Steve Braunias made it his mission to eat at each of the 55 food joints along West Auckland's Lincoln Rd. He has come to the end.
The man who ate Lincoln Rd set out to eat Lincoln Rd and I have, this week, at the conclusion of a long, sometimes arduous but mostly intensely pleasurable journey, succeeded in eating Lincoln Rd.
In February I was seized with the desire to spend the year filling my face at every single one of the 55 food joints in the stripmalls along Lincoln Rd in West Auckland. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I felt it was my destiny. And so I traipsed along that golden mile, 3km to be precise, every week this year, filing online reports on Fridays, ticking off the food joints one by one, eating a lot of chicken and a tub of salt plus fat with that, now and then ready to give up, but I stuck to the task, because when destiny calls you should always pick up.
It began at Texas Chicken and it ended at McDonald's. It was a journey into the known.
Lincoln Rd exists as a nebula of fast-food franchises - it's the way we eat now, the people's food. When we talk about food we don't talk about whatever convoluted, saucy rubbish that Al Brown cooks or Jesse Mulligan reviews; the year's biggest food conversations were the introduction of chicken fries at Burger King, and McDonald's audacious decision to launch the all-day breakfast.
Plus there was the debut of Texas Chicken, a plucky contender in the chook wars, but I've yet to meet anyone who has a good word about their stupid honey buns - is it a savoury, or a sweet?
Flame joined the pizza fight, taking on Lincoln Rd pizzerias Hell, Pizza Hut, and sloppy Sal's. Denny's added Lincoln Rd to its portfolio, in strange circumstances - it was going to be called Dez's, an independent food joint named after director of operations Peter Fernandez, but his Denny's partners talked him out of it. All that remains of his dream is a Dez's sign half-way down Lincoln Rd - why, I can just hear Don McGlashan singing that line.
It was all happening on Lincoln Rd in 2016 and I was there to witness it. Food joint owners trembled when they saw me come in, and gasped: "The man who ate Lincoln Rd!" I cast a long shadow. It will no longer darken the door of Chicos, supposedly the finest dining on Lincoln Rd, but nowhere near as good as Shen's Takeaways three doors down in the same stripmall.
Reputation counts for nothing. It all comes down to the food and the service. A franchise is no guarantee; Columbus Coffee enjoys a good pedigree, but the Lincoln Rd store is kind of shambolic. There are good Coffee Clubs and bad Coffee Clubs throughout New Zealand but I warrant one of the very best is the one in Lincoln Rd, thanks to franchisee Saten Sharma.
Then there are the stand-alone food joints, the ma and pa takeaways and bakeries, sometimes unexpectedly fabulous.
Montage of take away food outlets on Lincoln Road, Henderson. Photo / Michael Craig
I made my final journey for this series along the golden mile on Tuesday, and it was nice to pop into Indian Green Garden takeaways and say hello again to Narain and Grace Sami, who concoct delectable samosas and bhajis. Grace, as per usual, wore glamorous lipstick.
It was likewise good to revisit West City Bakery, where Khan Hak from Cambodia fashions unique little sweet delicacies such as the butterfly cake and a kind of doughnut twist.
But some food joint owners had gone. As in disappeared, skipped town. Such is the sad, cautionary tale of Mr Burger. He opened a burger joint in February. That first week, thieves rammed his back doors open, and stole the giant TV off the walls. He started at the bottom and then defied gravity, because it was all downhill from there.
Most times I went past it was stark raving empty. I went in and gave it a good review, out of kindness; apparently a gang of guys drove in from Mt Eden to try it out on my recommendation.
But not even the man who ate Lincoln Rd could stop the inevitable. The fate of the place was keenly observed by Dylan Reeve, director of David Farrier's hit documentary, Tickled. He sensed a tragedy was in the making early on. He sent me a message on social media in June: "There's a truck at Mr Burger today, taking away kitchen equipment."
It barely lasted six months. A notice eventually appeared on the front door. Mr Burger had served his last meal; now he got served: "This lease has been terminated as a consequence of non-compliance to pay rent." It's a jungle out there.
Nando's, Henderson. Photo / Michael Craig
The attraction and terror of Lincoln Rd is that it could be anywhere in Auckland, anywhere in the world, with its identical multinational corporations serving identical meals.
But it's so beautifully contained, in an easy, convenient three-kilometre stretch. Dominion Rd might boast as many or more franchises but it goes on forever. The paradox of Lincoln Rd is that although it's the street with the second biggest traffic count in New Zealand - 45,000 cars every day - it also makes for a pleasant, hour-long stroll from one end to the other.
The man who walked Lincoln Rd. I hardly ever saw anyone else on the pavement. Only a few weeks ago though I chatted with a beggar who was sprawled on the pavement outside Indian restaurant Chapati.
All of Auckland travels along Lincoln Rd so it wasn't surprising that the homeless washed up on it. He gave me his full name but I don't feel good about using it - he has two adult children, and neither know he's homeless. I asked where he slept and he said he'd found an abandoned house in Ranui which still had electricity. I asked how the begging was going on Lincoln Rd and he said the money wasn't any good, "but look at this!" He opened up his rucksack. It was stuffed with pies and doughnuts and burgers given to him by passersby: Lincoln Rd is always a story about food.
And so I witnessed the changing of the seasons on foot, on a full stomach. I began this odyssey, this quest, at the height of summer, when I traipsed from one food joint to the next in the bright blue light of the Waitakeres.
I had chook, I had fun, in that season in the sun. Then melancholy autumn, then hard, wet winter - my spirits became a little less light-hearted, and I remember one lonely night at Carl's Jnr, back when it had a D hygiene rating, nervously nibbling on a Jim Beam bourbon burger. It was dark and cold outside, cold and too bright inside.
But the burger was delicious, and Carl's Jnr eventually hauled itself out of the shame of its D rating and now sports an A. By the time spring came along, though, I was showing signs of existential dread every time I returned to Lincoln Rd. I felt imprisoned by the place. I felt I was trapped in a circle of hell - the 45,000 cars, the road to nowhere, a continual loop.
It wasn't the food that got to me; the food was usually always really good, and the man who is tired of fries is the man who is tired of life. It was more to do with a crisis of faith in the purpose and direction of western civilisation, a conviction that it was all sliding into the sea - the age of Trump was upon us, and the best we could do was build a stripmall and man it with workers on the minimum wage who served food which relied on polysyllabic chemicals and amino acids for taste? Why celebrate that? Why make a grand tour of something which felt on the point of collapse?
Steve Braunias in Lincoln Rd, Auckland. Photo / Doug Sherring
Outside, there was the homeless guy sprawled in front of Chapati's, who once made a grand score when he cracked a safe at a Glen Eden bar and made off with $96,000, and was never caught; inside, at McDonald's and Burger King and KFC and Texas Chicken and Subway and you name it, there were honest workers toiling away on the $15.25 minimum hourly rate, and if you think oh well they're just kids, consider that the average age of fast food workers is 28. Adults with young families, budgeting for petrol and electricity.
What, I wondered, was the point of Lincoln Rd? What was the point of capitalism? Verily, I was experiencing the Slough of Despond, that necessary step in every pilgrim's progress.
My final tour of duty was on Tuesday. I walked my daughter to her primary school and then kept walking, alongside the Northwestern Motorway, over Henderson Creek, past the playing fields of the Te Atatu Roosters, following the long, rather sensuous line of pylons which swing towards Lincoln Rd via the banks of the Whau River - it's a really nice nature walk.
One time I collected 16 weed specimens. Back home, I Sellotaped them to a sheet of A3 paper, scanned the page, and emailed it to weed expert Dr Kerry Harrington at Massey University for identification.
He replied, "If you were one of my students, I'd give you an E for the quality of your plant collecting as you haven't provided leaves with the flower heads ...B ut I'm up for the challenge so here goes."
He ID'd evening primrose, three-cornered garlic, wild carrot, wild radish, red clover, and scarlet pimpernel. So good to have names for the inhabitants of this unlikely wonderland. One fine apocalyptic day they'll likely take over and bury the crystal palaces of Lincoln Rd beneath a jungle of stalk and flower.
Montage of take away food outlets on Lincoln Road, Henderson. Photo / Michael Craig
But that's in some near or distant future. On Tuesday, I was on a journey to the past - revisiting the constant scene of my wanderings in 2016, my year as the man who ate Lincoln Rd, 55 food joints in four seasons, through good times and bad.
There was the birthday dinner at La Porchetta in June. There was the visit to Bar 159 to raise a glass of beer to my brother Paul who died in August. I called in again to the bar on Tuesday and ordered the same drink - Lion Red, my favourite - and toasted him again.
Then I got back to business. I wanted to wrap things up in style. I walked down Lincoln Rd one side and then back again on the other side in full, blazing sunshine to call in on my favourite food joints, where I chose 13 of my favourite foodstuffs from the year, and set up a picnic feast in an abandoned orchard.
All of Lincoln Rd had once been orchards, and vineyards, the soil rich with kauri gum, peat from drained raupo swamps, horse manure, shell lime, and bone dust. Bells were rung to shoo away the birds. Pioneers feasted on "pigeons of fine flavour" - Lincoln Rd is always a story about food - and the great Dalmatian wine-making families set to work.
French consul Paul Serne was a guest in 1923. "I have come to Henderson, I have drink red wine, then white, eaten pears, then grapes," he wrote. "It is a promised land."
Fine words, too, from novelist Maurice Gee, a native of Henderson, who once wrote of his hometown, "The little knot of Henderson town lay beyond the creek, with orchards and farms spreading out to the ranges."
There isn't a single vine or apple tree still fruiting on Lincoln Rd. Now is the age of the franchise. Paved paradise, put up a drivethrough. I would have loved to have seen the apple blossom in spring on Lincoln Rd but it's a privilege to be alive now and to order from such a range of brightly lit, family-friendly fast-food joints.
I laid out my feast in the long grass and surveyed the dishes. I drank a Funky Monkey from Tank, then a pineapple flavoured Jarriots from Mexicali, ate chicken McNuggets, then Burger King chicken fries, Nando's chicken tenderloin, Texas Chicken chicken, KFC chicken and a side of potato and gravy with bread roll, snapper from Happy Snappa takeaway, Bruce Lee sushi, bhaji from Indian Green Garden, a doughnut from Eves, a doughnut from Le KK Bakery, a doughnut and a butterfly cake from West City Bakery, and six Bavarian creme munchkins from Dunkin', you know, Donuts.
I ate like a king. I dined with the same pleasure as French counsul Paul Serne nearly 100 years ago, and declared, as he declared, that Lincoln Rd was the promised land.
The quest was done. The journey had ended. Lincoln Rd itself is far from finished; the abandoned, overgrown orchard where I held my last supper will surely one day be dug up and turned into a chicken shack stripmall; two more food joints, Momotea and Cafe Lincoln, are about to open their doors at either end of the golden mile. Good luck to them. I might check them out at some stage down the track, but only as a merely curious passerby.
The man who ate Lincoln Rd is no more. He belongs to history. He passes into legend, that wandering glutton, that chronicler of the way we eat, that pilgrim on his slow, solitary progress towards mortality, that collector of 55 playing cards covered in grease, that trade delegate, that restless soul who tested the very limits of human endurance and lived to tell a tale of the New Zealand way of life on a flat, high ridge on the Auckland isthmus - farewell, the man who ate Lincoln Rd.
