the natural wine bar is dead

Welcome to clipboard, a weekly newsletter about hospo, fashion and Tāmaki Makaurau, by Reilly Hodson. This week, we’re talking about the Karangahape Road wine bar, once the most relevant thing in hospitality, now not really a thing. Also: the triumphant return of TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT, by Mitchell Tan

long live the natural wine restaurant

A few years ago, the natural wine bar was the only trend in hospitality. We’d gone past the craft beer bar, the specialty coffee joint, and the all day eatery, and it seemed like you couldn’t walk a hundred metres without coming across a bar where some moustachioed man would talk to you about skin contact pinot gris or chilled malbec, chased with some sourdough and heirloom tomatoes.

These places all had a lot in common: they mostly served the same wines, the menus looked very similar, as did the dining rooms. They’d roll out a DJ every once in a while, do chef pop ups, all sorts.

In 2021, though, the picture is quite different. The places I’m talking about still exist, of course, and there are more places ever that will serve you a pet nat instead of a methode traditionelle. The focus seems to have decidedly shifted, though, towards being a restaurant that serves natural wine, instead of a bar that serves food.

Nowhere is this more clear than the newly opened Alta, at 366 Karangahape Road. The space that is now Alta used to be Clay, the best of the natural wine bars, in my view. The space was dominated by a massive, room-length table, and the customer base was all trendy fashion types, smoking darts in the back courtyard or splitting a bottle and a pizza inside. The focus was hanging out and trying funky wines.

This year, the Clay team hired a new head chef, Georgia van Prehn, and decided that her talents were wasted on bar snacks. They closed the room down, installed a completely new fit out with a lovely looking leather banquette and reopened this week as Alta, a restaurant that only does an ever-changing four-course set menu. Bookings are required, and the menu is filled with stuff like octopus noodles with beef fat, marmalade and silverbeet, instead of the deceptively simple pastas and pizzas you could get at Clay.

I’m really excited to dine at Alta, I’m hoping it will be something along the lines of Wellington’s Rita, one of my favourite ever restaurants which also only does a set menu and is excellent. I’m gutted, though, that it came at the expense of Clay, which was a firm favourite of mine for chill drinks after work, or a spontaneous stop on a night on Karangahape.

The other great wine bars on the K Road strip are also decidedly restaurant-y, now. Celeste’s instagram name (bar_celeste), is a suggestion rather than a real descriptor for the hot-spot that you need to get a booking to head to, and does a set menu if you’d like. Candela is much the same, delicious and with great wine, but not somewhere you could roll through at the last-minute on a Friday night and get a table for four (I tried to go out for a spontaneous drink on Friday on Ponsonby and K Road, nowhere had room).

There are a few great places to drink wine and hang out, though. Annabel’s is no longer underrated now that Jesse Mulligan went there for dinner, but it’s still my favourite place for a drink and some crispy potatoes, if you can get a table. Star Superette is doing a cool thing called wine club on a Friday where you buy a bottle and pay $20 to drink it with some snacks in the store. It’s a great idea, but it would be cool to do it any night, in a dedicated space. East Street Hall is also a great place for a drink, as is Madame George, but they’re not particularly wine focused.

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that despite appearances, I’m still on the lookout for a great place to just… have a wine, and hang out, without feeling like I should leave so the staff can turn my table, or that I need to order a dinner-sized meal. I’m open to suggestions.

PS: I’m aware that there are great options outside of my Grey Lynn-Ponsonby-Karangahape Road bubble: Bar Martin and Cave a Vin both come to mind, but because they’re a car drive away from me, I don’t find myself heading there often.

clips

• Ted Lasso came back this week, so it’s a great opportunity to (re)watch the first season. Apple TV+ has very little content, but the subscription fee is worth it for that show alone

• A great article in GQ about “The New American Sportswear,” or the next generation of great men’s clothes.

• Commoners just released a pretty good dupe for my favourite Stan Ray painter pants, called the carpenter pant. These ones come in a true black, which is a great win.

• Porter James Sports is essentially Sporty and Rich for NZ guys whose favourite thing to do on a night out is head to the driving range. Their winter collection just dropped, and features some nice pieces like this harrington jacket and this cord cap. 

• I had maybe the best sandwich of my life at Young George in Mt Albert last weekend (the chicken katsu was my pick). They have strange opening hours at the moment as their chef just had a baby, and you have to brave some gnarly roadworks, but it’s worth the trip. Thank you to clipboard reader Juliet for the great rec!

• I’m not a graphic designer, but this typography website is delightful.

• I agree with this article: bring back RSS readers, and make RSS feeds universal again. Also, it is my ambition to one day recapture the magic of early Tumblr, what a great time that was. Share

take it or leave it: graphic tees

By Mitchell Tan, proprietor of Rubbish Bin

i've had a bit of a love hate relationship with graphic tees in recent times. part of me is screaming "grow up" and i feel compelled to go on that quarter-life crisis hunt for the pErFeCt WhItE tEe (which in and of itself is a sisyphean task) and wear that for the rest of my life for every single event, but a good tasteful graphic tee still has a special place. whether that be supporting a homie, a good vintage, or just a cool graphic, it's hard to go past one for the warmer months when it seems like the only viable avenue to show some personality. 

the plague of logomania (more on that in the future) has seemed to muddy the waters across graphic tee-dom, as people often mistake something plastered with Balenciaga in an intentionally corny font as an actually good printed tee, but there are much cheaper and better options. that’s not to say that you can’t flip a brand name into a very cool graphic, which i feel brain dead does very often.

tasteful is obviously very subjective. this varies from person to person, but picking things that show a bit of you on a tee makes for the most powerful graphics! that could be repping your favourite food spot/cafe, band merch (that’s actually a good graphic), a 90s bootleg, or everyone tee de jour - some trippie LSD/psilocybin evoking abstraction. different printing techniques can also lend interesting textures and can juxtapose nicely against something like a garment dyed or stone washed tee.

here’s some of my faves:

brain dead (can’t remember the name)

ockhee tie dye

television marquee moon (this cost me $5 lol)

gimme five king tubby 

rubbish bin love tee (coming soon xo)

obviously this isn’t as hot as my previous takes but yknow, you can still

TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you enjoy clipboard, share it with your friends, I love to get new subscribers! It’s almost too late, but not quite, to share your input in the clipboard anniversary zine, which is increasingly not going to exist in physical form as I continue to discover how much printing things costs. Email me to find out more!