New discoveries in my home town

We haven't been on any mini breaks since Auckland last month, primarily because I am flat out at work and we had our massive, awesome office opening party this week which required a great deal of preparation - including painting in the weekends, below are our write-on walls (taken during clean up from the party), the write-on paint hadn't quite cured so we did some other creative stuff.

Staying here in Wellington has given me an opportunity to discover, and rediscover, some great food places. In no particular order we have eaten at:

• Phong Vu on left bank, Vietnamese, cheap and the cuisine for anyone who doesn't eat Gluten - rice / rice noodles in virtually every dish. I love Vietnamese food and we just rediscovered this pace last night - yummy.
• Cafe Breton (on Brandon St) has gluten free crepes, it's like GF heaven, with both sweet and savoury options. Only open for lunch, does a pretty good long black too. I have been there twice this month already - awesome.
• Khandallah Trading Company (formerly MBBK). For the non-Gluten Free among us it was great, with cheap eats and loads of options. For me sadly the staff have no idea what is and isn't GF and the menu is full of bread and sauces. So I stuck with meat and vege - disappointing.
• Fork 'n Brewer. Again great looking menu, we were there for a large party so didn't ask about GF just chose what turned out to be a wonderful Vege stack, honestly for a pub it looked fantastic and tasted great. Steve had Spicy Chicken Wings to go with his various beers and loved them - great.
• Cafe Villa in Ngaio - I have mixed feelings about our lunch there. My GF bread was soggy and eggs under done, while the bacon was almost burnt. My friends had eggs benedict which they loved, so had promise but for me - average.

Back to the office opening, which has been my focus for weeks. We got the food from Smith The Grocer, for the most part if was well received and the staff were lovely, their cocktail menu has loads of GF options. Later in the night as we cleaned up we got Hells - our new office tradition (yep twice makes a tradition) is to get a variety of vegetarian pizzas on gluten free bases - to meet the two variations of dietary requirements in one. They are great, good bases and yummy vege toppings - yum.

Some of my favourite people
I really threw this in to see if anyone reads my blog ;-)

our beautiful flowers for the party

Here they are setting up beforehand.

Final discovery this month was Garage Project. Shane my business partner thought it would be cool to have a local micro-brewery cater the beer, so we got 3 kegs from Garage Project. Everyone gave us awesome feedback and they were great, they stayed for about 3 hours promoting their beer and helping us on the bar (there were about 80 people so that's a few pints to pour). Not a beer drinker but I am told the Trip Hop was the most popular. 

What it looks like from the other side