Tag Archives: vegetarian

Expressoholic

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As much as I love a visit to a fine dining establishment such as Ti Kouka, sometimes it’s nice to just have somewhere you can go for a hearty laid back feed, coffee, beer and just enjoy some solid yet tasty food without hurting the budget too much.

Expressoholic has been open for around 24 years, although not always in the same location – first starting off on Willis St, before moving to Courtney Place for 18 years, until a rental dispute forced them to move to Cuba St.

I only became acquainted with Expressoholic after the Cuba St move, which put it right inbetween work and home for both my best mate and myself, making it an ideal option for our brunch and coffee needs.

I feel obligated to point out that for a cafe with a label of “Expressoholic”, their coffee is pretty standard Wellington fare – it’s a decent brew, but nothing that stands above other options in Wellington (in 2012 anyway – when they opened, I expect it would have been a bit of a game changer).

However any concerns about the coffee are forgiven as long as they continue to serve up delicious, well sized and affordable meals with lots of vegetarian options. :-)

Pancakes with berry and marzipan.

Deluxe Nachoes - the ratio of topping to cornchips is very heavily stacked towards the topping, great lunch or dinner option.

Tofu Burger - one of my favourite options, but it's a big meal! Their fries are cooked perfectly too, the exact right crunch.

Depending who's making them, the milkshakes can be average or amazing. Either way, never disappointed.

I rate the food here highly, all the meals are always well prepared to a consistent standard, served promptly and with the range on the menu, there’s always an option regardless of what you fancy that day.

The service is also excellent, with friendly and effective staff including the owner who’s often serving tables and clearing up afterwards.

For added points; unlike many Wellington Cafes, Expressoholic is open into the evenings and has a liquor license, so if you want to enjoy a beer whilst chomping down a hearty plate of nachoes, this is the place to go.

Whilst I’m not a huge fan of their black & white decor, the table art is pretty neat and they recently expanded into the shop next door adding a number of additional tables, since the expansion there’s been a table every time on 99% of our visits – be smart and avoid the typical weekend lunch rush hour though, it is a popular location.

Mirrors showing off your dreamy blogger who you know and love/hate. Note pre-coffee hair.

Expressoholic is located at 136 Cuba St, just a block up from the bucket fountain, well worth a stop whenever in Wellington.

Takapuna Beach Wanders

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Because I’m getting nowhere near as much exercise as I previously did in Wellington, I’m trying to get out and do regular walks in Auckland.

My currently frequent circuit is around Takapuna and along the beach which is always enjoyable and certainly very popular with other walkers, joggers, swimmers and other water sports.

Very tempted to go for a swim in the beach in the near future when there’s a nice hot weekend day, it’s certainly popular for that and with the very gradual beach it looks like it’s quite shallow for some way.

Takapuna beach in the evening. I do love coming down here late at night when the beach is almost pitch black and wandering along the beach with only a few other weirdo night owls walking dogs as company.

At the boat ramp end of the beach there is the Takapuna Beach Cafe which offers brunch options including a number of vegetarian options and seems quite popular with the locals, being packed whenever I go there.

I personally don’t rate their food that highly, I think it’s somewhat average and should be better for the premium they charge, although I can’t fault the location and views from there.

Vege brunch at Takapuna Beach Cafe. Looks promising, but didn't really do anything for me, not a huge tomato fan, the hash cake thing was a bit bland and the toast just a bit plain.

View out over Takapuna Beach. Although TBH I prefer the view of all the fine ladies when walking along the beach. ;-)

On the plus side, the beach cafe *does* offer some excellent gelato and the gelato takeaway portion of the cafe is open till late in the evenings even on weekends. It’s better priced and better tasting than the Movenpick along Hurstmare Rd as well.

Always nice stopping for a gelato on the walk, although that’s probably not helping with the whole getting less fat plan. ;-)

I’ve got a pretty good loop circuit from our apartment block, down the highway to Hauraki, along the full length of Takapuna Beach and then back through Takapuna’s shopping district.

