DINING OUT

A History of the Restaurant in New Zealand
Perrin Rowland
RRP: $59.99

Auckland University Press

Publication 10 September.

From oyster bars and ordinaries to hotel dining rooms, from Dunedin’s
Savoy to K Road’s Hi Diddle Griddle, from haute cuisine to Pacific flavours, from hogget to hapuka – Dining Out introduces us to the history of the New Zealand restaurant from the 1860s to the present.

Drawing on menus, memories, photographs and newspapers, Perrin Rowland tells the story of New Zealand’s first nineteenth-century restaurants; luxury in the golden age; licensing and the Depression years; World War II and the Americans; post-war dining and the six o’clock swill; the rise of ethnic restaurants; and our contemporary explosion of flavours. Throughout she asks important questions about the ways New Zealanders have eaten out. How did international trends
– from hamburgers to nouvelle cuisine – shape the restaurant experience? How have New Zealanders reconciled a culture of the ordinary bloke with the luxury of dining out? And was it really all bad coffee and soggy chips before 1980?

Extensively illustrated and engagingly written, Dining Out is a great,
gastronomical tour through New Zealand history revealing the far greater role restaurants played in our cultural and social history than suspected, and not just since the 1960s!
Pic above - The "American Invasion" inspired a wave of US-themed milk bars like this Wellington's Golden Gate in the 1940s. Photo / Greek Orthodox Community of Wellington and Suburbs Inc, Collection

Perrin Rowland shows that in amongst the silver service and salads of the New Zealand restaurant experience lies a great story about the way our peoples and cultures have changed over the last 150 years.

The books audience will include readers of social and cultural history,
foodies, culinary experts and cooks, nostalgia market. This is a handsome, finely produced book and I tip my hat to the author and publishers.

About the author

American-born, Auckland-based Perrin J Rowland is uniquely placed to take on this her first book.
A former chef who trained in Florence, Italy, Rowland has eaten and studied her way out to the Pacific, where she found that the New Zealand restaurant had been left off the menu of its culinary history. Rowland has since rectified that omission with her MA (1st Class Hons) thesis for The University of Auckland, “Entrée: A History of the New Zealand Restaurant from the 1860s to the 1960s”, writing for Te Ara:The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand
and by producing Dining Out, which has drawn on her thesis.

Rowland enjoys a double-stranded career, working as Programme and Communications Manager of the Goodfellow Unit, School of Population Health, The University of Auckland, and as a freelance functions chef in Auckland city.
Footnote:
There was an excellent one page story about the book by Peter Calder on the Herald on Sunday, 5 September 2010, click here to read.

And Peter Calder will be in conversation with the author during this weekend at the Going West Festival.