Paws for coffee - Auckland cafes for dog owners

Judge No 1 - Mind that Latte Lucy  

Auckland's Metro top 50 might be a good reference for the next great cafe to check out but if you're a dog owner, this doesn't always work - there are slightly different criteria.

• Is there good outdoor seating? (need a respectable space for dogs and owners to hang out - preferably with a rain option!)
• Is there a water bowl for thirsty canines? (and are the staff nice to dog owners)
• Is it close to any good parks or on a good walking route?
• And the obvious, there's really good coffee. And probably great brunch.

For you dog owning Aucklanders, our furry friends have done their utmost to bring you our top picks which may have a slight Ponsonby neighbourhood walking bias. (but then again, we think some of Auckland's best cafe's are here anyways!)

For non Aucklanders, I hope the pictures go some way to showing how much we enjoy our coffee going pastime - no weekend would be the same without it.

Judge No 2 -Ruby Dooby Doo (do dogs smile?!!) I think she just got a big pat from a passer by.

4 Paws:

Dizengoff - 256 Ponsonby Rd - our Ponsonby local.  An institution.  It has stood the test of time and turns into Ponsonby's dog central on the weekends. The coffee is great and I can never go past the 1/2 eggs 1/2 creamy mushrooms for brunch.
Little and Friday - 2 great locations:  One is right around the corner from us on Douglas St in Ponsonby which is where Good One used to be.  How fab is that!  The original one on Eversleigh Rd, North Shore is still worth checking out. Everyone is happy here, dogs, kids, donut eating adults. 

Dear Jervois - 234 Jervois Rd - a nice Herne Bay walk along Jervois Rd gets you here and ticks all the boxes

Dear Jervois - stay away from that scone

Bambina - 268 Ponsonby Rd - Another Ponsonby Rd institution. They don't seem to make the Metro Top 50 these days so not sure what they do to tick off the judges but the crowds of people speak for themselves

Queenies - cnr Cascade and Middle Sts, Freeman's Bay. Awesome brunch, quirky out of the way location and great outdoor area.
Olaf's - 1 Stokes Rd, Mt Eden - dangerous place for gluten lovers.  I find it very hard not to walk away with fig and fennel sourdough, pain complet bread and any manner of pastries over and above brunch and coffee.
Jam - 33-45 Hurstmere Rd, Takapuna - top location in Takapuna and great cafe.  It's right on the edge of the town centre park so heaps of seating, lots of friendly dogs, and really good food.

no one can get past without a pat

Odette's - Shed 5 City Works Depot 90 Wellesley St - very funky industrial fit out in Wellesley St.  Great outdoor space.
Mary's - 13 St Mary's Rd, Ponsonby - best recent addition to Ponsonby. Great outside courtyard for paws and the hospitality is fantastic.
Bread and Butter bakery - the Grey Lynn one beside Farro on 34 Westmoreland St.  Great outdoor area.
Takapuna Beach Cafe - 22 The Promenade, Takapuna -great spot, great view, always good, and always dog friendly.
Cafe on Kohi - 237 Tamaki Drive, Kohimarama - a bit more of a hike for us, but when we catch up with Felix at the beach its the place to go.

3.5 Paws:
Petite Bocal - 177 Sandringham Rd, Sandringham - if this place had better outdoor seating it would be top of the list.  The Croque Monsieur is fabulous. There are a couple of tables outside. 

Ripe - 172 Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn - this is usually part of our favourite Saturday morning walk.  Recyclable plates and cups only so no 4 paws, but if you're OK with that it's a pretty cool, busy hangout, great outdoor seating and the food selection is amazing.

2 paws:

Il Forno - 55 Mackelvie St, Ponsonby - still a favourite coffee place and the chocolate almond croissants are yum, but alas no outdoor seating.  This is where we grab our take away coffee and croissant if we're off for a beach walk.

Happy coffee drinking and dog walking!

Chilling out at Little and Friday

Did anyone see a cat?!

