A delicious jaunt to Rotorua
Geothermal kai, shape-shifting Twisties and Korean gilgeori street toast.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter produced in partnership with Boring Oat Milk. Written by me, Charlotte Muru-Lanning. It’s lovely to have you here!
Mud pools, terraces, geysers, fumaroles, and hot springs: Rotorua’s geothermal landscape lends itself to a bunch of innovative traditional cooking practices. Food, suspended in kete, can be boiled in hot pools. Hāngi is cooked through natural steam in the ground.
While plenty of those natural treasures were irreparably damaged, and some entirely depleted, by geothermal power development and the tourism industry, there’s something mesmerising about food heated by bubbling natural hot springs and geothermal steam. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea, and on the weekend I got to try my first geothermal kai, thanks to Tourism New Zealand who hosted me for the weekend. Part way through a night walk at Te Puia (which you should definitely do if you have the chance), we ate wheatmeal, kūmara and butterscotch pudding steamed in Ngāraratuatara, a cooking pool named after the eye of the tuatara.
There’s a whole world beyond geothermal treats in Rotorua too – as I discovered over the course of the weekend. We visited Poco, a slick new wine bar in a second story space in town, for a pre-dinner glass of Ata Rangi Crimson. Next time I’d be keen to go back for food, especially their wild pork rillette. For a post-mud pool lunch, we popped into Okere Falls Store for cheesecake and kimchi cheese toasties – they also boast a massive craft beer selection. Asian Sari-sari store in the town centre stocked Filipino condiments and sauces I’ve never seen locally before – and I reckon they’d make excellent post-holiday gifts for friends and family. And a visit to Rotorua wouldn’t be complete without stopping by Capers Epicurean, an institution in Rotorua that’s been open since 2001. I was pleasantly surprised that their cabinet food was just as good as I remember from childhood visits and, despite the glaring lack of pancakes on the menu, unchanged.
If I’d had more time, I'd have loved to visit: Latin American restaurant Sabroso, Capizzi Pizzeria, Te Arawa Fresh Seafood and Fresh Noodles for a big bowl of chicken meatball noodle soup. They’ll definitely be on my itinerary next time.
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Weekly bites
After Chris Mansfield’s liquor licence application received dozens of objections last year, the former reality TV show contestant accused of domestic violence appeared to drop his plans for a Karangahape Road bar called Tomfoolery. So when the bar suddenly opened last month, locals were understandably shocked. I spoke to objectors and lawyer Grant Hewison about the seemingly “duplicitous” tactics used to open the bar and how it might point to broader structural problems with district alcohol licensing processes.
Reading Perzen Patel’s essay on memories of eating her grandmother’s prawn curry while hungry was a bad idea. The piece is a nostalgic trip back to her childhood in India and the importance of food and recipes in connecting to home and the people we love. The piece also includes a link to her grandmother’s recipe – and it looks delicious.
The Huy Fong Sriracha brand, based in California, has been producing its famous “red rooster” branded chilli sauce since 1980. The brand now produces around 200 million bottles per year. However, it’s halted production of the sauce due to an ongoing weather-induced chilli shortage, leading to a shortage of the product. While sriracha is a generic term for chilli, garlic, vinegar sauces in Thai and Vietnamese cuisine, the Huy Fong version’s popularity surged in the 2010s with the emergence of foodie culture. Will the shortage hit our shelves? I popped into my favourite Asian supermarket in the CBD and there were no bottles of the Huy Fong version in stock. If you’re after an alternative, Shark Brand is fantastic (albeit less viscous than Huy Fong’s), and of course Sriraja Panich, which is apparently the original sriracha brand. But good luck tracking it down.
After it was made illegal 10 years ago, the government is reviewing whether bringing wine and beer back to convenience store shelves could help smaller retail chains compete with the supermarket stronghold. For my own selfish reasons, I like the proposition. There’s nothing like the cheeky thrill of being able to buy canned cocktails from konbini in Japan or the mini cartons of red wine in Italian corner stores. Unfortunately, like most things in life, it’s more complicated than that. I have vivid memories of how lax things were around ID checks when you could buy alcohol in dairies and we all know New Zealand has a messy relationship with alcohol.
