Anger Burger

It feels 200% different to be in another country with a car and a local.  Five years ago I was 25, alone, and for the most part just winging it.  I was staying in Wellington, a city uniquely friendly to travelers and foot-traffic, but I was 10,000 miles away from home and celebrating Christmas and New Years with near-total strangers.  Still, it was formative and critically important in my development as an adult; I don’t think you can know yourself well at all until you’ve traveled alone.

Compare this to arriving, getting into a car, having a local say, “Want to eat the best fish and chips around?” and then be off for it, and, well, there is no comparison.  It feels a little like cheating.  Scrumptious, scrumptious cheating.

Mike ‘s “dinner” portion of fish, which translated from Kiwi means “dinner plate sized fillet”.

But right she was, and I’m here to tell you: Americans?  We rarely do fish and chips right, and I’ve even bragged about places.    Plimmerton Fish Supply in (surprise!) Plimmerton soundly kicked the asses of any chips places I’ve been to in the last few years.  I mean, brutally murdered the asses of any other chips places.  The fish was incredibly fresh and flaky with a disgustingly delightful batter that tasted like a savory doughnut.  They do their frying in 100% rice bran oil, which is not only a relatively healthy oil, but has almost no real flavor of its own.

I ordered kumara (what locals call sweet potato) instead of potato chips and moaned my way through the pile.  They were, in a word, fuckingdelicious. I didn’t eat a drop of ketchup or tartar with my meal, it was so good.  Also up there, to the upper left of the kumara chips, was a single battered mussel ordered ala carte.  It was mediocre — oversized mussels can be hard to eat, and this one was no exception.  Normally I really like mussels and New Zealand is home to some of the best in the world, but if you can’t bite through a piece it takes a little bit of the fun out of eating.  I’ll try their oysters next time.  The cole slaw was also excellent, but aggravated my Crohn’s the next day enough that I won’t be risking it again.

Another attempt was made at a meat pie, this time a lamb curry and clearly inferior to yesterday’s lovely handmade specimens.  However, still fantastic.  Still buttery flaky pastry, still well-flavored meat and gravy.  This one suffered only in filling texture, being faintly too gelatinous to respect entirely.  And yet another reason to appreciate having Mike along: since we can share meatpies, I can sample twice as many.

And, quickly now before I am off to do something else: some hot nutz for your pleasure.