Cool new place - Odette's - with plenty of outdoor space

Little and Friday and their famous donuts have made it to Douglas St in Ponsonby!  Yay!

Ok. It's not always about the coffee.  Ice cream outings are great too.

Sometimes an Il Forno takeaway coffee is best - it means we can get away to the beach.

Odds and Ends

Christmas and Easter have both come and gone and summer has turned to autumn since my last blog.

 

Work hard, play hard is a good rule to live by, but it's all flying by a bit fast at the moment. Alas, despite all my good blog intentions these 34 pictures from Christmas, New Years, Pinot Day, Queenstown, and bits and pieces, will have to tell the story of our adventures over the last few months - we've really had a good time with family and friends - can't be too bad then, can it?!

Christmas in Arizona

Made it to the Grand Canyon at last. Cold but awesome.....

The location of our Arizona family Christmas

A hungry family waiting for a table 

Ok. not your typical family Christmas dinner, but yummo.......!

a challenge we all accepted!

hmmm...pink and terra cotta are the colors of the day for the Mora's in Sedona. 

yep. Arizona's wild west.

happy patrons - mom and dad at the superstition saloon

fantastic - dig into those onion rings

Mother

Daughter

no trip to Arizona is complete without a visit to the outlet malls

Underground at the Titan Missile Museum 

And a genuine crew commander at the controls - we were lucky to have him on our tour

New Years in New Orleans

We watched the fireworks from the banks of the Mississippi. 

Bourbon St - NOLA knows how to party - lots of crazy people!

It's all about the sauce - Tabasco and Crystal are on every table

Caught in the act at Cafe du Monde having a beignet

It's all about the music - Jazz on Frenchman Street

Pinot Noir Day - Curt's 2006 vintage 
at our place

Another great tasting - 2006 Pinot's were great.  Even Lucy was in on the action

Two great Pinot mates

Easter in Queenstown

Spectacular Rippon winery on lake Wanaka

The famous Felton Road sign

Other bits and pieces

Waiheke sculpture festival - another beautiful day on the Gulf

Man and dog

At the Mount with their Airedale cousin, about to get a treat from the owner of Tay St coffee Shop

Ruby enjoying the view

Al and the girls having fun at the beach 

Great sign in New Orleans

RIP Uncle Alfie - lost a great family member 6 April - farewell 

Good Life in New York

Upper East Side from inside The Met

Well a little over a month ago we managed to squeeze a few days of New York into a recent trip. It's somewhere I've always wanted to go and it was way better than I expected so thought I better actually write about it before it's a distant memory!

Maybe I was expecting a concrete jungle (or filled with mobsters and muggers!).  Instead we found New York to be a vibrant urban tapestry full of 'interesting' and mostly friendly locals, something functional etched into every spare space and an energy about the place that's amazing.

New York is somewhere I've seen a thousand times in movies and TV shows, so it definitely feels familiar - like you know the place. (New Yorkers are all too happy to point out the spots for you if you can't figure it out for yourself, like where Carrie Bradshaw filmed Sex and the City and there's a sign at Katz's deli above the chair where Sally (as in When Harry Met Sally) had her famous fake orgasm!)

Street view from the High Line

In no particular order, here is the checklist of things we got through and some general impressions.

Out and about:

Walking along the High Line

Best walk: The High Line,  an old abandoned overground railway line has been converted into a walkway that spans about 20 city blocks, this is the ultimate use of dead space.  I wish they'd do something like this with Auckland's abandoned Nelson off ramp!

Central Park

Central Park: It really is as cool as it looks on TV.  Talk about orderly.  There is a road all the way around and you can only cycle one way.
Brooklyn Bridge: the other great walk.  It really just has to be done, even if you only walk half way.

Selfie on the Brooklyn bridge

A Broadway Musical: OMG I didn't think I would like this!  We saw The Book of Mormon, a brilliant comedy and worth checking out.  You can put your name in for a lottery but because this show is new and popular, there were 10 seats for 200 people.  Instead we waited in the cancellation queue and got some amazing seats at a much lower price.

