Mangonui has the reputation for the best fish and chips in New Zealand. With a challenge like that it was only right we should seek out the shop and put their claim to the test. As it's been months, possibly more than over a year since we last had fish and chips there aren't a lot of comparisons.
We'd from the Cavalli island in time for a late lunch and a brief stop before continuing on to our night anchorage. Mangonui is a small fishing village on a shallow river with fishing boats on the wharf, shops on stilts hanging over the water and a small area to plant the anchor. We ended up 50m off the main jetty and within view of the chip shop.
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| Mangonui fish n chip shop |
Catch of the day was Bluenose which we haven't tried before but it looked like firm white fish so good to try together with an order of salt and pepper calamari and a heap of chips all wrapped in paper to take out or eat in. An endearing feature of the restaurant is it is BYO as in bring your own wine. However I'd interpreted it as byo Heinz tomato sauce – not an item readily available and never served in eateries. Chips without Heinz? Unthinkable. How was the meal? The calamari was excellent. The chips tasty and lots of them. The batter on the fish was not the best – too thin and greasy for my picky tastes. Can't have been that bad because we cleared the paper and felt very full afterwards.
As we continued our trip north across Doubtless Bay (so named by Capt'n Cook who sailed passed in bad weather, looked ashore and declared “doubtless it's a bay”) to Cape Karikari and Waipapa Bay where we discovered our friends Paikea Mist and Visions of Johanna. All of us intend to leave early tomorrow morning to make the passage to south island in benign conditions.
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