The area near Esmonde Rd has a marshy swamp area that’s always interesting, with a seemingly large population of Pukekos living there and wandering out onto the pedestrian area and sometimes even Akaranga bus terminal to say hello.

Pukekos are lurking....

All up it’s a 5.89km walk that takes about an hour (average walking speed of 6.74 km/h) and is reasonably varied, although lacking of any hills. :-(

You can view this map in full size on Google Maps.

Melbourne: Day 01

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Had a bit of a sleep in on my first full day in Melbourne, eventually @MissNickiBee came and looked at me disapprovingly till I got up off the floor.

Start off with coffee and breakfast in a cafe down some side street, before wandering into the city via the streets of Melbourne.

I love all the old buildings and how much historical feel that Melbourne has – despite being an uber geek, I appreciate the older architecture and tend to find that it’s more interesting than many modern constructions.

Large brick constructions - wouldn't survive in welly with all our quakes! ;-)

More detailed look

Ideally I’d like to buy something like a 1900ish villa for myself, and renovate so it has modern ethernet, power, bathroom, kitchen, etc inside, yet still retain the classic hard wooden feel.

Of course in Wellington this wouldn’t be cheap, so clearly I need to marry rich/moonlight as cougarbait/sell hacks to dodgy types/something to boost my salary to support the half a million price tag. Or stop buying computer kit for a bit :-/

Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of the cute Melbourne houses, but they look amazing with their iron trellises and cute picturesque gardens.

Of course, Melbourne has large modern towers as well :-)

Towering tower blocks of toweringness

Our first proper stop was the Melbourne Aquarium, @MissNickiBee had some discount tickets which helped.

Was an amazing visit, it’s far larger than Kelly Tartans (although they might have more penguins) and lots and lots of detail about different species.

I took a huge number of pics and videos that I’ll have to upload at some stage, for now here’s some penguins, since penguins are awesome:

squark squark! splash splash!

Aside from penguins, they had a huge number of different fish, sharks, jellyfish, stingrays and many other fishy critters – well worth the visit, kept us occupied for several hours.

After visiting the aquarium, I headed out to St Kilda with @MissNickiBee for drinks, cake and beach fun.

St Kilda

This is cake. It is most delicious.

One of the things I’ve noticed most about Melbourne is that everything is very compact – there’s a huge amount of people, traffic, trams, etc all trying to fit into tight streets – it’s not uncommon for people to be squeezing into trams, randomly joining you at your cafe table since there’s no free ones and for trams to be whizzing by closely through tight gaps.

I took a rather bad video when I was out in St Kilda of a tram going by the cake cafe where we were seated which shows just how close they sometimes get.

That’s pretty much my one complaint with Melbourne, there’s a lot less personal space and it can feel a bit dirty and chaotic at times, particularly some of the stations and streets. – especially compared to Brisbane with all it’s huge open spaces!

I guess it’s kind of the problem of trying to fit four million people into the limited space available. :-/ On the plus side, this population means there’s so much selection available for everyone.

After cake, we went wandering along the St Kilda waterfront, probably the only place I’ve seen in Melbourne that’s not squished with a million people running about – although there were certainly a few sunbathers around, even for a business day.

I turn my back on this burning sun!

I'm outside. Note my uncomfortable expression at the burning heat.

Melbourne CBD viewed from St Kilda beach.

Tour guide leading me out onto a pier, to what I suspect can only be her plan to dump my corpse off into the sea.

Boats and city!

To wrap up the St Kilda visit, we headed back into the city for dinner – sadly the vegetarian only pizza place was just closing when we arrived (around 21:45) but VegeBar (IIRC) was open and doing a roaring trade.

They managed to find us a table and much delicious vegetarian pizza was consumed – I’d have to go back, there’s a huge menu of awesome sounding vegetarian and vegan foods – they even have a menu for raw vegan diets O_o

Me attempting to photograph at night.