A parallel conspectus of pies.

Although we devoted large amounts of our own resources into ‘Vernacular’, our travels were not exactly an exercise in privation. Many of our early meetings took place at our favourite Auckland restaurant, Cazador, where Rebecca and Dariush provided us with a power point at an important time (as we prepared our pitch to send to Potton & Burton Publishing). Later on in the piece, my wife and David’s girlfriend probably tired of hearing about all of the great places we had eaten meals or drunk beer as we went out to various parts of the country. In truth, the location of a certain impending meal did, on occasion, shape the agenda.

We took a special interest in conducting an informal survey of pies throughout New Zealand, and can announce our findings with some degree of authority. The South Island had it all over the North, with the best pies coming from (in descending order) The West Coast Food Co. in Hari Hari, The Kissing Gate Café in Middlemarch (where David also took great delight in consuming that staple of the South Island, the cheese roll, pictured below), and Ginger Dynamite in Riwaka (which recently reopened after a fire destroyed their premises earlier in the year). Undoubtedly, there will be some who dismiss these amateur findings as balderdash and conjecture (in favour of other establishments). It is indeed a fraught subject.