The four of us were sitting in Soto posing that daft question: "Which nation's food would you have if you could have only one?" and for the first time I realised that my long-standing allegiance to Italian food might be wavering.

Ticking all the boxes is this village cafe, from its jars of juice to its radically aproned staff — and, of course, the fare .

It is not easy to decide which lie Helen Dunmore was talking about when she titled her new book.

It was friends who'd moved down country 20 years before and returned to the French Cafe for their wedding anniversary who proclaimed: "It was still brilliant, even better than before."

If you’re on a jaunt north of Auckland, a revamped cafe has just the thing to calm the hunger pangs — and a standout hot chocolate too.

Consider being commissioned and hard-pressed to write the biography of an old, famous, living author.

Does an Italian restaurant need to be run by Italians?

Extensive footnotes make this hard to follow, as Nicky Pellegrino discovers.

Walt and Judy, of 1970s small-town Vermont, can't conceive a child. For all their mutual tenderness, life has become just "a collection of gestures and habits". So they adopt.

The classic, clever cuisine is the real star of this tiny Pt Chevalier eatery.

The wealth gap is provoking much contemporary anxiety. But the financial imbalance between, say, Bill Gates or Warren Buffet and the Big-Mac slinger is a shadow of that which existed between the first American capitalist barons.

Regulars of the Bridgeway cinema and others who frequent this once-sleepy Auckland suburb, just over the bridge, have known about the Stafford Road Wine Bar for a while.