Taste of home for Beijing Kiwi team
25 Jul 2008
The team’s home-away-from-home in the vast Beijing Olympic Village will feature New Zealand images and mementos, including a large Maori carving and a piece of pounamu (New Zealand jade) in the entrance.
"We get a blank canvas within the village and we’ll work really hard to make a little bit of Aotearoa in Beijing," said New Zealand’s Chef de mission Dave Currie, who is in Beijing with other support staff preparing for the team’s arrival.
Real coffee
As well as familiar decor, there will be some home comforts on the menu for the Kiwi compound including real coffee made by an in-house barista - a first for New Zealand Olympians.
"The feedback we got from the last couple of games is that athletes want good coffee," Curry said.
"Getting good coffee in Athens (in 2004), you just couldn't, so one of the sponsors ran a competition and this young woman had to have a test and face a selection panel and she came up trumps."
Twenty-one year old Julianne Frith, of Auckland, competed against fellow Accor Hotel staff to win the post of barista to the sports stars. She’ll spend three weeks in the village brewing up to 500 cups per day of her winning caffeine fix.
Food culture
Frith will be kept on her toes as a New Zealand café typically serves up to 10 different variations on the traditional brew, ranging from the classic ‘short black’ espresso to the ‘flat white’ - a Kiwi speciality.
Coffee is an important ingredient in modern New Zealand food culture. New Zealand cafés are proud of their high standards and the business is extremely competitive.
Wellington is the ‘coffee capital’ with more cafés and restaurants per capita than New York. The capital city lists more than 300 cafés.
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