Anger Burger

I know what you are thinking: where’s the damn meatpie reporting in this three-legged dog of a blog?  RELAX.  It is here.

A long, long time ago¹, when I was last in Wellington there was a lot of scuttlebutt around town that the cafe to be at if you were a nerd was Chocolate Fish in Miramar.  Why the place to be?  Well, it was the Weta Studios cafe of choice.  What is Weta you ask?  HOW DARE YOU!  It’s the home of Lord of the Rings!  The movies, I mean.  So basically: the best prop masters in the world, something that titillates my ocelot if you know what I mean and I think you do.  And apparently, anyone that fancied themselves a potential employee of Weta could do worse than to sit around Chocolate Fish cafe and make note of who’s who.  So off we went!

As memory serves, it was a beautiful beachfront little cafe with an excellent savory scone and ample servings of its eponymous treats.  Since we were going to be in the area today, I begged my host to take us to Chocolate Fish so I could relive the footloose carefree days of my youth.

And it’s not there anymore.

Here’s the weird thing: I Googled it and in a kind of blind hopefulness ignored the results that clearly said stuff like “Beloved Miramar Cafe Closing” and yadda yadda and instead focused on the fact that Google Maps still located the cafe at 497a Karaka Road, so off we went.  And discovered that it is now called, of all things, Scorch-o-Rama.  I know, I don’t know either.  I was deflated and we needed to eat so we went in.

Perhaps I deserved it, but their pies were abysmal.  Mike’s egg and bacon pie (above) looked great on paper but ended up being a bland, heavy lump of hard-cooked egg and tasteless pieces of ham.  He made it through about a third of it before giving up.  At least the accompanying tomato chutney was tasty, a pleasant sweet-tart alternative to ketchup.

My friend and I shared a spinach and feta pie, which was mostly empty and suffered as Mike’s did from a fatal run-in with a microwave.  Meatpies are commonly and blessedly made from flaky pastry.  Scorch-o-Rama’s pies are made from a tough, unseasoned crust that seemed to be intended not for taste, but for durability.

When I got home I looked up the demise of Chocolate Fish on the internet and encountered a scandal!  Apparently in 2007 the building’s owners raised the rent of the cafe something astronomical (one reliable source claims it was raised from $800 to $8,000 a month) coincidentally around the time their son completed training to be a cook.  So distraught was the community that the city council stepped in to ensure Chocolate Fish could move somewhere nearby with minimum fuss. 

But wait!  Soon after a community petition went around to save Chocolate Fish, the landlord killed himself!  And the blame was placed on mean notes on Facebook!  Escandalo! (Crotchety Deborah Coddington can bring you up to speed here, but be warned: she gives the Baby Boomer set a bad name by blustering in confusion about “blogs”.)  Yikes!  And then the son did open a new cafe in Chocolate Fish’s old spot!  It’s like Days of Our Lives in cafe form.

But who knows what the truth is here, other than: meatpie fail.  No good.  The rest is just drama.

¹ Five years ago.