Editorial: Wairoa cafe serves up hope

WILD: Goats are a fixture on the Napier-Wairoa Road. PHOTO/SUPPLIED

My wife and I drove to Wairoa for lunch last week to entertain my obsession with rural settlements and food.

On the highway, we passed a road sign warning of wild goats for the next 70km. That's a lot of goats. I'm partial to goat curry. Who knows, maybe we'd get lucky and bowl something for dinner.

Wairoa's cold. The imported lighthouse long ago swapped its salty digs for a freshwater river that pushes parallel to the main retail strip.

A son of the provinces, I find myself arriving in these towns with a sense of foreboding.

The spectre of vacant shops is made worse by discount-import gift stores peppering the CBD. They seem wildly out of place here.

A wonderful old two-storey building has plant life growing like epiphytes from its guttering.

A backpackers has "no accommodation available". I couldn't decide whether that meant they were full, or just didn't offer lodgings any more. The optimist in me would like to believe business was booming.

But it's hard to walk these streets and be charitable.

Like many of these former rural strongholds, much of what used to be, is now vestigial.

But there was one standout.

We popped into the riverside EastEnd Cafe and left an hour later in awe. This is a contender for best cafe in the Bay. A mix of funky and folksy, with the most fantastic home-made fare served with utmost professionalism. This exceptional eatery is easily worth the two-hour drive through goat-infested forest.

It could have been the caffeine but we left strangely buoyed by a town post-prime but still unequivocally proud.