Every couple has a special restaurant. Their old familiar, their venue of romance - first date, first kiss, or not even necessarily a debut, more just some place they picked up along the way and kept returning to, over and over, affirming their love for each other as soon as they step in through the door for dinner. Only adulterers have a special lunchtime restaurant. The rest of us are out in the open, wholesome couples with normal appetites. “Our second home,” she texted when I sent her a photo on Monday night. I was in Wellington to report on the Scott Watson appeal. Our restaurant was The Jasmin.
Every couple wants to go downtown. “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely/ You can always go downtown,” sang Petula Clark, but she’s not seeing the full picture: downtown is just as exciting, just as glamorous, just as full of possibilities for couples as it is for singles wanting to be couples. The Jasmin is on Lambton Quay. It’s the best downtown street in all of New Zealand - Queen St in Auckland is a violent nightmare, George St in Dunedin has mental health issues, Victoria St in Hamilton is okay for a couple of blocks but fizzles out into feral territory, and does Christchurch have anything left you can really describe as a downtown street? I walked along Lambton Quay’s sensual curves each night after the appeal towards The Jasmin, in the falling rain, among thousands of people in winter coats, and I fancied that their faces were not at all tired but lit up by shop fronts and street lights - their faces glowed like flames.
Every couple longs to say to a barman or a waiter: “The usual.” They want the patterns of romance; love has so many good and charming habits, and a special restaurant is up there at the top of their beautiful routines. The Jasmin is in one of the strangest arcades in downtown New Zealand: the James Cook Arcade. It has a barbershop and a shoe repair shop. They are very good shops, but the reason thousands and thousands of people queue in the arcade every morning and every night is it has an elevator that goes up to The Terrace, that long serious street of office blocks employing whatever remains of the civil service. I wrote stories about the Scott Watson appeal on my phone; I tapped out a fair bit of them in the elevator queue while waiting to go up to my room at the James Cook Hotel on The Terrace.
Every couple wants a witness. They want someone to know what they know, that they belong together - they want someone to see them at their best. Friends and family are good for that sort of thing, but it’s better if it’s someone without bias, someone who’s just there to bring them the menu. “Beautiful lady,” the waitresses would always say when we went to The Jasmin. It’s on a mezzanine floor in the arcade. It’s up a very narrow little winding staircase. It’s set back from Lambton Quay. It doesn’t have windows. It has green carpet and green trim, and it has a peculiar row of dried flower bouquets on the wall. It’s a twilight zone and it’s been there, incredibly, since 1980: coming up to 45 years, and still massively popular. It was half-full on Monday night. It was totally packed on Tuesday night. The Jasmin has a place in Wellington’s heart.
Every couple has their favourite meal at their favourite restaurant. I always ordered the Black Pepper Steak Sizzle ($33), wok-fried fillet steak with ginger, onion, scallion and black pepper, served on a sizzle platter; she always ordered the Chicken in Hot Pepper Sauce ($29), wok-fried sliced chicken with capsicums, water chestnuts and seasonal vegetables in a rich sweet and salty sauce with dried chillies and peanuts. “Where is beautiful lady?” Every couple is really at their special restaurant because their love for each other is on the menu. It’s not on the entrees - that would be weird, a bit miniscule - but more so on the whole-hearted mains and definitely on the wicked desserts. They want to get fat on love.
