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

Friday May 10: Cake, Mini Burger and Hotdog Week

This week at work has been a particularly good week in terms of food. It started off with a double birthday on Tuesday, meaning birthday morning tea. We were treated to mini burgers from one of the birthday people and chocolate slice from the other. They were both delicious and there was quite a few absentees that day so there was plenty to go around.

Mini Burgers & Chocolate Slice

Sausage Feast

Later on Friday there was another birthday, this time it was celebrated by chocolate cheesecake and some other chocolate type cake. I only had the cheesecake this time. Also on Friday was a special ‘Friday night drinks’. This week it was German/Austrian themed. The catering was organised by an Austrian guy who works with me. He organised German sausages with mustard mayonnaise and curry powder. Apparently, curried sausages are all the rage in Berlin. He also got in a mini keg of Krombacher, and some other German beers that I could not pronounce. It was a great change to the regular chips and dip. To go with the sausages and beer there was French fries (apparently it’s traditional). But un-traditionally we got the fries from the Burger King across the road. I didn’t complain because BK is awesome and it only added to the awesomeness of the over-abundance of sausages and semi-exotic beer (semi-exotic as in not the Steinlager we normally get).

It was a good week on the food front and helped as a good distraction to the lack of invites that we have been receiving to free food events. 

Close but no d'oeuvre

A little while ago a colleague of mine got invited to the opening of Darby Street (a new shared space street in the centre of Auckland) this was partly due to the fact that she was an Urban Designer who had been working on another ‘Shared Space’ project in the Auckland CBD. Anyway, she asked me if I would like to tag along, and I of course agreed. Later on I heard that Len Brown (our current mayor) would be also be making an appearance, I thought to myself…this is great. Last time I was at an event with Len Brown (the Ground breaking of Wynyard Quarter’s Gateway Plaza) the food was pretty decent, probably due to his VIP presence.

But then I found out closer to the date that this opening was not going to be like a regular opening, there were not going to be waiters topping up your wine glasses and bringing around bite sized portions of deliciousness. Firstly, it was open to the public to attend, this means no catering. Naturally I was a little annoyed, but because I heard that there were going to be live bands playing, such as ‘Kidz in Space’, I thought what the hell.





The portable 'sculptures' and Kidz in Space doing their thing

We decided just to pop in in our lunch hour to see what was happening. ‘Kidz  in Space’ was doing their thing on a temporary stage that was erected at the Elliot Street end of Darby and portable ‘sculpture’ things were placed around (refer to photo). It was a pretty good atmosphere.
 

Luckily, the radio station ZM had their ice cream truck there and they were giving away free soft serve. Although it wasn’t a mini herb encrusted chicken breast roll with a cranberry relish, it was ok. Later I was given a free mini can of Coke Zero. They got the mini portion sizes right, but not the type of freebie!

The Soft Serve Truck

 The music was good and the ice cream ok, but I was still a tad disappointed at the lack of mini morsels of food. To top it off, I had recently had two wisdom teeth removed and today was going to be my big come back to the world of solid food, the Darby Street Opening was going to usher this in.

 Also to add to that, our receptionist was away today and yesterday, which made me question the likelihood of decent Friday night snacks. I was happily surprised at the presence of Sal’s pizza tonight though. So all in all my first non-soup meal after the removal of my back two teeth was greasy New York style pizza.  

Ode to the Friday Evening Drinks

Although, strictly speaking Friday Evening drinks is not really catering (as we get most of the food from the grocery store) I would still like to acknowledge the effort that our receptionist goes through to make us Archi Underlings look forward to the end of the week.

Our receptionist goes way beyond her job description when she carefully picks out and arranges the array of nibbles to accompany an end of week beer or wine. Come five o'clock every Friday we know we’re in for a treat.

I remember when I first started working at my current office, when I got the email on Friday saying that the nibbles and drinks are served, I tried to be polite and ease off looking like some starved animal. But now that I’ve been here for nearly two years and have witnessed a few of the older members plough in, my mentality has kinda shifted in regards to the nibbles. Now when I see "nibbles and drinks are ready" I take it as saying..."dinner is served"

Our Receptionist has been with us for seven months now and she is great. I'm not saying that our previous receptionists didn't do a good job, but our most current one makes a special effort to add a few nice touches to the array of snacks. Firstly, she makes dip for our potato crisps! (Spot the dip in the photo) Although it’s only onion soup powder and reduced cream, it still is delicious and none of our previous receptionists have been bothered to do so. However, what really is special is that on occasion she will make these skewers of cut fruit with marshmallows and cut up mars bars, they are awesome!

In addition, she will try to mix it up as well, remembering what we got last time she will try to find new things to order in, not neglecting the old favourites of course. So in addition to some camembert cheese and sundried tomatoes we might get something we haven’t seen before, like fruit spread that goes really well with blue vein cheese and crackers.

I must say I was initially quite impressed at the volume of alcohol that my work provided at drinks, but now the snacks are also equally as impressive.