Category: Misc

As a sort of New Year’s resolution I’ve decided to retire a few stories that I sometimes tell people. I suspect I repeat some of these a bit too often (and sometimes to the same person) and they are getting a little stale. Feel free to offer other suggestions.

• Kicking down door at work
• My day as a court witness
• Co-Worker electrocuted and comes back for more
• Co-worker at Gang Party
• Co-worker mugged on 1st day in Auckland
• Colour-blind co-worker and windows
• My Uncle meets Bill Gates
• Stories about crazy head of the company I used to work for.
• The day I meet the guy from the Fraud Squad

The above are all retired until Jan 1st 2015 unless specificly requested.

I’m not sure why I suddenly seem to be publishing a food blog but I have a few tech articles up my sleeve which should get posted in the near future. But for now I have another review of one of my regular food haunts.

The Bluebird is a vegetarian and vegan cafe is locate in the Valley Road shops on Dominion road, across the road from the foodtown supermarket. It is own and run by the
New Zealand Sri Chinmoy Centre which is a group/church/whatever of followers of spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy .

The shop is on two levels, downstairs there is seating for around 20 and a counter at the back where you can order. Upstairs seating is about the same but includes a couple of couches and low tables. Normally you order and pay at the counter and the food is brought out.

The menu (also on the website) is completely vegetarian with about half of items being vegan. The standard item is a bowl which has a base of Baked potato, mashed potato, baked kumara or brown rice with one of about 8 toppings. This comes in 3 sizes ( $9, $12 and $15) and I’ve found that the medium size is more than enough for a main meal.

The sample pictured is a medium size ( $12) meal. The base is rice, the topping is Mexican beans with sauce and there is cheese on top. The meal also comes with some bread.

A large meal pretty much fills the bowl to the top.

Drinks include water (free) and various phoenix soft drinks , juices and some  smoothies (although I keep forgetting to check if they do Soy smoothies).

Other mains includes a rotating array of salads, hot-pots, Lasagna, pies etc. These may or may not be available each day. Apart from the bowls which are always available you just have to see what is at the counter.

Sweets include the very nice apple crumble (which comes in a bowl) along with a couple of cakes and a small selection of slices at normal cafe prices.

There is the usual range of coffees (50cent Soy-milk surcharge) plus some herbal teas.

The general ambiance of the place is very quiet, music is quiet background (although a video on low volume showing Sri Chinmoy performing weight-lifting sometimes plays upstairs). The female staff are usually dressed in Saris and service is usually efficient and polite.

The opening hours are a little mixed. Mon/Tue: 10 am – 8 pm , Wed: 10 am – 3 pm, Thu/Fri: 10 am – 9 pm , Sat: 10 am – 2.30 pm , Sun: Closed. Plus they sometimes close for a week or two while they all go off to do whatever stuff Sri Chinmoy members do.

I’ve been going there for around 6 months and I quite like it (going around weekly these days). It seems to be quite popular (a little crowded on Friday nights at least) but the food is nice and quite good value for money (although it isn’t in the budget category) and I really like a nice quite place where I can just read my book over a meal.

Another person at work had a flyer for this place so I thought I’d try lunch there. The full name is “Sal’s Authentic New York Pizza”. They appear to have only recently opened (ignore the “since 1975” bit).

As you can see from their website they are just a little counter and oven on a central Auckland street. They have a couple of tables out the front on the footpath you can stand at to eat but I just took my food back to the office. When I was there (1pm on a weekday) there was one guy most making the pizza and another guy (from New York, although I didn’t catch if he had previous pizza experience) mostly serving.

I ordered a slice of Cheese Pizza ( $5 ) and 3 Garlic Knots ( $2 for the 3 ) which got put in the oven for a couple of minutes to re-warm them.

The pizza and knots were a good size and pretty good in general quality. Certainly filled me up for lunch. Service was friendly and fairly fast.

The only bad note was the guy serving didn’t wash his hands between fixing a rubbish bin outside and handling food a minute or two later. That’s the sort of thing that makes some people freak out and he needs to make sure he washes his hands next time.

However I’ll probably visit again, although there are a couple of other good Auckland CBD pizza options.

Update

I receive and email from Nick Turner (Director of Sal’s Pizza) in response to the above post. The email is fairly long so I won’t reproduce it here but he has explained the linage behind the “since 1975” tagline which I am satisfied with and with respect to the less than perfect food handling I saw he says:

Because we are always striving for perfection with our product, service and
cleanliness, obviously we are unhappy about the handling of the rubbish bin
before food. We will continue to ensure this does not happen again, and
continue to maintain our Grade A health certificate.

As I said originally I enjoyed the pizza at Sal’s and intend to go back there.

I thought I’d do a little review of one of the places I go to for weekend brunch occasionally.

Cafe Taska (see website) have 3 branches around the Auckland and while I work close to their Vulcan Lane branch their Dominion Rd place is just a few minutes away for the odd weekend splash-out.

Coming from town the cafe is located a block of so past the supermarket on the left hand side. The interior has lots of wood and is fairly dark although they do have a outdoor area out which I’ve not actually used. The daytime menu is the usual suspects plus a few Spanish influenced dishes.

The dish is especially like is the Piperada which is described as “Basque style eggs scrambled with red pepper and tomato sofrito, served in a terracotta cazuela with crusty bread” :

The whole thing is a very tomato-y mix which I find really delicious and is pretty big for the $15.50 is costs.

I also had a coffee and slice which was about normal although their sweet selection is a little more limited than many other places. They sort of try a few things like Baklava and Turkish Delight to be different. The Linzertorte (hazelnut & raspberry Tart) is interesting but not to my taste.

General atmosphere was good, music with mostly instrumental and in the background (the have live music for dinner), service was okay, reading material was a little limited with just one copy of today’s Herald and a couple of magazines.

The big surprise I have about this place is how empty it is for lunch ( at least out the front). I casually dropped by for dinner a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t get a table since it was packed so people definitely know about the place but for some reason don’t see it as a daytime destination.

Overall I quite liked it: 7/10

Cafe Tasca

338 Dominion Rd, Auckland

Menu and photos on website: http://www.tasca.co.nz/

I am getting really sick of going to kiwiblog and having it not load cause the scoop ad network it is using is not loading. In fact the content of the page doesn’t load at all when scoop (or the bit’s kiwiblog uses) is down.

Please David, give up on these guys and switch to somebody else.

Move over Star Trek..