Creating a cartography of kai
On the power of food in making sense of place, potato and gravy grievances and Bourdain's Caesar salad.
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!
When you’re living in a new town or city, or even just visiting, there’s a process of internal map-making that inevitably happens as you get to know your surroundings and eventually piece together how each tree, shop, street, block, mountain, beach and motorway is linked.
To me, that intangible sense of shifting from pure disorientation to finding your bearings is one of the most wondrous parts of being somewhere unfamiliar.
When I think back on moving from Auckland to Ōtautahi as a naive 22-year-old, it’s one of the most vivid parts of the nostalgia I hold for the place.
In a city so flat, food helps to create vital geographical points in building a cartography of the city in my mind. Not just in a physical sense, though it was a huge part of it, but in understanding the people and the history of the place I’d moved to. An incredible South Indian restaurant that glows solitarily in a sleepy arcade in New Brighton, the Korean restaurant with the most generous banchan, a cheap spot for a snack near the bus depot, a massive walnut tree in the red zone, the Balinese stall at the local market, the a supermarket with perfect fried chicken and Nepalese momo in Lyttelton. Finding places to eat coloured a once unknown place familiar. The more I ate, the broader orientation I had of where I was, and who I was in relation to the city.
I’ve since moved back to Tāmaki Makaurau (almost five years ago, in fact), a city I feel I know like the back of my hand, as you may have guessed if you’ve read this newsletter.
Anyway, I’m flying to Christchurch this weekend – for the first time in over a year and it’s made me think about that intersecting relationship between memory, familiarity and food. Ōtautahi gets an unfairly negative rep for its food, and since living there I’m quick to chide anyone throwing shade upon the city. I’m excited to return to old favourites that helped me understand and find happiness in the city all those years ago. Places like The Afghan Kitchen, a perfectly chaotic restaurant where the owner Abdul cooks delicious kai amid erratic hours and a flame-filled kitchen. Or Hang Seng, which was the closest I could find to both the food court experience and Sichuan dishes that I took for granted in Auckland but desperately craved while living away from home.
There are copious others on my list, and newer openings too that I’m buzzing to try – but perhaps it’s best I save that for next week’s newsletter. And if you have any suggestions in the garden city, do send them my way.
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Weekly bites
Word on the street (or on RNZ) is that US casual dining restaurant chain TGI Fridays is on its way to New Zealand. Founded in 1965, the chain, more affectionately referred to as “Fridays” is famous for its magnificently middlebrow menu which features signature dishes like whiskey-glazed chicken strips, loaded potato skins with ranch sour cream, and Cajun shrimp and chicken pasta. These days, Fridays has more than 700 restaurants worldwide in more than 50 countries and has plans to open up to six restaurants across Aotearoa. It’s part of a franchising license agreement between Auckland-based The Franchise Coach and global franchise marketing and advisory firm World Franchise Associates and could see a bunch of other international chains opened around the country.
In what must have been both a comical but incredibly annoying instance, a Waikato-based Costco customer returned home with their 12-pack of Wattie’s spaghetti from the Auckland store to find 11 cans were without noodles, reports Stuff. Amid the “saucy situation”, a spokesperson for the company attributed the mistake to mislabelling and said the cans “actually contain Wattie’s Big Red Soup”. Depending on your views on canned spaghetti (I quietly detest the stuff), the case could be deemed serendipitous, or just thoroughly disappointing.
Even more than most other fast food chains, the KFC menu is surrounded by a distinct air of mystery, secrecy and legend. Why is the coleslaw so perfectly balanced? How are the bread rolls so fluffy? What the heck are those 11 secret herbs and spices? Unfortunately, this week the chain has found customers wondering why their potato and gravy has started to taste bad. Complaints have been fired at the company from multiple customers who described the mash as “soapy”, “plastic” and most succinctly, “yucky”. KFC has shut down speculation around any changes, despite numerous disgruntled customers convinced that a new recipe is to blame. The chicken chain’s potato and gravy has a storied history, with Colonel Sanders himself apparently unenthused about the evolution of the recipe to its powdered potato-based current state.
In a historic moment for employment rights in Aotearoa, the not uncontroversial Fair Pay Agreements Bill passed 76 votes to 43 yesterday in Parliament – fittingly, just two days after Labour Day. CTU president Richard Wagstaff described it as “the most significant piece of legislation in employment relations for a generation.” You might be wondering why I’m talking about this in a food newsletter (again), but it will be fascinating to see how both workers and employers that make up all the pieces of our food sector puzzle respond – especially when it comes those in low wage industries like meat workers, supermarket workers, hospitality workers, factory workers and beyond. Since the introduction of the bill in March this year, the bill has found embrace among unions who see potential to improve working and living conditions for workers, meanwhile it’s received a mostly icy reception from employer associations who believe it will create additional complexity, cost, disruption and reduced flexibility.
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A meal a week
It’s been four years since Anthony Bourdain’s death, and still it feels there’s a ceaseless weekly trudge of content desperately attempting to unpack his life. I think about the crass 2021 documentary Roadrunner, the recently released book ‘Bourdain’s final days' and the monthly think pieces arguing for the hundredth time, why Bourdain is relevant. Of course, in a way I am part of this – writing about him here. As a Bourdain fan, I get the fascination, and the allure of somehow making someone immortal by way of content. It’s always important to remember, but what’s uncomfortable is that much of this feels only exploitative. I choose to cherish the content written and recorded by Bourdain while he was alive, and on Tuesday evening, exhausted and desperately needing to get through a leftover can of anchovies, frozen baguette, head of lettuce and glut of eggs, I made myself the Caesar salad from his extraordinarily rugged cookbook Appetites. This is a purist Caesar salad. And by that I mean, there’s no chicken breast, there’s no mayo, there’s no bacon, there’s no poached egg: this is no riff. I ate the entire thing with a fork from a giant salad bowl cradled in my arm while watching Ab Fab on the couch. It was perfect.
A snack a week
Ripe Plantain chips (Platanitos Maduros), I bought these from Pure Convenience Store on Hobson Street in Auckland Central (a favourite dairy), but you can also find them at Latino Foods for $3.90: Produced in Columbia, these chips boast impressive health benefits – according to the packet – for your muscles, for your nervous system, and for expectant mothers. And when you take a read of the dyad ingredients list, it’s clear these are geared toward a health-oriented snack audience: just ripe plantain and vegetable oil. All in all, these were OK and straddled the snack space somewhere liminally between a chip and a piece of dried fruit. All at once, crunchy, slightly sweet and with a lacing of acidity. After my third chip, I was bored though and found myself showering a hefty pinch of salt into the bag – a slight improvement. 5/10
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
