A new book documenting New Zealand's restaurant history busts the myth that dining out is a recent Kiwi hobby. By Peter Calder.
One thing above all others made Perrin Rowland ideally equipped to write about the history of eating out in New Zealand: she knew absolutely nothing about it.
So she embarked on the project unburdened by the received wisdom that there was no eating out here until the 1960s.
The effervescent New Yorker, who has been here only five years, first researched the subject for an MA thesis in history at the University of Auckland and spun her work into a book, Dining Out: A History of the Restaurant in New Zealand.
What she discovered will come as a surprise to those who fancy that our forebears all sat at home, grimly eating mutton with grey gravy and boiled cabbage.
Rowland, who trained as a chef in Italy and cooked for several years in Ireland and California, says food history - like any other history - is full of popular memories that don't withstand scrutiny: our restaurantless society is one of them.
"I didn't know the story that there were no restaurants in New Zealand before the 1960s and so I started researching. When I mentioned at a food conference what I was doing I was getting laughed at by people who were saying 'There is no story there, you idiot'. And I said 'What's all this stuff I'm finding from the 19th century?'."
What's mythbusting, even iconoclastic, about Rowland's book is that she uncovers a long, rich and sophisticated dining-out culture stretching back to the early years of the new colony.
"I went back to the 1860s because it's really an urban story and it wasn't until the 1850s that the first townships were happening, but I found ordinary menus [an ordinary was the 19th-century term for a fixed-price lunch] from the 1840s. Newspapers don't really go that much earlier but I would not be surprised if there were restaurants in Russell earlier than that.
"But the old newspapers are talking about restaurants in Berlin and Paris and Japan. The idea that New Zealand was isolated and cut off is wrong. They were keeping tabs on what the Prince of Prussia was having for dinner."
Rowland believes the idea that eating out in New Zealand is a late 20th-century invention derives from a changing idea of what a restaurant is.
"It's not a static construct. The restaurant has an aura of newness: it's always the most modern in food, décor and service and when the fashion changes and restaurants don't keep up, they stop being thought of as restaurants. A really good example of this is Pizza Hut. When it arrived in New Zealand [in New Lynn in 1974] it got a wine licence in an era when it was expensive and complicated to get one. For a year or two it was the most popular place to eat out but then when the restaurant scene changed it was no longer the most modern and people don't really think of it as a restaurant any more."
Likewise, the 90s fashion in restaurants was indoor/outdoor flow and wide-open aspects; the best restaurants in Auckland in 2010 are closed in and at the very best, diners knock on the door.
The biggest single upheaval in eating out was unquestionably the arrival of restaurant licensing in 1961. Wine had not been integral to the restaurant experience in the new world ("Drinking wine with dinner was not seen as a sophisticated thing to do," says Rowland) although upscale eateries had turned a blind eye to diners - many prominent citizens, including judges - with paper-bagged bottles by their chair legs before that. But when the Catholic Archbishop of Wellington ventured the view that our drinking habits could be improved by "the taking of wine with food in a dignified restaurant", Parliament relented and, in response to 3000 applications, granted 10 licences nationwide - four in Auckland.
Like it or not, New Zealand has a proud dining history, says Rowland.
"We look back with modern eyes and say there was no dining out because they weren't dining out the way we used to dine out.
"But there's also a sort of cultural cringe about the quality of New Zealand history. Every decade from the 1950s onward has somebody saying in the public record 'Look at how far we've come and how bad the immediate past was'."
* Dining Out: A History of the Restaurant in New Zealand by Perrin Rowland is published on Friday by Auckland University Press, $59.99. Rowland will also appear in conversation with Peter Calder at the Going West Books and Writers festival next weekend.
