The Great New Zealand Café - Discover the best in coffee and café culture

 Armed only with a list of recommended cafés, Mathew Hawke and Niki Grennell set off on a three-month odyssey to visit and sample the coffee culture of character cafés the length and breadth of New Zealand.

 Illustrated throughout with colour photographs and a lively text design, this book can be dipped into at random or read as a journey from one café to the next. Particularly good food options are noted, and recipes of signature dishes from cafés are included. Travel notes and text breakouts identify scenic attractions and highlights for both children and adults along the way.

Footsteps graphics follow the authors’ route on the New Zealand café map, and there’s plenty of information about New Zealand’s coffee history and an explanation why there are so many different roasts available in this country.

Here is an example (chosen at random) of how cafes are dealt with:

Strictly Coffee Company

23 Bath Street

Dunedin 9014

Strictly Coffee Company is owned by self-confessed ‘Johnny-come-lately’ Duncan Northover and his partner Lesley Keen. The business has been in operation since the late 1990s and Duncan and Lesley took ownership around 2005. They may be relatively new to this café but they have a history in hospitality and have had instruction from Kiwi roasting guru Craig Miller about the best way to roast coffee.

Strictly has always been a roastery and the focus is coffee not food. That said, the quality of food on offer is often above the standard café fare. Lesley is a kitchen fiend and all the food is made on the premises, apart from the bread.

Strictly is very much like the Tardis (Doctor Who’s time-travel machine) in that from the outside it looks tiny but once inside it is positively spacious. The building is approximately 110 years old and a former stamp-maker’s premises where they could look out the long window over what was at the time paddocks, while they worked. The building has evolved over time to a solid piece of contemporary history in the making.

There are some rules Duncan and Lesley stick to which would serve every aspiring café owner well:

• No excuse for bad coffee.

• Always hire nice staff who leave their attitude at the door. (NB: Prudence the fantastic manager.)

• Remember to have fun.

Ninety per cent of Strictly customers are local return business that comes through the door every day of the week. The rest have either stumbled off course, been drawn in by spiffy reviews, or are aficionados from out of town, like us. This is a community café in the heart of the city, with great coffee.

About the authors:

Matthew Hawke and Niki Grennell wrote and self-published Espresso Escape, a successful book about the best cafés in Auckland. Niki has worked in the tourism business in New Zealand managing cafés and travelling the country. Matthew is a writer with an impressive knowledge of coffee, and he has visited many cafés across the world. 

The book covers the whole country but with an emphasis on cafes outside the four main centres including rural locations like Rawene, Arapuni, Opotiki, Pukehou, Greytown, Maruia, Pukekura, Glenorchy, Omarama, Riverton and many others. The book is a must for the glove box of your car when travelling about NZ packed as it is with coffee recomendations, recipes for delicious cafe food, and travel notes......It is profusely illustrated, all round a most appealing publication.


New Holland - RRP $34.99