Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2018 i Metro NZ

A library of Metro features and columns is available at www.noted.co.nz. Designed as a home for quality long reads and inspiring journalism, our website gives you current reviews, new food openings and guides to the city, plus all the best stories from the Listener and North & South. New at www.noted.co.nz 01-KISSING THE SERPENT Bob Harvey experiences the power of ayahuasca. 02-TOP 50 UNDER $50 Great inner-city meals for $50 or less. 03- FOOD: FIRST LOOKS Our First Looks offer sneak peeks at the latest restaurant, bar and cafe openings, including Pūhā and Pākehā. 04-TE REO IN SCHOOLS Interest in te reo Māori is on the rise, but schools are struggling to find teachers. FOLLOW US- On Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, our username is @metromagnz METRO…

My nan turned 100 this year. She is the youngest of her siblings, as is my mother, as am I. When you are the youngest, you get to enjoy your older siblings looking out for and after you. If you live long enough, as I observed with my nan, you will one day return the favour by looking out for and after them. If you live long enough as a mother, as I have observed with my nan and mum, your daughter will one day take care of you, as you did her. These are those big, unspoken rules of love, passed down through the doing and not the saying. My nan’s pantry was always full of her homemade jam. Jars that she had recycled and repurposed. She’d show us…

AMPERSAND Ōrākei Bay Village, 228 Ōrākei Rd, Ōrākei Part of an eastern suburbs retail complex that opened last year, Ampersand seems to hum at all times of the day, and it’s not hard to see why. While the large space can feel a tad cold and cavernous at night, the veranda overlooking Hobson Bay is hard to beat on a sunny lunchtime. Breakfast and brunch offerings include devilled lambs’ kidneys and ramen alongside more-standard fare, while bistro-style dishes — steak frites, pasta, crêpes — take centre stage at lunchtime. A plant-based menu is presented alongside the regular one without comment, and luckily — because it’s the sort of place where it feels wrong not to order an alcoholic beverage — the drinks list is great. Go for—Watching the world go…

For a busy dad-of-two, Saturdays and Sundays are typically spent finding the best swings and slides, heading to kids’ soccer, hitting the scooter park, plus the essential pit-stops for fluffies and ice cream. A punchy 5-seat vehicle that’s as comfortable navigating city streets as it is cruising the open road, the new Ford Escape ST-Line EcoBoost AWD is the perfect foil to a busy weekend with kids. Bold and stylish in a Race Red colourway, this is an SUV that adapts seamlessly to everyday driving scenarios and busy Kiwi lifestyles. The Escape ST-Line offers a choice of nine colour options — there’s something to suit even the fussiest SUV enthusiast. Offering the sportiest driving dynamics yet, with chassis enhancements including thicker anti-roll bars and a 10mm lower ride height for…

REVIEWS - DAVID LARSEN Vermilion Directed by Dorthe Scheffmann Opens November 8 Talk to people who have made films in New Zealand, and one thing you’ll tend to hear is that the development process can be very drawn out. If you want Film Commission funding — which you do, because you can’t easily make a full feature for less than the cost of an Auckland house — you have to jump through a rigorous series of hoops, which often involves multiple screenplay rewrites over many years. This is one reason New Zealand directors’ first films can sometimes seem at once over-cooked and under-written: the process went on too long and the original clarity of vision got lost. I know nothing about the specific development process of Dorthe Scheffmann’s Vermilion, which…

Thames in the summertime The historic town of Thames (Hauraki), near the mouth of the Waihou River, is the southernmost point of beachy Coromandel. Built in the 1860s, during the gold rush, Thames’ rich history is worth investigating – a visit to the local museum and The School of Mines are must-dos here. Summer is the perfect time to go, if only to hike or cycle the Coromandel Ranges which rise steeply behind the town. A wide range of accommodation, restaurants and activities make it easy to while away a long weekend in this sunny town, or even a week. Rapaura Gardens 586 TAPU-COROGLEN ROAD, RD5, THAMES PH 07 868 4821 / RAPAURA.COM Endorsed, as a ‘Garden of Significance’ by the New Zealand Gardens Trust, Rapaura Watergardens is…

Next Woman of the Year Awards 2018 — The Cordis 01-Madeleine Brettkelly, Sharon Brettkelly & Kathryn Graham. 02-Nicola Gaston, Jane Harding & Caroline Anne Crowther. 03-Jason Sharp, Jazz Wilson, Nicola Paterson, Brittany Teei & Michelle Sharp. 04-Merenia Donne & Rachael Russell. 05-Ken Freer, Wendy Thompson & Lillian Grace. 06-Valerie Riley. 07-Monique McKenzie, Julia Braybrook & Michelle Sharp. 08-Nina the dog. Webstar Magazine Media Awards 2018 — The Bruce Mason Centre 01-Tanya Wong & Shelley Ferguson. 02-Jacquie Fraser, Rachel McLean, Mark Banbrook & (foreground) Melissa Walsh & Amy Madden. 03-Anita Hayhoe, David Ashton & (front) Sarah Dunn. 04-Donna Chisholm & Virginia Larson.…

