You checked the forecast. The forecast lied. Eleven in the morning, the sky has gone the colour of wet concrete, and whatever you had planned for the Botanic Gardens now needs a roof over it.
Most lists of indoor activities in Christchurch send you to a mall. Here is the other option. Our patisserie sits inside The Welder, an 1880s brick building a block south of the Bus Interchange, with the kitchen open to the room. Sit down with a coffee and you can watch chocolate worked across a marble bench, close enough to hear the palette knife scrape. On a wet Tuesday that is a better hour than it sounds.
The room comes first
Plants everywhere, in an old industrial shell. The tables move, so push two together and six of you fit. Low tables for children, high chairs, a water bowl by the door. Dogs are welcome. 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, 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 thick enough to hold a ridge, the same garnishes the kitchen uses. Then it turns into a competition. Ninety minutes, $65 a head, Tuesday to Friday between eleven and four.
Groups of four to twelve. You cannot book this one alone, and that is the point of it. The closest thing we do to a paint-and-sip, except you eat the evidence. Larger and private formats sit on the group experiences page.
Or the slow version
Smaller group, nobody keen 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. 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 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: a toasted marshmallow rim, or cream on the side. Dark Belgian chocolate either way, thick enough to drag on the spoon. 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 and not a request.
At the next table a coat drips over the back of a chair while its owner works a teaspoon round the rim of a cup, chasing the last of the cream. Wet Saturdays in here look like that.
Lunch, if you want it: a croque monsieur, or the quiches, made with no added gluten, as is the Brazilian cheese scone, which comes out warm with hand-whipped butter. 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. More sits 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 and not behind a crowd. Four seats in the room. Book two of them and half the class is someone you like.
Then Patisserie After Dark: scheduled evenings 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 watch for the date.
Before you come
Open ten to nine Tuesday through Saturday. Closed Sundays and Mondays. A rainy Saturday morning is the plan; a rainy Sunday is not.
Anything in the cabinet you buy on the day. Anything made to order goes through the website, where the date picker only shows dates the kitchen can actually meet. A layer cake, say, or a tray from the mini cakes and petit fours. Most things need two days, larger desserts three, petit fours a week. Collection is in person. We do not deliver, and that is exactly why every cake is handed over already boxed and steady enough to travel. The FAQ covers storing and sizing.
Bring someone. One coffee is an errand. Two is an afternoon.
