A restaurant that disappeared

Pasture's gone offline - and some customers want refunds

Kia ora and welcome to The Weekend, your curation of the best things to read (and listen to) from The Spinoff and around the internet. I went to see Hamilton last night after seemingly every single one of my friends watched it in the past week, and I’m experiencing some “2017 feelings” again. Reckoning with the narratives provided by the American empire, wishing my sister wasn’t an ocean away (on the other side of the Cook Strait), feeling like the most logical response to an insult is a duel, things of that nature. You think you’ve left your teenage “musical era” behind and then it all comes rushing back; what sort of wisdom might fill my mind if I hadn’t dedicated memory to “knowing most of the lyrics to a three hour musical” for the last seven years?

-Shanti Mathias, staff writer

Pasture is gone. What now?

Famously fancy restaurant Pasture has seemingly closed without warning, reports Charlotte Muru-Lanning. A restaurant in Parnell, Auckland, Pasture was known for degustation menus high on flavour and its tiny size — only seven seats — to make meals that cost hundreds of dollars. A source told Muru-Lanning that her reservation to Pasture was unexpectedly cancelled — and while the restaurant seems to be totally empty, she hasn’t had her deposit refunded. “As we've seen from Metro's 2021 reporting on working conditions at Pasture, what happens behind the scenes at these fancy restaurants should be of interest to us all – even if we can't afford the extravagant prices on the menu,” Muru-Lanning tells me. “In this case, patrons seem to have been shortchanged, but we don’t know who else may have been affected by the abrupt closure.”

Should sperm donation in New Zealand be privatised?

Fifteen years ago, Amber Older was single and keen to be a mum. But when she was given the profiles of people who were willing to donate sperm to singletons or lesbian couples — only four of them — she was frustrated. There was hardly any detail, especially when she compared her experience to a friend in the US. “How could she know so much about the father of her baby while I was stuck with a few measly paragraphs?” While Older ended up getting pregnant the old-fashioned way, not much has changed for sperm donation in Aotearoa. “The impact of having sperm so tightly regulated means a world of stress, anxiety and potential pain for the hundreds of Kiwis who want a baby but need someone else’s swimmers to conceive.” Maybe, she argues, it’s time for that to change.

Number of the week: 3.5% threshold???

More than a year ago, a review board was given the thrilling task of going through New Zealand’s electoral law and recommending updates. They released their recommendations this week. Along with some changes to donation policy, they had two major recommendations: make the threshold of the party vote 3.5%, and lower the voting age to 16. Toby Manhire walks through the report here. It’s a good intro if you’re lost on some of the finer points of electoral law, or if you want to spend your weekend debating with your friends how many seats parliament should have. (Alternatively, public submissions are open here.)

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The face that launched a thousand (research) ships

20 years ago Kerryn Parkinson was a junior researcher on the NIWA vessel Tangaroa, on a research mission to the abyssal plains north of the North Island. Her job was to photograph specimens in a scientific way: in even lighting, next to a colour chart and measurement scale. But one special fish caught her eye. “I was about to return it to the sorting lab to be preserved, and I thought it just looked very funny. So I took a photo, front-on.” she tells Ellen Rykers. Years later, that photo was discovered online, and became the blobfish meme. Fun fact: in its natural habitat at high pressures, it’s a streamlined predator, but being pulled to the pressure of the surface collapses blobfish into their famously grumpy visage.

‘The shape that music takes within the body is different for every instrument’

Gorgeous essay here from Xiaole Zhan, winner of the Charles Brasch Young Writers essay competition, about the viscerality of music and bodies. Here’s a brief excerpt. “Learning music made me realise that I am not a genius of the body. Musicality and physicality are one and the same muscle. Knowing how the music moves is not enough; you also have to know how to move the body in a way that follows. The genius of knowing one’s body can be seen even in childhood; in the prodigy dancer, in the small fingers that find a home on a quarter-size violin. You can learn to sing before you learn to speak.”

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