SHOPPING & SERVICES The best… Basics that don’t make you feel basic H&M While we certainly don’t discourage forking out a few hundy on a beautifully made New Zealand designer piece, when it’s basics you’re after, thank god for H&M. The Swedish fast-fashion giant opened its first New Zealand store at Sylvia Park in 2016, and then in August, H&M Commercial Bay arrived — perfect for the mall-averse and for lunchtime retail therapy. The multilevel store is well laid out, meaning you don’t have to trawl through too many body-con mini dresses to get to that $15 white tee you’re after. It also has a homewares section filled with covetable, affordable goods. If you can get out the door without an $8 fish-shaped bottle opener or one of…

Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in April before the United States Congress, to explain Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, was a watershed moment in the internet age — the first time one of contemporary tech’s titans was forced to defend the pernicious forces they’d collectively unleashed. But it was also a moment that may, according to historian Jill Lepore, have been longer in coming than many of us think. About two-thirds of the way through her new book, These Truths: A History of the United States — an epic, 900-page narrative biography of the world’s most powerful nation — Lepore writes that “Hiroshima marked the beginning of a new and differently unstable political era, in which technological change wildly outpaced the human capacity for moral reckoning. It wasn’t only the…

Every two years, the Walters Prize asks New Zealanders to take a leap into the contemporary art unknown. The safety harness comes in the form of four jurors, who select the finalists under near-academic conditions of confidentiality and rigour, as a way to build an often-sceptical public’s trust that what they’re being offered really is the best. And yet a defining pattern across the past few Walters Prize exhibitions is how quickly they end up looking like tightly curated shows rather than competitions: the internationalist hipsterism of 2012, for example, won by Kate Newby, or the narrative-focused, moving-image oriented reflections on colonialism, Māori identity and place in 2016, won by Shannon Te Ao. This isn’t a problem, necessarily. But it does show that more and more, the Walters is becoming…

ANIKA MOA ANIKA MOA (Universal) Oh dear. This is hard to write, because Anika Moa is so ubiquitous right now that she feels like a de facto friend, but her self-titled album isn’t really much chop. Then again, I was clearly wrong about her last album, Queen at the Table, which I really liked, but it flopped big-time. That album’s attempt at an alternative take on contemporary R&B moves seemed to have read her fans wrong, so Anika Moa sees her back doing what she knows her demographic likes: winsome, MOR folk-balladry. It’s a surprise move, as the whole thing was recorded with top session musicians in New Orleans, players whose licks decorate albums by the likes of Lucinda Williams, Marianne Faithfull, the Neville Brothers, Bob Dylan, and a tonne…

What’s the best thing about a night market? The opportunity to impulse-buy an artisanal recycled-wool Nespresso Cosy. The very real chance of misplacing the children in a crowd of strangers for long stretches of time. Joining the back of a massive queue in the hope it’s for wood-fired pizza and not the experimental steamed-dandelion truck. Market-shaming anyone crass enough to use the provided single-use cutlery instead of bringing their own from home. Unpacking your haul at home and knowing you won’t be short of venison chorizo for months.…

Pale stale males I think you are too hard on white, right, male extremists ( A year of dangerous thinking , September/ October issue). It isn’t their fault they were sent to repressive, single-sex, high-decile schools. It isn’t their fault they were taught a false sense of entitlement, only to find immigrants had won all the academic prizes. Put yourself in their boat shoes for once. They had nothing in their lunch boxes but chia seeds, carrot sticks and sourdough spelt. There was no Raro in their drink bottles. They had no coat when it rained; the nanny picked them up. Driving them out with Village People anthems they can’t dance to isn’t the answer, people. Show them some love, Auckland. Find common ground. Break carbs together (see…

The old wrestler clambers out of his dinghy, drags it on to shore. It’s not much of a beach, 30 metres wide at the most, and it’s stony, slippery as hell. He looks up the valley, dark and damp this winter’s morning, and breaks into a grin. “This is a truly special place,” he says. “You’ll see.” He first came here in 1971. He was 37 years old, the British Empire professional wrestling champion. “There’s always someone in the family who’s got a feeling for ancestry. And I had the bug. I was the first to come back.” Growing up on a Pukekohe sheep farm, the youngest of six, John da Silva had heard the stories about Mangati Bay. How his grandfather, a press-ganged whaler from Santa Catalina, Brazil, had…

