Cheese, cheese and more cheese, Kaikoura Cheese Company - a dream

The Kaikoura Cheese Company operates a retail outlet on Kaikoura’s main street. Here tastings and purchases can be made of the artisan award winning cheeses that have left New Zealand’s top chefs and restaurants lauding. Believing myself to be a cheese connoisseur – for the simple reason that I eat an awful lot of it – I dropped by the store and sampled their signature ‘Tenara’ - an ash coated goats cheese which apparently takes fifteen days to mature and quite honestly left me drooling for more.

Crayfish by the beach galore in Kaikoura

The name Kaikoura itself means ‘meal of crayfish’. Kai being the Maori word for food with Koura meaning crayfish. This delicacy is famed throughout New Zealand and is fished in the waters around Kaikoura. Crayfish is a type of lobster found in abundance here with seemingly everywhere in the township selling it. The best place to sample it though must be the Kaikoura BBQ, a simple food cart set up by the beach. I was asked to choose my own crayfish from the chilly bin (ice box) and was given the tip that whilst size doesn’t matter so much price certainly does, the more expensive the crayfish the better the quality. My cray was then BBQed in front of me by the experts. Grabbing a table overlooking the beach I couldn’t imagine a more quintessential Kaikoura experience than this – sitting by the ocean, salty sea air drifting on the breeze, savoring the delicious flavours of the succulent melt in the mouth crayfish.