Spice of life

WORDS: JACQUI GIBSON

A walking tour of Sandringham with food historian André Taber offers a tantalising taste of the Auckland neighbourhood’s history

Food historian André Taber is standing on the edge of Sandringham’s Edendale Reserve when he tells me his favourite projects are the ones dreamt up by other people.

The walking tour we’re about to start is a case in point, he says.

The 0.6-kilometre route takes in 13 stops on Sandringham Road in a city suburb dubbed Auckland’s ‘Little India’ due to the growing number of South Asian eateries and shops.

André was commissioned by a Sandringham community group to research the food history of Sandringham and design an app and walking tour for the 2020 Auckland Heritage Festival.

Community facilitator Joanne Harland says the group, called SPiCE (the Sandringham Project in Community Empowerment), wanted to create a heritage walk for the community as a response to Covid-19.

“I loved the project and found out a lot of things I didn’t know about the area,” says André, who led two sell-out food heritage tours of Sandringham during the festival.

To learn that Sandringham’s food heritage encompassed everything from early Māori gardening to fresh-milk vending to some of the city’s first Chinese fruit shops, as well as the traditional foods of Samoan migrants, was fascinating, he says.

Born in Montreal to British and American parents – both classical musicians – André moved to New Zealand from the Netherlands as a teenager. He’s lived in Auckland ever since.

“Like many Aucklanders, I’m curious about how the city evolved. Worldwide, people are exploring cities on foot led by tour guides knowledgeable about food heritage – and now Auckland is joining the trend.”

Today’s guided tour starts near the kūmara- and crop-growing terraces of Ōwairaka (Mount Albert).

Pulling out my phone and opening the SPiCE app, I learn that the reserve on which we’re standing was once a wetland of tī and tuna , common foods of local iwi.

Outside the Edendale Supermarket, our next stop, André explains that the unremarkable-looking shop was originally a general store set up by Sandringham’s first shopkeeper, Norwegian settler Anders Eriken, more than a century ago.

“To learn the food heritage of a place is to understand its wider cultural and social history,” says André, as we duck into Satya Chai Lounge Sandringham a bit further down the road.

“This place references another important chapter in Sandringham’s food history — the arrival of its first restaurants, all of which were Asian,” he says as we sit down.

“Thai restaurant Doy Luang Thai was one of the first on the scene in the 1990s. Then came others like Satya, a popular South Indian restaurant, and this millennial hipster bar next to it, run by the owners’ son, representing the village’s second generation of Asian restaurateurs.”

A taste for history

As we share a plate of spicy fish pakora, André explains his longtime interest in food writing, which increased on a trip to Tahiti exploring the Pacific nation’s traditional cuisine in 1993.

It peaked when André was in his twenties and reading the weekly New York Times food column during a year he spent living with his grandfather in the US.

“At the time, food writing was coming into its own in New Zealand and around the world. Histories about great men doing great deeds were on the wane. Instead, people wanted to know about the histories of ordinary people – who they were, what they did, where they went and what they ate. The rise of food journalism was part of that trend.”

Locally, Wellington journalist David Burton reviewed restaurants and wrote books about the country’s culinary culture. Cuisine magazine was the authority on recipes to try at home and the country’s best places to eat.

For his part, André spent much of the 1990s studying French and history at the University of Auckland, writing papers on topics such as the food harvests of 19th-century England and New Zealand’s female farm workers, who were responsible for boosting food production during World War II.

In 2002 he graduated from Auckland University of Technology with a diploma in journalism and ready to give full-time food writing a go.

“But I found the opportunities for food journalists just too limited. You couldn’t make the same kind of living in New Zealand that you could in places like London and the US. So I pursued a career in television programming instead, fitting in food writing projects where I could and parenting my son.”

By the mid 2000s he’d written guidebooks on buying New Zealand olive oil and the great New Zealand pie. The former earned him a finalist spot in the 2007 New Zealand Guild of Food Writers Culinary Quill Awards – Book of the Year.

In 2012 Random House commissioned André to write an essay on the history of fast food in New Zealand for The Food Truck Cookbook by Michael Van de Elzen.

A year later he wrote a series of articles on the food and drink of the naval ship HMS New Zealand for an exhibition run jointly by Auckland War Memorial Museum and the National Museum of the Royal New Zealand Navy.

These days he contributes to the Aristologist, New Zealand’s food history journal, and regularly attends the annual New Zealand Symposium of Gastronomy & Food History alongside teaching food history at Auckland’s Selwyn College.

The origins of our Chinese cuisine

Right now, says André, as we finish a plate of ‘Xtra Hot Crispy Chicken’, he’s researching a book on the history of Chinese restaurants in New Zealand. Funded by grants from the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, it is due to be published by Massey University Press next year.

André promises the book will feature interesting new insights into the country’s food heritage and cast doubt on the officially recognised date of Chinese migration to New Zealand.

Heading back outside to Sandringham’s busy main road, he explains: “I’ve tracked down some fascinating clues as to where and when the first plate of chop suey was served, which is a cool piece of food history.

“But I also write about New Zealand’s first – that we know of – professional Chinese chef, John Jackson, who arrived in Wellington in 1859. That’s seven years before the first Chinese miners arrived in Otago.”

At the site of the former Prague Bar and Cafe, we reach the end of what’s been a 90-minute interview, a delicious lunch and a first-hand experience of the SPiCE walking tour.

As I read the final entry on the app, I learn that the neighbourhood bar opened in 2011, marking the end of Sandringham’s enduring dry period introduced by Scottish Methodists in the 1890s.

“That’s what I loved about researching this food tour and New Zealand’s food heritage more generally,” says André. “You get to look beyond the surface of a community and discover new, often unexpected, things about the people who once lived there.”

My favourite place

The Occidental Hotel on Auckland’s Vulcan Lane is probably one of my favourite heritage places in the city. I credit my knowledge of its history to Perrin Rowland, my friend and an experienced chef and food writer, also based in Auckland.

I don’t go there a lot now, but I did as a student in the ’90s. I remember the first time I walked in I was struck by how small it was. But that was the case for a lot of hospitality businesses in the early days of the colony. I remind people of this in the food history class I teach at Selwyn College. There were so few people compared with now, so hotels of the time weren’t huge. Stylish, yes. And an ornate Victorian-era building like this, packed with an extraordinary collection of interesting art and objects, was certainly stylish.

tī: cabbage trees tuna: eels

To access SPiCE’s Sandringham food history tour app, visit spice.org.nz

I tell my students it speaks to the aspirations of the era. Built in 1870 and run by Edward Perkins, a flamboyant ex-sailor, it shows you how connected New Zealand was to the global economy even back then. People here wanted fancy hotels as much as the citizens of London or New York did, and Edward catered to these tastes. And the fact that it has continuously operated as a restaurant, bar and hotel for more than 150 years is amazing to me. n

The Occidental Hotel is a Category 1 historic place: heritage.org.nz/list-details/624/Occidental Hotel