was possible, some idiot would sue the theater owner after they fell out of their seat because they’d been allowed to imbibe a glass of Zinfandel. Adults in the States, it seems, prefer to be treated like children and told what they can’t do because if allowed to do it, they will only get in trouble.

The movie house itself is pretty amazing. It’s actually three boutique theaters, each with its own special charm. The largest, Tivoli, has a huge amber 95-bulb chandelier suspended from a domed ceiling above the seats, which include reclining armchairs and double snuggle seats. The Roxy, the smallest of the three, has draped fabric suspended from the ceiling giving it an exotic, tent-like feel.

But the coolest has to be the 80-seat Paradiso where, yesterday afternoon, Sex and the City 2 was playing. The name of the theater—Paradiso—says it all. They wanted to make the theater feel really cheerful—a place to chase away the mid-winter blues—so they festooned the ceiling with some 32,000 colored paper flowers that were fixed by hand to a wire frame, while 100 tui birds and fantails, made from palm leaves, wing their way across the walls. Fantastic! And if you can sit in comfy, over-sized chairs with thousands of flowers over your head while enjoying a nice glass of wine, so much the better.

Sign for The Cream of Matakana. Photos by David Lansing.

One of the places Heather suggested I check out was The Cream of Matakana. “It’s in the dairy co-op building,” she told me. That sounded interesting. Taste a little New Zealand butter or what have you.

Except, of course, the old co-op, where they once made Matakana Pure Creamery Butter (“The Delight of the Table”) hasn’t churned out any dairy products since 1963 when it closed down. Now it’s a bit of an arts complex with a place to do pottery and an eclectic design store called The Cream of Matakana. Out in front of the store, sitting at a wooden picnic table, was a young woman in a straw bonnet and sunglasses soaking in the sun and reading the newspaper. When I started up the steps of the store, she turned half way around and said, “If something catches your fancy, just give me a shout.”

I went back down the steps and asked her if she worked there. She said she did. “I should be inside,” she said, “but it’s too bloody cold. The building was designed to keep the milk cold you know and they did a good job of it.”

She was right. Inside the store, with its concrete floor and high ceilings, it was like a meat locker (remember it’s winter down here).

Now, I’m not the one to call The Cream of Matakana an eclectic design store. That’s what they call themselves on the little sign attached to an old push lawn mower in front of the store. But I think they’ve got it right. There were necklaces with little resin birds in red and black and blue; a brooch of glass jet planes that looked like they could have been little candies; blocks of lavendar or cinnamon soap; jars of colorful bath salts; tie-dyed baby hats; pink or lime watering cans with flowers on them; pillows made from recycled vintage blankets; and lots of framed photographs of what looked like local scenes—the beach, smooth stones, water.

What I settled on was an odd painting with six stylized portraits of what looks like the same cartoonish woman, one with a crown on her head, another with a blue page-boy haircut. It was as if a six-year-old had decided to make six little portraits of her mother in different moods from silly to sad.

I went back outside and told the woman sitting in the sun that I’d found something that caught my fancy. She came inside, picked up the painting, and gave it a good luck. “Oh, yeah, that’s nice isn’t it?” she said, as if this were the first time she’d ever seen it (and maybe it was). I asked her if she could wrap it in bubble wrap or something since I was going to have to transport it back to the States.

“Is it a gift then?” she asked.

It is, I told her. For a woman I knew who had multiple-personalities. “You never know which one is going to show up.”

“This will be perfect then,” she said.

Yes, I told her. Perfect.

Breakfast at Takatu is a bowl of muesli outside on the bocce court. Photo by David Lansing.

What is it with the sky here in New Zealand? It’s amazing. Day after day. A cerulean blue river of sky clotted with long, puffy gray saturated clouds. I just stare and stare at it. Particularly in the morning. At Takatu, my routine has been to get up early and head for the main house where Heather has laid out breakfast—ricotta pancakes with fresh berries one morning, plump local figs with clotted cream and cheese the next, and always there is Heather’s spectacular muesli.

