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

Thursday May 23 – Pink Ribbon Breakfast & Friday May 24 – NZIA Awards

Two things occurred this week which are worthy of mention from a eating point of view (and the second thing was also kind of a big deal for the office).

The first was that our office hosted a Pink Ribbon Breakfast. This was a breakfast that an organisation throws where the staff donates some money towards Breast Cancer research. Technically this was not free, as you should give a donation but the food was well worth the small donation. Our Office Administrator and Business Manager prepared all the food and it was awesome.

My only regret is that I hardly eat breakfast and as a result I could not really eat as much as I would have liked to.

We had pikelets, cupcakes, omelette, sliders (Yes! Mini burgers for breakfast), muesli and some other stuff I couldn't even try because I got too full too quickly. There was even pink decorations and our model maker made a pink toaster for the donations box (ironically we didn't have toast).

All in all it was worth coming in half an hour early for.

Pink Ribbon Breakfast

The second event of this week was the NZIA New Zealand Awards night, held at the Marine Events Centre at Wynyard Quarter (Karanga Plaza). Our office was lucky enough to have come out with two awards and we had booked three tables for the evening. Because I had worked on one of the projects that we had won an award for I was lucky enough to tag along.

The night started with a few of walking into a room lined with waiters with trays of Champagne or beer. I decided to take it easy and only grab one drink, holding myself back from downing a glass of wine there on the spot and chasing it with a bottle of beer for each hand, this was probably a good idea as the clients from my current project were also attending the event.

After a bit of chit chat and catching up with people you recognise working in other offices, we were ushered into the main hall, where we found our tables and got ready for dinner. Of course there were a series of speeches from the sponsors and hosts prior to our first course. Naturally my table started finishing off the bottles of wine that was on the table.

The first course was a salmon dish, which was ok. It was not too fishy which was good.

This was followed by a steak main, with some sort of potato hash brown and peas. The steak was prepared medium rare, which was good for me, but probably wasn't so great for others who couldn't handle a bit of blood. There were no choices in the menu (unless of course my office had just pre-chosen for everyone and didn’t let us know).

The Steak Main

After the main course there were the awards presentations and the short speeches that followed each award, except for one student who claimed an award for some competition and was really enthusiastic and spoke for about five times the length of everyone else.

After the awards were over and we had finished giving each other high fives, we were presented with the desert course. A platter of assorted deserts, mini eclairs, mini tarts, mini cheese cakes and some other mini desert thing. It was pretty good.

I would have to say the food was all of great quality, but as one of my colleagues who also went said, there wasn’t quite enough. The other downside was that they ran out of wine and beer and stop serving out table.