Mar 18, 2025 Metro Eats
Kia ora,
Welcome to the first instalment of this newsletter for the year (both of 2025 and of the snake). I hope you’ve had a lovely raumati. Mine was largely comprised of Paddington films, thesis writing and agonising over near-indistinguishable variations of butter-yellow paint test pots. The highlight was that I got to partake in my favourite activity in the entire world: collecting tuangi and then eating them — steamed as is, with white bread and lashings of butter — for breakfast.
Anyway, here we are, back into the regular swing of things. It’s a natural point in time to gaze forwards and ponder what might lie ahead.
When you write a newsletter like this, it is easy to feel that your job is to take a perpetually cheerful, or at the very least mildly hopeful, position about the state of things. Food is yum and fun and light, right? But we also live in a time where it feels disingenuous, maybe even insulting, to pretend things are all well and good, and to not gesture toward the troubling reality we’re living in. So I’ll be honest. When I think about what lies ahead in the realm of food, I find myself consumed with many unsettling thoughts: about the dire state of snapper in the Hauraki, the potential impact of new immigration settings on the wages of food industry workers, the plight of chickens that end up rotisseried, forced labour in the tomato industry, the bleak pictures of the new school lunch programme I’ve seen on Reddit, debates around seed oils and unpasteurised milk, microplastics in my vegetables, forever chemicals in my spatula and that I’m likely being surveilled everytime I pop to my local supermarket (with no agency over what happens with the data being collected). All of this whips around my brain like a grim food-themed montage from an Adam Curtis documentary.
Among all this, something that looms especially large is the normalisation of AI. Though I have done a good job at tuning it out previously, my return to work this year has been accompanied by a feeling that I’m being bombarded by AI from every direction. From local media discussing replacing editors with AI, to the DeepSeek discourse, to the PR email about a shiny new AI restaurant ordering system in my inbox. Glowing at the top of my Google Docs is now a little four-pointed star named “Gemini” (aptly, the most insincere and chaotic of all star signs) begging me to seek its assistance. And when I open my emails, prompts jump out of nowhere nudging me toward various offers for AI to “Help me write” or “Summarise this email”.
But the final straw for me came during the long weekend, when my search for a hollandaise recipe online returned an AI-rendered image of the sauce. One of life’s greatest sauce joys churned out by machines that have never enjoyed its delicious creamy tang, its velvety mouthfeel, the feeling of fixing a split saucepan of it, or the verveful, discordant clatter that surrounds you at a cafe as you dig into a plate of eggs doused in it. Grim.
While I try my best to shelter myself, this is, of course, not the first time I’ve seen AI depictions of food. They pop up every now and then when I’m scouring menus on Uber Eats or scrolling the social media of local restaurants. Perhaps even more harrowing than the uncanny, playdough-like images themselves is that someone, somewhere who presumably has the ability to generate real food and snap a picture of it with their phone (or hire a photographer), believed it would be more appealing to use a computer to generate it. (Not to mention the stomach-churning amount of water used to power these generative artificial intelligence machines.) Maybe, at its core, the reason all this feels so disturbing is that it reaffirms our deepest suspicions that all this technological progress does not have our interests at its heart.
So, a message to my future computer overlords: with all due respect, please leave me and my hollandaise alone.
Hei konā mai,
Charlotte
Comings and goings.
For months, as I approach a particular stretch of Dominion Rd, I have been craning my neck to catch a glimpse of a freshly renovated but closed shop with a big circular window at the front and signage reading “Jiu Meet”, in the hopes that I might spot some clues as to what exactly the place is, whether or not it’s a restaurant, and, if so, what kind. I didn’t solve much of the mystery using this technique, but it looks like it’s finally open. From what I can see online, the idea is a Chinese-influenced menu with a good deal of flamboyant-looking dishes in a smart fit-out. I’m intrigued.
Nearby is DADA: ORIENTAL TREATS, which I am extremely enthused about. It joins the club of late-night dessert and tea shops on Dominion Rd (it’s open 12–10pm), but with a specific focus on Japanese sweet varieties like taiyaki and kakigōri. I’ve been holding out for something like this to open, so I’ll report back once I visit.
Another new one on Dominion Rd is the subsidiary of Karangahape Rd pie shop PIE ROLLA’S, which now has a tiny, near-literal hole in the wall joint below The Capitol.
Sound the alarm! PASTRAMI & RYE, which was featured among the top 50 cafes in our latest issue (if you don’t have a copy yet, get a copy!), is opening a pop-up location in Ponsonby Central this week. They’ll be open and assembling their exemplary sandwiches 7am–3pm until May this year.
It has been brought to my attention that a place called Changan Burger has opened on Kitchener St in the spot formerly occupied by Swings. From a glance they’re doing pretty spectacular looking gua bao, roti rolls and, more surprisingly, hot chocolates.
There was a wave of ice-cream openings at the beginning of summer – and now one more for the list. This one is in Onehunga and called Dream and they look to have a daily rotation of vividly coloured confections. I also have to acknowledge how incredibly close (650m away) they are to Ollies. Brave.
I like the diplomacy implied by the name of the new Chinese restaurant on Symonds St: In Your Flavour. Largely unadorned, it’s located in the space that housed Sri Mahkota many moons ago, but has, since they closed almost a decade ago, sat mostly empty. If you eat here you’ll have the option of sampling things like dim sum, or Cantonese-style barbecue, or congee, or fried noodles, or spicy stir-fried chicken and beef and pork and lamb and fish and prawns and crab. Yum, spicy crab.
There is a little Vietnamese place called Chicken Quán which recently opened at 206 Victoria St West. The menu is bountiful: bánh mì, phở, fried rice, salads, egg noodle soup and plates of rice with braised, grilled, stir-fried and steamed proteins. Inside the shop is a smattering of tables for dining in but it’s right across the road from the park so you could mooch over there with your order for an alfresco lunch situation.
In a world where the Warriors operate a mammoth macho sports bar and eatery in Kingsland serving wagyu burgers and four kinds of chicken wings, it makes some kind of weird sense that the Auckland FC would open a minimalist, also macho but of a different variety, cafe on College Hill selling Allpress coffee and Daily Bread pastries. I can’t quite explain why that is on brand, but it is. It’s called COFFEE AFC and is open 7.30am–2pm daily. There’s lots of blue and white going on and you can buy merchandise for the club, which is majority-owned by American businessman and Trump financial supporter Bill Foley.
From the archives.
Metro, January 1985
