The Exact Same Word
COLLISION 00025
To think that I almost didn’t eat at Graze Wine Bar in Wellington, New Zealand. It remains, months later, one of my favorite dining experiences of the year. The format was honestly made for someone like me: an adventurous, curious over-eater who loves to try lots and lots of anything and everything.
I owe my lack of regret to a restaurant manager at Koji, another Wellington must-dine. While sharing his favorite spots in the city, after having served me a top-notch tasting menu from his own kitchen, he had made it quite clear that Graze was a reservation I didn’t want to not make.
And so I made it for my last evening in town.
An evening at Graze starts off with careful and thoughtful intake of the small dining room’s single chalkboard menu, posted in clear view with that day’s offerings. Fresh catches, local ingredients, creative vegetable dishes and storytelling inside of storytelling abound. Dishes are listed by size with the desserts rounding out the bottom of the chalkboard.
One can try the whole board at Graze, an innovative menu option I honestly should have selected given how much I ordered that evening. Or one can roll the dice, asking the chefs to divvy up what’s available into a series of surprise Snack Attacks.
Each Snack Attack is a small-plate portion served in sets of threes. My reservation was lucky enough to come with a seat at the counter, where I watched the chefs work from a compact, tidy space, churning out enormous, inventive flavors one Snack Attack at a time. The counter is a seat, and an experience in taste and community, not to be missed.
In Taste, Up Close, Tessera Edition 55, I wrote about the influence New Zealand’s small-format kitchens had on me. Still not knowing exactly where their influence would carry me one day, I find that my fascination with them lingers, unsolved, six months later. Graze was the first of many Kiwi eateries I came to enjoy, whose petite square footage betrayed their hefty culinary prowess and super-sized imagination.
Beyond my taste buds finding an almost impossible-to-explain rapture in these small-format restaurants, the restaurants inevitably facilitated something else. Encounter. Ordering and surviving three Snack Attacks at Graze meant I had held onto my counter seat through two seatings of two pairs of dining companions.
When I initially sat down, a mother-son duo occupied the counter stools to the left of me. Straightaway, they were inclusive and welcoming, not to mention hilariously sassy and full of opinion about New Zealand’s North Island over its South Island. I hadn’t even ordered yet and I already knew, because of these two, that Graze was the kind of place where real people came to eat “real, real good” food.
After the mother and son left, two women my age took over their seats. Toward the end of our meals, we all got to talking. They were smart and successful, not superficial braggarts or social climbers, just women who clearly worked serious jobs that made a serious difference. They projected something that I made a note right then and there to admire far more often. They were comfortable, confident and real.
We talked global politics, food, travel and wine. They recommended two wineries in Martinborough, which was to be my next stop in New Zealand the next day. One of their recommendations was owned and operated by a female vintner, and it felt all the more special to have tasted there at these women’s gentle behest.
As we were settling bills, they invited me to join them after dinner at a Chinese Lantern Festival they were attending just up the hill in the Wellington Botanical Gardens. I thoroughly and utterly surprised myself by saying the exact same word that had brought me to Graze that very night.
Yes.
