The Other Down Under - New Zealand dining comes of age

Looks like New Zealand restaurants are coming of age. I loved New Zealand when Mike and I visited Roël there in '95 and the food wasn't too bad. Sounds great now! I shall return!

From The Other Down Under

QUOTE

FOR generations," said Nigel Elder, a former paratrooper in the British Army who now tends the vines at Martinborough Vineyard, "we exported our best produce. We didn't taste it, so we didn't know how good it was."

Well, that's not true anymore, and the evidence was there on the table: sweet, sensual scallops from Whitianga, a little fishing port on the Coromandel peninsula, so fresh they threatened to jump off the plate, showered with basil, coriander and lemon grass; unashamedly wild-tasting rack of lamb from Hawkes Bay, tender and rosy-red; three New Zealand cheeses, including Waimata Farmhouse Blue, a tangy, buttery delicacy that could readily stand comparison with Roquefort or Maytag; and luscious fig and Arataki honey ice cream.

The setting was an open-fronted cafe called the French Bistro, a strictly mom and pop operation in this little North Island market town, where my wife, Betsey, and I were eating lunch with a crowd of wine people. Wendy Campbell cooks, alone, and her husband, Jim, serves. Yet everything was based wholly or largely on regional ingredients of the first order, and the drink was just as local and just as good as the grub.

Such wine-and-food epiphanies are becoming more and more commonplace in fast-changing present-day New Zealand.

UNQUOTE