WellUrban

Personal reflections on urbanism, urban life and sustainable urban design in Wellington, New Zealand.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Better latte than never


The kiosk in Waitangi Park has finally opened. Hooray! After months of delays (way back in April I thought it was "nearly ready"), you can finally get pizza, pasta, panini and petanque (boules hire from $5) in the park.

Waitangi Park Cafe - open at last!
Of course, the Waitangi Park Café also serves coffee, though at $3:50 for a small paper cup it's pricey and not particularly good. Whether the latter is due to the brand (Vittoria) or staff teething troubles is hard to tell. They also sell a dozen or so flavours of icecream, including one with manuka honey that seems particularly appropriate now that the nearby manuka bushes are in flower.

Since the kiosk is run by Mediterranean Foods Ltd, one might have expected gelato rather than ice cream, but if that's your preference you might not have long to wait. I have it on very good authority that a branch of Kaffee Eis will be opening in the ground floor of the Chaffers Dock complex, and while the real estate agents' claims of a November opening for the retail tenancies seem a little optimistic, I've got my fingers crossed that something will happen before the end of the year.

3 Comments:

At 8:27 pm, October 28, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Working near the Oriental Bay New World, I've also noticed Mr Chans has re-opened after being rather quiet for a few weeks. The owners were probably on holiday, or buying stock from overseas, or both. At the time of writing they were having a re-opening sale with 15% off most goods.

I've also posted a little piece of my mind on LiveJournal about my trip up to Auckland for the Armageddon Expo, a little rant an aviation issues, and comparisons of Auckland and Wellington.

A WellUrban post on Wellington Airport would be an interesting one.

 
At 1:56 am, October 29, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I can't believe, that in Wellington, the city of good local roasters (how many now? more than four), the kiosk has to go with some crap that's been sitting in a container ship for 3 months or so. While a bad barista can make a Vittoria espresso worse, I've never had a good one.

What a bugger. And a waste. And a crap decision, since while it's a local park, there'll be plenty of tourists wandering through... and they'll get fed the rubbish they can buy on any main street around the world.

 
At 12:26 pm, October 29, 2006, Blogger Tom said...

deepred: yes, I'd wondered what happened to Mr Chan's. There was a handwritten sign on the door, but since I can't read Chinese I couldn't work out what was going on. I popped in yesterday and it seemed all up and running, though there's still not fresh goods.

Thanks for the links. Our airport's future could either be a huge boost for Wellington (787s) or a disaster (codeshare). I've been meaning to write about it, but I'll need to do a bit more research first.

trix: I presume the decision was made by the med foods people, who otherwise seem to have good taste. All the more reason to look forward to a Kaffee Eis outlet in the old Herd St building: they serve Mojo, which is good & local (roasted a few hundred metres away).

 

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