Washington Square

We took most modes of transport while we were there, which was easy as.  We mostly walked everywhere but most impressive was the cycling. We stayed in Chelsea at Hotel Americano, which was a fantastic and relatively reasonably priced place, and they had bikes for the guests.  We biked all the way up the Hudson River one day and all the way around Central Park.  You can rent bikes everywhere.

Museums and memorials

9/11 beam the plane went through in twin tower

New York has the best collection of stuff anywhere except maybe Paris.  Each one deserves a reasonable amount of time so there was no way we could fit them all in.  The ones we did:

Only at The Met

9/11 Memorial.  Do you still remember where you were on 9/11? This will take you straight back. It's pretty powerful and there's nothing quite like the sense of place and perspective this gives.
The Met. It's huge! It's full of notable artefacts, exhibitions and famous paintings.  We spent 2.5 hours there until closing time and that was way too short.
MOMA: If I had to pick, this was my fave.  It was hard for me to comprehend that all of the Warhol's, Monet's, Picasso's, Lichtensteins, (etc, etc, etc) where the real thing, all in one place.  There was so much to take in.  The cafe served some of the best coffee in New York and is far removed from the average museum cafeteria bad food experience.

Marilyn at MOMA

Classic Warhol

Monet at MOMA - incredible

We cycled past the Gugenheim, but that and the Fick will have to wait for the next visit.

Food
This is a heavenly city for lovers of cult American food. The big ticket items live up to all expectations:

Hungry?  Get your pastrami sandwich at Katz!

Pastrami Sandwiches: Katz's deli really is the best.  We had a few others but Katz's was in a league of its own. With piles of pastrami on rye, pickles and a root beer it was heavenly.
New York Cheese Cake: We walked to Sarge's deli after our broadway show.  The Rueben was great but the Cheese Cake was the main drawcard.  The waitress got Al to have a glass of milk with it which strangely cut through the creaminess of the cheese!

New York Cheese Cake - Heavenly!

Bagels for breakfast: You gotta have the 'Schmear' (cream cheese) on a bagel.  They are pretty awesome.

A New York staple at Murray's Bagels

Pork Bun at Momofuku Milk Bar.  These were pretty yum and David Chan is world famous for these but you know, the bun place in Northcote Point would give it a run for the money.
The list goes on, but lots of great little places everywhere though two others of note would be the degustation we had at Le Bernardin, a 3 star Michelin Restaurant and the wacky foie gras soft taco with American Cheese we had at Earl's Beer and Cheese.  OMG.  Foie gras twice in a matter of days it both times were amazing.

Earl's Beer and Cheese in the Upper East Side.

Foie gras soft taco.  So wrong but so right!

As for drinks, well I managed to fit in the compulsory Cosmo on the rooftop bar at our hotel.  Very shee shee.

Compulsory Cosmo on the rooftop bar

Shopping
Stop me.... Oh what a pleasure.  Well, let me qualify that. The big department stores you can take them or leave them quite frankly.  At Bloomingdales I practically felt harassed as I think all the sales people are on commission.  But the shops on the upper east side, e.g. Tiffany's and every designer around, were just beautiful.  I actually loved Soho best though with lots of little shops in the side streets where I may have got a bit excited at DKNY and Dianne von Furstenburg.

There's just too much to see and do to get through everything, so in 4.5 days I thought we experienced a great cross section of the city. We didn't go up the Statue of Liberty but we could see it from lots of the places we went, and we didn't go up any buildings but our hotel's rooftop bar afforded some cool views, so we'll have to leave those for next time.

Well, New York, I fell in love.  I could easily go back.

City scape

Our subway stop

Calexico - a very popular food truck

outdoors at MOMA

Cool city scape from inside MOMA

Yes, tacky - these really are the SATC steps

Al enjoying some Jewish street food at Taim

Cool street art

New World Trade Centre

9/11 Memoria Fountain

Underground at 9/11 memorial - the slurry wall and last beam

More fun in Central Park

Selfie at Momofuku milk bar

Central Park