Kaikoura Seafood BBQTuesday February 15
(before picture)
By the time we arrived at Kaikoura, whale-watching center of New Zealand, and checked into a motel with a staggering view of the bay and the (snow-capped!) Seaward Kaikoura Mountains, it was around 5 PM. Our hostess noted some points of interest on the map, including a fur-seal colony at our end of town, so we started walking east, following the coast. About halfway along, we encountered Kaikoura Seafood BBQ - just a few tables by the side of the road, a covered space for the coolers of seafood, the grill, and the barbecue, and a boy and a girl cooking and serving.
We continued our walk out onto quiet Kaikoura bay's rutted shelf, where seals snooze, away from the surf-pounded Pacific side. As we found when we climbed to the observation point above, this is the faultline where the Indian/Australian tectonic plate meets the Pacific plate - its siltstone is a risen sea-bed, which must be why the seals look so comfortable lounging on it. It was momentous, monumental. And after its grandeur (and our tiredness), we were happy to walk back to Kaikoura Seafood BBQ for a roadside dinner.
We started with whitebait, a new Zealand specialty we haven't had before - tiny whole fish, transparent and about an inch long. They're thrown into a pan and fried up with some beaten egg, for a sort of fish foo-yong. It was served on wholemeal bread, with lemon and mesclun. It was fine, but didn't really taste like much.
It is part of the Kaikura experience to eat the local crayfish - Kaikoura apparently means "food - crayfish" in Maori. Holt, who spent some of his crucial palate-forming years in New Orleans, couldn't understand at first what this involved. $47 for just ONE crayfish - not a bucketful? "One" turned out to be a healthy lobster-sized monster. Anyone from the Big Easy would have said, "if these are your crawfish, cher, I'd hate to see your alligators." It had been caught (in a pot, lobster-style) by the girl's uncle the night before, and was halved, slathered with garlic, and grilled on the barby as soon as you pointed to it. It came adorned with mesclun, rice, lemon, and a nasturtium. All you got to deal with it was a dinner fork and some napkins, no crackers but your teeth, though Barbara obtained a spoon with a nice sharp end to poke the succulent meat out of every narrow little leg, and even the antennae. And that's what we did.
Later, we saw crayfish at twice the price, doubtless at half the freshness and quality. We are glad we stopped at Kaikoura Seafood BBQ - it topped off a magical day.
By the time we arrived at Kaikoura, whale-watching center of New Zealand, and checked into a motel with a staggering view of the bay and the (snow-capped!) Seaward Kaikoura Mountains, it was around 5 PM. Our hostess noted some points of interest on the map, including a fur-seal colony at our end of town, so we started walking east, following the coast. About halfway along, we encountered Kaikoura Seafood BBQ - just a few tables by the side of the road, a covered space for the coolers of seafood, the grill, and the barbecue, and a boy and a girl cooking and serving.
We continued our walk out onto quiet Kaikoura bay's rutted shelf, where seals snooze, away from the surf-pounded Pacific side. As we found when we climbed to the observation point above, this is the faultline where the Indian/Australian tectonic plate meets the Pacific plate - its siltstone is a risen sea-bed, which must be why the seals look so comfortable lounging on it. It was momentous, monumental. And after its grandeur (and our tiredness), we were happy to walk back to Kaikoura Seafood BBQ for a roadside dinner.
We started with whitebait, a new Zealand specialty we haven't had before - tiny whole fish, transparent and about an inch long. They're thrown into a pan and fried up with some beaten egg, for a sort of fish foo-yong. It was served on wholemeal bread, with lemon and mesclun. It was fine, but didn't really taste like much.
It is part of the Kaikura experience to eat the local crayfish - Kaikoura apparently means "food - crayfish" in Maori. Holt, who spent some of his crucial palate-forming years in New Orleans, couldn't understand at first what this involved. $47 for just ONE crayfish - not a bucketful? "One" turned out to be a healthy lobster-sized monster. Anyone from the Big Easy would have said, "if these are your crawfish, cher, I'd hate to see your alligators." It had been caught (in a pot, lobster-style) by the girl's uncle the night before, and was halved, slathered with garlic, and grilled on the barby as soon as you pointed to it. It came adorned with mesclun, rice, lemon, and a nasturtium. All you got to deal with it was a dinner fork and some napkins, no crackers but your teeth, though Barbara obtained a spoon with a nice sharp end to poke the succulent meat out of every narrow little leg, and even the antennae. And that's what we did.
Later, we saw crayfish at twice the price, doubtless at half the freshness and quality. We are glad we stopped at Kaikoura Seafood BBQ - it topped off a magical day.(after picture)
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