Today I’m writing about our mixed feelings about eating at Amisfield, a very high-end local restaurant. It’s not somewhere we’d normally go, but we ate there as the result of a very kind gift from friends who stayed for a while in our barn. Therefore, the first principle of going was that a good receiver actively enjoys a gift. I remember Mum’s UK friend Chris (not to be confused with my partner Chris!) talking about being a good receiver. She explained how important it is to be a good receiver of gifts to make the person providing the gift feel good too – it’s a reciprocal process. People often say things like “You shouldn’t have,” when given a gift. Chris’s point was that one should rather say, “Thank you so much, that’s lovely.” Of course, there's the other sort of awkward occasion when you really don't like the gift, but that's a different type of problem!

So we went to Amisfield primed to be grateful receivers. Weighing on the other side of the scale was our active dislike of the elite and entitled society that permeates Queenstown. There are many people here who want to be seen as being wealthy and special and we really don’t want to be part of that scene. I’m much more impressed by the Dennis Chapmans of this world. Dennis Chapman sold his IT company for around $100 million in 1998 and continued to wear jandals and shorts to events, like he always had. It might be that people who want to be seen as wealthy and special are those on the edges of wealth, rather than those squarely in the middle, I don’t have the data to be confident about that statement!

We went to Amisfield on our bicycles. That, to me, is special and a privilege – having the time to be able to cycle somewhere. It’s not what everyone views as a privilege, however. I remember cycling to the Framohs office in Kaiapoi from Sumner – around 1.5 hours each way – to discuss the design of the house we were proposing to construct at Castle Hill Village in 2009. I was told later that a number of people in the Fraemohs office commented we were a risk not worth taking on – “How can they afford to build a house if they commute on a bicycle?”

The woman at the front desk at Amisfield apparently understood we came on bicycles but kept asking us about our ‘drive’ to and from Amisfield. Maybe driving is so core to her that she considers bicycles ‘drive’ too. There certainly weren’t any bike stands at Amisfield and no one else visibly arrived on a bike. That made us feel special and we felt even more special cycling home for an hour in the cold southerly rain. At Amisfield, we changed our clothes in the handicapped toilet (normal cubicles are cramped for clothes changing), to get a knock on the door while we were in there. I am fairly sure it was the manager making sure we weren’t getting up to anything untoward in the toilet (it was not someone handicapped knocking)!

The meal was absolutely amazing. It was an exceptional performance of food. I can see the rationale for high-end dining where one is considering it a performance, rather than a simple act of sating hunger. Everything was highly designed and thought through, from the uniforms of the staff to the tray support placed by the table when each course was brought (eleven courses!), to the presentation of every item of food, to the spiel given by the wait staff about the food. I took a very small numbers of poor pictures of the food – a combination of reasons for my lack of images in that I dislike people constantly taking food pictures and spreading them via social media – do I really need to see what you had for lunch yesterday? – and because food photography is very hard to do well.

I was particularly impressed by the way the Amisfield menu pushed people’s limits (while first asking about food allergies). They used ingredients that people might not actively be drawn towards including eel (on special Vogel’s toast with duck paté), turnips (five different ways which included roasted and pickled and turned into sauce), oysters (in cucumber foam with cucumber chunks and frozen cucumber ice), and sweetbreads (lamb pancreas on skewers, with monkfish, over a crayfish beurre sauce). The final offering was deer icecream as in the image above (noting it is very hard to milk a deer but you get 10% fat milk as opposed to the standard 4% fat cow milk). The icecream was made to look like a deer antler and presented on a deer skull. All performance should push limits one way or another. For us there was only one limit we couldn’t surpass – we didn’t like the flavour of Bluff oysters, even disguised in cucumber foam; as far as I’m concerned oysters should be left alone to live on in their little oyster shells.

Of leaving things to live where they belong, I’m largely vegetarian these days so struggled mentally with some of the dishes from that point of view, as the vast majority required killing something. However, I entered into the dinner with the aforementioned spirit of gratitude, as a special occasion.

In summary, was the meal worth it? To answer that question, I have to know what worth might be in this context. Was it worth it for the animals to die? Probably not, if you were the animal being asked. And, if you are going to die, it doesn't likely matter if you turn into a lamb chop cooked on the barbie over a beer, or a sweetbread on a fine skewer at Amisfield. The end is the same – I see shades of the cow in Douglas Adam’s ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ advertising its rump to the diners. However, whether humans should eat animal products, from the point of view of minimising animal suffering and/or saving the planet from the weight of human agriculture, is a question beyond a single dinner.

We didn’t have to pay, so I can’t complain about the price. Was it worth the money that someone else paid? Does that mean could the people giving the gift afford it (presumably, or they wouldn’t have given it to us)? Or does that mean was it a fair price for the food? It probably was, given the amount of labour involved in the cooking and presentation – there was almost one wait staff person per table and the room was full.

Was the meal worth the vast amount of time required for the gathering and food creation, like the chestnuts turned into a 50c coin-sized chocolate/icecream/caramel/chestnut delight? Is a play worth the thousands of hours put into every aspect from script writing to set design to making costumes, lighting and performing?

To hell with all the worth-its. Did we enjoy it?

Yes.