Eating in New Zealand

It’s a buffet place but with a twist - desserts! Just located within the Stamford Hotel on lower Albert Street in the City @ $18 per person for a all-you-can-gorge sugar rush. Given that couple of my friends have several sweet tooth and haven’t visited this place, I thought I’d bring them to this place but with a caveat - the selection at the buffet will be very limited. All right, they said…

[Shot of the dessert buffet table]

Though I wasn’t able to get a shot of the dessert selection themselves (I’m still quite self conscious…sigh) I took a photo of the dessert selection - all of which sit under the lighted section as shown in the photo. Apart from four different kinds of cheese and the various canned / fresh fruits (canned peach & Pineapple, fresh watermelon, rockmelon and other things), there are a number of sweet-looking items that looks like they pack some decent cholesterol… it’s a little counterproductive to think about these things at a buffet, but the way these desserts looked were totally shouting “…eat me! It’s a buffet so it doesn’t really matter if I, the cheesecake, look a little bit crumpled from all the other diners digging into me! Just eat and forget!~”. Hallucinations aside, the offerings at the dessert buffet were really quite tiny give the price we’ve paid.

[Cheese platter courtesy of moi!]

If I was going to pack on fat and calories then I might as well doing it with my preferred dairy products - cheese! Thankfully their cheese selection is decent (most NZ cheeses are) and I had a fun time trying to rid of myself of a block of blue cheese, amongst a gathering of Camembert, nuts, dried apricots and crackers. Way better than the overly sweet desserts, I say! (I did end up having a serving of the tiramisu that my friends said were OK… and it was :)

[Fruit platter for me!]

The effects of guilt after stuffing myself with an insane amount of cheese (relative to my normal consumption, which is almost nil) prompted me to get some fruits in the hopes that it will ‘balance out’ the sins I’ve committed.. er… I mean the five-plus-a-day balanced diet thing. Gotta eat your fruits and veggies! I had some honeymelon and watermelon given that I didn’t like canned peaches and pineapples too much. They were fairly fresh and not artificially sweetened with sugar water or anything so that was good. I would’ve gotten myself a bit more but it didn’t seem the establishment were too keen on refilling the dessert buffet section too often, which is another reason why I thought the price we paid was quite expensive. We did have a big group though (around 7 of us) so wherever we go with our plates is going to end up like the aftermath of a locust swarm anyway - but I would’ve thought that given it’s a hotel environment, they would’ve kept things looking nice and filled up the empty cheese platter or the non-existence of watermelon on the fruit platter (both thanks to the careful work of yours truly).

Overall, this place is OK - if you’re wanting a ‘dessert buffet’ experience. If you’re not averse to the price of High Tea then I’d strongly recommend you have that instead (Langham Hotel does this) to get your sweet tooth fix. Otherwise at $18 per person, the dessert buffet is somewhere good to visit if you have no high cholesterol, no heart problems, and have a penchant for punishing yourself by eating really really sweet things in large quantities! Me and my friends probably won’t return until end of the year, when we’ve all forgotten forgotten the shock of so much sugar rushing through our bodies… but if that sounds like your cup of tea, the contact details are below!

Contact details:

Stamford Plaza, Lower Albert Street
Auckland
(09)357 9220

Hours:

7 Days: 6.30 - 10am, 12 - 3pm, 6 - 10pm

One of the hangups about tutoring during summer school is the lack of time available for eating lunch anywhere else BUT on campus. No prizes for guessing where I’m having my lunch today!

For today’s lunch, I got myself the Chicken pesto wrap from Deluca’s cafe on level 1 of the Owen Glen /OGGB building. It’s the first time I’m having this wrap, and since it only costs $6 I wasn’t personally expecting much at all.  Upon closer inspection though, the amount of portion appears to be similar to that offered for a panini!

And I guess I was right; 30 minutes after the wrap I am still feeling satisfied from the meal, so it’s personal proof for me that the portion is more than enough as lunch! In terms of taste, the avocado, chicken, and basil pesto all goes very well together (Although I do miss the melting cheese component I usually have within the panini) and the wrap does a fairly good job of holding everything together, literally. One of the reasons that I haven’t tried this wrap is also because that it is usually sold out by the time I head up to buy my lunch; now that I’ve had a taste, I’ll certainly be looking forward to try this again next week!