Bell Pepper Blues, Dunedin

Friday February 1

Dunedin, in the far southeast of the South Island, is a very Scottish town, with the Free Kirk, its raison d'etre and major monument, slightly rainy and windswept today. The Lonely Planet guidebook (which has proved to be VERY reliable so far) only had two restaurants that sounded good, and luckily one of them was not far from our hotel, as we'd already walked our feet off to and around the Otago Museum.

Even the waitresses couldn't explain the name Bell Pepper Blues. The place is nondescript on the outside, plain but serene within. We warmed our bones with a bottle of Hatton Estate merlot, which like most merlots here was meatier than even a Cab Sav. And the special soup, a delicate seafood bisque, helped a lot too. Our other starter was scallop tortellini, an exquisite lineup of little dumplings stuffed with big chunks of scallop as well as lovely pink mousseline and decorated with scrawls of lemon and wasabi cream sauce, each topped with a tiny chip of prosciutto.

For mains, we had a char-grilled elk loin - probably wapiti, a deerlike elk or elklike deer which was imported from America to New Zealand for the hunters, and as usual, got loose, overpopulated, and decimated this delicate ecosystem. They were finally rounded up using nets from helicopters, and are now extensively farmed in the South Island. It was perfectly cooked, sprinkled with pepper and porcini mushroom dust, with a roasted white kumara aioli and a sweet red wine and juniper glace de viande, not to mention a smoked bacon yorkshire pudding alongside. Though we still think that our best venison was the wood-smoked stuff at Cook'n' with Gas.

As every NZ restaurant seems to have pork belly on the menu, we tried it here. It was a streaky roll, so unctuous that a mouthful felt like a full meal, and came with puréed potatoes, roasted parsnips, and a muscatel, muscovado sugar, and apple juice glaze. At the end, I could hardly get my jacket on, and the cold wind was no longer a problem.