Friday 09 May 2014 - Suit up for dinner

It was time for another NZIA New Zealand Architecture Awards dinner and I was lucky enough to get a free ticket from my office again which meant three things; remember to bring a suit to work for the dinner, a lot of drinking will happen and probably very little food will be served.

So I got my suit dry cleaned (it had taken a bashing lately with a string of weddings I had been attending) and bought it in for the big night. From experience, from last year, about half the office went across the road to Burger King before the awards dinner knowing that a) dinner won’t be served till about 10pm and b) it would most likely not be enough. Unfortunately, I had a few things to tidy up on my project and I missed the dinner call. Instead I ‘carbo-loaded’ on beer and potato chips.

This year the event was held at Queens Wharf, which is a short stroll down the road for us. So as per the usual, we left it till the very last minute before walking to the venue. This ensured that we could finish off a few family sized packs of chips. Once we had all suited up we walked down there.

Vegetarian Entree (note micro greens = fancy)

We were greeted with Champaign which we happily accepted. This marked the long night of drinking ahead. I followed that up by a couple of Peronis before we moved on to sit at our tables. However, while we were standing around catching up with people from other offices and sipping our drinks, there was a distinct lack of canapés. This meant that for the people who didn’t grab a whopper before hand, we were pretty much starving when we sat down at out tables at about 8:30.

Similar to last year, and to no surprise the food was pretty lack lustre. For starter we got a fish dish. Which was ok. However, the vegetarian option was pretty hilarious. For what I saw it looked like marmalade or mashed up fruit quince with a bit of micro greens sprinkled on top (cause you know micro greens make everything fancy).

Steak Main

After downing that and the bread roll at the table we sat through the intro speeches and the first of the awards. There was also a speech from Rob Waddell (NZ rower/Team NZ sailer) which was actually very inspirational.

Mains was a steak and steamed vegetables which was ok on the taste level but tiny on the portion level. It also didn’t help that it was 9:30 at night and we had been solidly drinking since 5. We even asked for bread rolls, which they didn’t have any extra.

Desert was a mini meringue, some sort of mini pannacota and a tiny chocolate slice. After it had all finished a group of us went over to the 24 hour MacDonalds on Queen Street and grabbed some burgers.

Although the food was disappointing, the night itself was quite fun. We got to catch up with others from other offices, drink heaps and even won an award or two. 

Desert Platter