I pour a bowl, mix in a few of the fat tart blueberries picked from bushes just down the road, and head outside to sit in one of the comfortable canvas chairs anchoring the end of a bocce court. Small birds dive after the insects floating in the breeze above the vineyards; in the distance I see fishing boats heading out of Omaha Bay. I eat my muesli, drink my coffee, and watch the clouds float overhead.

Takatu Muesli

When mixing up this homemade muesli, Heather Forsman often uses pear juice instead of apple juice and dried blueberries, figs, or fresh dates instead of apricots.

Ingredients

3 cups rolled oats

1 cup hulled sunflower seeds

3/4 cup shelled almonds

1/2 cup hulled pumpkin seeds

1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

1 cup thinly sliced apricots

1/2 cup apple juice

1/4 cup sesame seeds

2 tbsp. vegetable oil

1.   Preheat oven to 325°. Put oats, sunflower seeds, almonds, pumpkin seeds, shredded coconut, sesame seeds, apple juice, and vegetable oil into a large bowl and stir to combine.

2.   Spread mixture out evenly on a baking sheet and bake, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned, about 30 minutes. Remove from oven and set aside to cool.

Sprinkle apricots over cooled muesli and toss to combine. Store in airtight container at room temperature for up to 1 month. Serve with yogurt and fresh fruit.

All things lamb at Stubbs in Matakana. Photo by David Lansing.

One of the particularly yummy things Heather served as an appetizer last night was a chicken liver and brandy pate that came from the butcher shop in Matakana, which may be why it was at the top of her list of places I should check out today. So I went in to town and ended up parking, quite accidentally, right in front of it. Couldn’t miss it since the display window was filled with all things lamb: lamb racks, boned and rolled lamb, butterflied legs of lamb, lamb shanks, chops, backstraps, cutlets, steaks, chops, and rumps.

Not that they didn’t also have some lovely looking cuts of beef and pork as well as whole rabbits, quail, pheasant, and duck. But it was the lamb I was lusting after. There is, to me, nothing like a nice cut of lamb. I love that slightly gamey, grassy taste of very rare butterflied leg of lamb, seasoned with olive oil, kosher salt, garlic, and rosemary, spit-barbecued over a slow fire, the fat dripping on to the coals and evaporating as a smoky fragrance that always gets me salivating.

The Matakana butchery is actually called Stubbs Village Butchery and is owned by two guys named Dick and Bill (of course), both of whom look exactly the way you would expect a New Zealand butcher to look, which is to say beefy and a bit portly with massive shoulders and forearms.

When I was there Bill, the one without a mustache, was handing out samples of some little tidbit of meat speared on toothpicks. “Chipolata?” he asked.

I took one and popped it in my mouth. It tasted a bit like a Jimmy Dean sausage. “What’s a chipolata?” I asked him.

“Chipolata?” he repeated, saying the word in that way that people have when they’re surprised you don’t know what something is. “Never heard of chipolata?”

I assured him I hadn’t.

“What’s it taste like, mate?” he asked me.

I told him it tasted like a Jimmy Dean.

“Tastes like a Jimmy Dean?” he repeated, clearly confused. “What’s a Jimmy Dean?”

I told him it was a breakfast sausage. He smiled. “There you are, then.”

So evidently a chipolata was a breakfast sausage, though why they didn’t just call it that was beyond me. Bill said they made them here in the shop and he had beef or pork chipolatas.

“No lamb?”

“Lamb chipolata?” Bill repeated.

I nodded.

“Nah, mate. You don’t make a chipolata from lamb.”

Why not, I asked him. You seem to make everything else out of lamb.

“A bit strong for breakfast, I reckon,” he said.

Not for me. I think lamb chipolata would be just the thing for breakfast. Along with a bowl of Heather’s muesli and a strong cup of Black Dog coffee, and I told this to Bill. He nodded and thought about it for a minute and said, “Come back tomorrow morning. I’ll have some lamb chipolata for you. We’ll try it out. You bring the Black Dog.”

I plan to do just that.