In brief the Urbis Design Day is a day where designers of furniture, appliances, lighting and other things can kit out their studio space and show case their work for the public to see. For someone working in the field of ‘design’ you can usually get go to their show rooms and have a look, but for the general public this is a good opportunity to see what’s happening in New Zealand.
However, the real reason I went to Design Day is the food and drink.
The show rooms are spread around Auckland and special taxi vans are available to take you from venue to venue. Each venue, apart from show casing their designs, is catered. Although most of the places did their own in house catering, some of them had contracted a catering company.
The first venue that I arrived at was an exhibition run by Matter in conjunction with Automation Associates. I believe they were also sponsored by Absolut Vodka (or they just wanted to be different from the beer and wine of the other venues). Upon arrival guests were presented a Moscow Mule cocktail, nice touch, although for some reason they had doubled the vodka in the already ridiculously small cup of mine meaning I had mostly Moscow and little Mule.
After downing that Vodka water I decided to try to look half interested in what was on show. I was quickly side tracked by the mini cupcakes on trays. These were delicately decorated and looked great. I tried one that was chocolate with berry flavoured icing, it was delicious. A colleague of mine, also an Architectural Grad, had two cupcakes. The first was a chocolate mint one, which she describes as good, actually more like goooood (note the extra o’s) the second was a ginger crunch one which was not so good. All and all the cupcakes were pretty good. The company responsible for the cupcakes was called ‘Icing on the Cake’ (http://www.icingonthecake.co.nz/). After a couple of more venues, mainly catered in house…such as a sausage sizzle done by Poggenpohl (don’t get me wrong the sausages were awesome but they weren’t the same as the cupcakes), I arrived at the Fisher and Paykel pavilion.
This was probably the (catering) highlight of the day. After rushing through a kitchen totally decked out with the latest and greatest of Fisher and Paykel white ware, you arrive at a temporary tensile pavilion in the middle of Britomart. Inside there were seven different tasting stations where you could sample canapés created by the restaurant ‘The Engine Room’ (http://www.engineroom.net.nz/). They had help from a catering company called: ‘The Great Catering Company’ (http://www.greatcatering.co.nz/) to man the stations and make sure your wine glasses weren’t empty - See picture of a friendly tasting station waiter above. The first tasting station was a gazpacho (cold tomato based soup). It was very fresh and quite tasty. It wasn’t too tangy I didn’t taste just like tomato juice (which I thought it would do). Next up was a round of mini Horse radish and beetroot ice cream cones. These were very well made and the mini waffle cones were awesome. In addition, the ice cream was surprisingly delicious, almost cheese cake like. Next up was a little envelope filled with a Riesling flavoured sherbet. It was good, although I couldn’t make out the Riesling over the tang.
After resting for a bit and downing a couple of Heinekens, or Steinlager Pures…some green bottled beer, it was time for the next round. This started with a manuka honey injected fig. I was slightly disappointed by the lack of flavour in this one, although it could have been the alcohol dampening my taste buds. I could hardly taste the honey in the fig, but I guess the idea was good. After that I had a gingernut flavoured tea with an Earl Grey flavoured biscuit. This was a funny take on reversing flavours which turned out to be pretty successful. The last thing I ate was a toffee apple candy, which actually turned out to be the most disappointing of all the stations (apart from the station I accidently missed – some pastry thing). I could taste burnt toffee, even though I had beer taste buds (you know when you feel tipsy-ish and everything tastes awesome). In fact I had to throw away the candy and grab another mini ice cream cone to get rid of the taste in my mouth.Moving on from the Fisher and Paykel pavilion, there wasn’t another venue that compared (catering wise) but some came close.
At the Kohler show room there was a chocolate fondue, one of those ones that come out of a fountain. This was provided by ‘The New Zealand Chocolate Fountain Experience’ (http://www.nzchocolatefondue.com/). It was pretty nice dipping in your marshmallows into the chocolaty goodness, but I must admit by the time I arrived at this venue I was half drunk and everything tasted like it was the best thing I’ve eaten. It would have been better if they had strawberries as well as marshmallows.
Of course other places provided the typical crackers and aged cheddar… beer and wine was flowing… I would definitely be going again next year, maybe next year I would have matured a bit and be more interested in the products on display. One regret that still bugs me is that I missed out on the Antipodes show room; I hear they had French pancakes made to order!! Oh well.
Best tasty morsel: Mini horse radish and beetroot ice cream cones
Not to my liking: Ginger crunch mini cupcake
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