As Johnny mentioned in a previous post, we lucked out timing-wise on the New Zealand portion of our trip to see his brother Jay! Having just returned home from a three month cooking stint in Northern Italy, Jay was only in California for a couple of weeks when his fellow chef and friend Vaughan, a Kiwi whom he had met while cooking in San Sebastian, Spain, called him to see if he’d be interested in moving to New Zealand to work at Amisfield, a winery just outside of Queenstown. And with that Jay became a temporary New Zealand resident three weeks ago!
Since we had just missed Jay’s move to Italy by a couple of weeks on the European leg of our trip back in October, we were ecstatic that we’d finally have the chance to see him…and in New Zealand to boot! We were looking forward to lots of quality time with Jay once we got to Queenstown, but upon realizing that our drive from Lake Tekapo to Te Anau would take us right past Amisfield, we decided we had to make a surprise visit.
It was a rainy day, and Amisfield was packed. Once the friendly host, Tom, discovered that we were related to Jay, he gave us a wink and nod and told us he’d finagle a table for us just as soon as we’d tasted some wine. After 10 months, we couldn’t have been happier to see Jay’s face, and it was especially cool to get to see him in his element – the kitchen! He took us on a quick tour through the kitchen, garden and vines, and then used his employee perks to get us six bottles of the delicious wine that we had just tasted. We then proceeded to have the most delicious lunch of all time with a fabulous bottle of Pinot Noir. Everything was amazing, but the best part was obviously getting to see Jay!
It wasn’t too sad to have to say goodbye, because we knew we’d be seeing much more of Jay once we got to Queenstown after a few days at Te Anau and Milford Sound.
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| Chef Jay! |
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| Hungry men |
Ladies who lunch |
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| Zucchini bruschetta |
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| New Zealand lamb is simply the best! |
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| Before |
After |
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| Johnny and Jay post-lunch with our bounty of wine |
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Posted on February 29, 2012 at 4:12 am in Food & Wine, New Zealand | RSS feed
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