Apparently, Bluebird Twisties have shape-shifted. It’s not the first time the corn snack has come under scrutiny – last year Stuff reported that chip fans felt the taste of the corn snack had declined. Now, their famously variable “twist” shape has morphed into identically-shaped crescents. Or “Moon prawns”, as one commenter put it. I assume changes like these tend to be money-saving measures put in place by companies, but if a Twistie doesn’t twist, or taste like it used to, is it even a Twistie any more?
A vital message from The Spinoff’s publisher, Duncan Greive
If you’re reading this, you’re hopefully getting value out of The Spinoff. Yet like many publishers, The Spinoff has suffered a significant drop in members, despite our costs continuing to increase. On one level I understand why our membership has dropped away. There’s a cost of living crisis, and inflation has made life hard for many of us. It’s totally normal to feel like you don’t need to support your local media organisation at a time like this.
The promise we’re making to you is that we’re actually better-suited to times like this than the pandemic itself. Our plan is to return to something more of what made us – coverage of culture, politics, te ao Māori and more with heart and humour. We will do that with features, essays and opinion pieces, but also podcasts, comics, video and newsletters. We are here to help walk you through this fascinating new era, and feel well-suited to being your guide.
But we can’t do it without you. The Spinoff has been cut out of the government’s enormous $100m plus Covid-19 campaign, which has been a boon to the big media companies and social media platforms. We returned the wage subsidy, unlike almost every other media organisation. The public interest journalism fund was narrowly targeted and is winding down. The big tech companies are refusing to do what they did in Australia and make meaningful deals with local media. And the recessionary drums continue to beat loudly, impacting the commercial spend we rely on, along with you, our members.
All of which is to say that we need your support more than we ever have. So please, if you can, click here to support The Spinoff by becoming a member today.
An interview with Paul Lee from Swings Cafe
Tucked away on leafy Kitchener Street in Auckland’s city centre, newly opened Swings Cafe serves single-origin filter coffee and natural wine and beer on tap, and the star of the show, a variety of Korean street food staple gilgeori: toasties made with fluffy milk bread. Open from 10am to 3pm, Tuesday to Saturday, Swings feels modern, and unlike anything else you’d find in town – for the time being at least. It’s the second opening for owners Paul and Lisa Lee who also run Ockhee in Ponsonby, a restaurant with a menu based on traditional Korean dishes. The new spot leans toward the casual, with sandwich fillings like egg, mozzarella, gochujang and condensed milk or egg, lettuce and bulgogi beef – adding new dimension to the growing and evolving expressions of Korean food in Aotearoa.
Swings is such a catchy name, where did that come from?
It just came into my mind after seeing this street – kind of sloped and the meaning behind it when I named it was just like our lives: back and forth, ups and downs.
Can you tell me a little bit about the menu?
Our other restaurant in Ponsonby, Ockhee, that's real traditional food that we make. That's our passion. But then we were like, “how can we share Korean culture with New Zealanders?”. So we chose street food. Koreans love eating gilgeori, Korean toasties.
When would you eat gilgeori?
In the morning, when you're in a hurry and gotta go to work. It comes out in like five minutes, wrapped in foil.
You’re an owner operator, do you think being that intimately involved with your own business influenced your approach to Swings?
Yeah, I wasn't really looking at the money side of it, but instead doing it for passion, for the culture, and for the community that we built. If not, I'd be really commercial, focussing on money. I'd be looking at numbers every day. But I just wanted to do everything properly.
There’s been so much discussion about central Auckland’s demise, but it kind of feels like there’s a lot of interesting new places popping up – why did you decide to open in town?
This place came out to the market and when I came to look at it, it was late summer, it was breezy, beautiful, sun coming in the morning, looking out at Albert Park. On High Street and Lorne Street, both of the sides are full of high buildings, whereas this is so vibey. I looked at the space, I went, “I’ve got to take this”. People were like “why in town?” or “why choose this tucked away space?”, but my gut feeling was like “bro, look at this – every cool spot in bigger cities like Melbourne Sydney, it's all tucked away”.
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte