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Katie Williams and Les Williams met in the 70s while making meatballs at a bakery in Hastings.
They later bought their own bakery, Nutmegs Pastry, where meatballs remained a key feature.
The couple will attend the sold out Hastings' inaugural Meatball Festival, celebrating the local delicacy’s nostalgic appeal and their lasting love.
It was love at first meatball.
The precise rolling motion, the shake of the crumb, the crispy crunch.
Over “raunchy” conversations while making the Hastings treat, Les and Katie Williams didn’t just create an increasingly iconic snack, they started what has become a near-50-year love story.
Friday marks the inaugural Meatball Festival, a slightly mad, rather ballsy and completely sold-out Hawke’s Bay event that is set to see thousands descend on Hastings city centre to try and to celebrate the humble delicacy.
Among them will be Les and Katie, who met while making the meatball into the institution that it is today.
Katie Williams started her baking apprenticeship at the Lilac Continental Patisserie on Heretaunga St East in 1976, training under German baker Ekhardt Kohnke.
“I was the first girl in New Zealand to get an apprenticeship as a girl in a bakery,” Katie said proudly.
This is where she learned the process of making the Hastings meatball, made popular by Dutch patisserie-chef immigrant Gerard Denijs, who in 1953, introduced New Zealand to a meatball based on the Netherlands’ “Bitterballen”.
Katie Williams at 16 next to Ekhardt Kohnke, the German owner of The Lilac in 1976.
With just a few weeks to go on her apprenticeship, Katie was shipped off to Barnes Bakery in Mahora and there she met a handsome young man named Les, her future husband.
“There was chemistry across the bakery, but working on the meatball bench gave us a chance to talk and get to know each other,” Les said.
“As we were both quite young some of the conversations were a bit raunchy.
“We fell in love and 45 years later meatballs are still part of our lives, even our 2-year-old mokopuna Frankie loves them.”
In 1981, Katie and Les bought Wyndham Home Cookery in Hastings, opposite Thompson Suits, and renamed it Nutmegs Pastry. There, they rolled out their own “special little meatballs”.
“My retired parents, Bart and Muriel Russell, came in two days a week to roll the balls and dip and breadcrumb them,” Katie said.
“[It was] a family business”.
Although Katie has left the baking trade, Les still works as a baker at New World Hastings, and meatballs are still a big part of their lives.
“Every time we go away we have to take dozens of meatballs with us,” she said.
“Our youngest daughter got married [in] January and she wanted meatballs, so we got 100 little meatballs made the size they used to do at the Lilac, which were smaller than what they are now.
“There were people from all over New Zealand and overseas and everyone went crazy on these meatballs.”
Katie and Les are looking forward to attending Hastings’ inaugural sold-out Meatball Festival to see what people from outside the district think of the crumbed balls.
“When people taste them from outside the district, everyone just loves them – these bizarre, strange little meatballs,” Katie said.
Hastings mayor Sandra Hazlehurst also has a long love affair with the meatball. She can remember her father making them at Warren’s Bakery, once owned by her family.
“Hopefully, our meatball festival will put these iconic treats on the national culinary map,” she said.
The sold-out Meatball Festival will be held in and around Hastings CBD on Friday, March 14, between 5 and 8pm.
Hastings District Council recommends ticket holders find parking spaces in the surrounding streets, but not in the New World car park, where towing enforcement is in place for non-customers.
There are chill-out zones at Albert and Landmarks Squares, ideal for families and groups to picnic at and the iSite will be selling a Dick Frizzell-designed T-shirt and teatowel.
Attendees can vote for their favourite meatball in the People’s Choice award, with the winner being inducted into the “Hastings Ball of Fame”.
The Meatball Festival kicks off Fawc for 2025 – the region’s Food and Wine Classic.
It will include events like the Church Road Chardonnay Experience, Cuisine magazine’s Grand Long Lunch, An Ocean Odyssey at St Georges Restaurant, and The Coastal Cocktail Trail amongst many other unique food and wine experiences that won’t be found anywhere else but Hawke’s Bay.
The festival runs March 14 to 23 and tickets for events can be purchased at the Fawc website.
Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke’s Bay Today and spent the last 15 years working in radio and media in Auckland, London, Berlin, and Napier. He reports on all stories relevant to residents of the region.