01-CARDAMOM MORNING BUN Daily Bread Green cardamom and cane sugar layered between buttery plaits. 1210 Great North Rd, Pt Chevalier 02-POPPY SEED BAGEL Best Ugly Bagels Boiled then wood-fired — the best bagels in town. City Works Depot, 90 Wellesley St West, central city 03-CINNAMON BUN Hare and The Turtle Made to a Cinnabon recipe, they’re perfectly gooey, messy and only five bucks. 1/63 New Windsor Rd, New Windsor 04-STEAK & MOZZARELLA PIE The Fridge Red wine-braised meat and stringy mozzarella combine for a meal in one hand. 507 New North Rd, Kingsland 05-PORTUGUESE CUSTARD TART 4&20 Cinnamon-infused pastry and vanilla custard. 3A Clonbern Rd, Remuera 06-BLUEBERRY TART & RASPBERRY TART Olaf’s Artisan Bakery Cafe Custard and berries layered on short pastry. 1 Stokes Rd, Mt Eden 07-PAIN AU CHOCOLAT…

My first encounter with Auckland’s hidden underworld began at the bend of a cul-de-sac on the flanks of Te Tātua-a-Riukiuta (also known as Three Kings). The walk up the long driveway gave little away, other than to indicate we were among the inhabitants of a genteel, leafy suburb. We reached a platform that was clearly someone’s deck. Now more or less single file, about 50 of us, some clutching cushions, sidled through an outside shower cubicle and then down rough step-like rocks around a tree. There, the ground fell away abruptly in a scree of rubble and boulders. Descending the rockslide crab-like, my partner and I caused a traffic jam. No one worried. The underneath would wait. At the base, the ground was still precarious, but flattish, the darkness relieved…

Hippie Paulo Coelho Penguin, $37 Hippie is best-selling Brazilian author Paulo Coelho’s contribution to a small avalanche of books marking the 50th anniversary of 1968. That momentous year, it will be remembered, followed on from 1967’s Summer of Love and saw, among other events, the Prague Spring, riots in Paris and Chicago, the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, massacres at My Lai in Vietnam and Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City, a general strike in France, Black Power salutes on the Olympic medal podium, Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, “Hey Jude”, “Street Fighting Man” and Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart”. In response, many young people, and some not so young, sought to flee the apparent death throes of Western middle-class orthodoxy and ride the…

FILMS UNDER THE STARS American Express Openair Cinemas are coming back to Auckland, bringing back food, fun and films to Western Springs Park from January 17 to February 17. Visit openaircinemas.co.nz and sign up to receive the full program as soon as it’s announced. THE AUCKLAND PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA Auckland’s orchestra presents a whirlwind of inspiring music, fabulous soloists and exceptional performances. Look forward to the wonder of nature and power of music in Planet Earth II Live In Concert, the circus-meets-symphony Dawn, OSCAR®-winning animation Peter & the Wolf with live orchestra and more. Subscribe in 2019 to receive a 25% discount off public ticket prices and no booking fees. GIBBSTON HIGHGATE ESTATE LOVEMAKER 2018 ROSÉ The latest Gibbston Highgate Estate Lovemaker Rosé will be your favourite summer wine. It follows…

AUCKLAND CHORAL Auckland Choral presents a momentous choral occasion. Celebrate Auckland Choral’s 100th consecutive year of Messiah performances. Joining us, singers from from Brisbane and Dunedin choirs, with soloists Simon O’Neill, Martin Snell and Marlena Devoe. Make your Christmas special at this sparkling celebration of our “one hundred-not-out’ tradition. 16 December 5.00pm | 17 December 7.30pm Auckland Town Hall | Ph 09 970 9700 ticketmaster.co.nz  | aucklandchoral.com ENCHANTED FOREST Tucked away beside Countdown in Onehunga is The Enchanted Forest, a newly renovated outdoor mini golf course. Nestled perfectly for a fun day out right inside a beautiful park setting — bring your lunch! Gift vouchers available for that perfect family Christmas stocking filler. MOORE WILSON'S Moore Wilson’s Wine, Beer and Spirits is the place to come for a…

FOOD & DRINK Smart dining Rita Housed in a narrow century-old miner’s cottage amid a cute clutch of Te Aro Valley shops, this delightful little restaurant is the sort of place you’re welcomed like the regular you’re soon wishing you were. The set menu, which changes several times a week, is short and surprising and deceptively simple — and, at $65 a head, really good value. On the night we visited, seafood — clams, snapper, cray — was the standout, and off-the-boat fresh, while chef Kelda Hains’ open kitchen at the far end of the room makes it feel like being at your friends’ for dinner. The list of a dozen wines are all available by the glass. 89 Aro St. rita.co.nz Locals recommend…