You checked the forecast. The forecast lied. It is eleven in the morning, the sky has gone the colour of wet concrete, and whatever you had planned for the Botanic Gardens is now a plan for somewhere with a roof.
Most lists of indoor activities in Christchurch send you to a mall. Here is the other option. We are a patisserie inside The Welder, an 1880s brick building a block south of the Bus Interchange, and the kitchen is open to the room. Sit with a coffee and you can watch someone temper chocolate on a marble bench, close enough to hear it. On a wet Tuesday that is a better hour than it sounds.
The room comes first
It is a plant-filled space in an old industrial shell, and the tables move — push two together and you have room for six. There are low tables for children, and high chairs. Dogs are welcome, so there is a water bowl by the door and the table legs are metal, which matters if you have ever tried to clip a lead to a wooden one.
Getting here in the rain is the easy part. Seven minutes' walk south of the Bus Interchange, parking across the road and behind the building, and bike racks by the side entrance for the optimists.
Something to do with your hands
Sitting is fine. Doing something is better. The Mini-Cake Decorating Challenge puts a station in front of each of you — freshly baked mini cakes, bowls of ganache, the same garnishes the kitchen uses — and then it becomes a competition. Ninety minutes, $65 a head, Tuesday to Friday between eleven and four.
It runs for groups of four to twelve, which is the point of it. You cannot book this one alone. It is the closest thing we do to a paint-and-sip, except you get to eat the evidence. Larger and private formats sit on the group experiences page.
Or the slow version
If the group is smaller and nobody wants to compete at anything, book the high tea instead. About two hours, with bottomless organic Zealong grown in Waikato on the only tea plantation in the country. Book up to ten online. It wants two days' notice at minimum, a week or two for a weekend sitting, and vegetarian and no-added-gluten menus are both selectable.
Two hours is the useful part. Long enough that two friends who keep meaning to catch up and never do actually get past the small talk before the rain stops.
What to drink while it passes
None of this needs notice. Order a hot chocolate and the question back is New York or Paris, which is a real difference and worth asking about. The dark chocolate thickshake is the one people argue over. Most hot and cold drinks can be made with a dairy-free milk — the one place on our menu where that is an everyday choice rather than a request.
If you want lunch out of it, there is a croque monsieur, and the quiches are made with no added gluten, as is the Brazilian cheese scone. Our kitchen is small and without exclusive production areas for all of our different recipes, so traces may occur, and nothing here is guaranteed safe for severe coeliac disease. There is more in the No Added Gluten range, and when it turns properly cold we lean harder on the warm end of the menu.
If one afternoon is not enough
Some people come back to watch, some to learn. Our cake decorating and baking classes cap at four, so you work beside Dhi rather than behind a crowd. With only four seats, booking two means half the room is someone you like.
Then there is Patisserie After Dark — scheduled evenings after hours where plated desserts get tried out before they reach the cabinet. Fondue, poached pear, things that exist for one night only. They sell out, so the date is worth watching for.
Before you come
We are open ten to six Tuesday through Friday, and ten to three on Saturday. We are closed Sundays and Mondays, so a rainy Saturday morning is the plan and a rainy Sunday is not.
Anything in the cabinet you buy on the day. Anything made to order — a layer cake, a tray from the mini cakes and petit fours — goes through the website, where the date picker only shows dates the kitchen can actually meet. Most things need two days, larger desserts three, petit fours a week. Collection is in person. We do not deliver, which is exactly why every cake is handed over already boxed and steady enough to travel. The FAQ covers storing and sizing.
Bring someone. That is the whole difference between a coffee and an afternoon.
