Content area
Full Text
In the final of our series on the Museum of New Zealand which opens tomorrow, Warren Barton tours the restaurants and discovers fine dining
--------------------
IT ALL sounds a bit off the wall really but, as of tomorrow, people who want to eat out in Wellington and who want to do it in style have yet another choice -- the museum.
And they have that choice because the Museum of New Zealand, faced with the need to make a dollar (several million of them every year, in fact) has explored every commercial opportunity it can. Not to mention the 700,000-plus visitors expected to visit the museum each year who will have to eat somewhere. And based on overseas experience, at least a third -- nearly a quarter of a million people -- will choose to wine or dine, or do both, at the restaurants there.
To ensure that they can -- and do -- is the task of Adam Cunningham, a young man from Melbourne, who had wide experience in the food and beverages business and staff training and management in Australia (with Regent and the Four Seasons Group) before joining Mike Egan as national operations manager for the One Red Dog restaurant chain about five years ago.
That's how he became involved with the museum.
Faced with setting up a catering operation to service visitors and the corporate, conference and special events trade that they aim to capture, museum management did the smart thing and entered into a partnership with Egan and Cunningham, and with two other established and successful Wellington restauraters -- Chris Green and John Lawrence of the award-winning Boulcott Street Bistro.
As the Crescent Group, they are responsible for running the three museum restaurants and a catering operation which, in the most...