Fields Cafe
Cost: $53.70 for two
Address: 4 Appian Way, Albany
We arrived: Fields Cafe has popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, in the fields that gave its name. It could just have easily been called Orchards as the cafe is in the middle of Auckland's original fruit bowl. Now it's part of the Albany mega mall, fronted by tyre shops, furniture stores and the North Harbour Stadium. You drive past half-constructed apartment blocks and big-box retailers to a grassed area, where a carpark has been marked out with rope and gravel. Fields is so new you can still smell the freshly hewn wood of the large deck outside. It is scattered with bean bags for those brave enough to publicly perform the inelegant extraction of returning to an upright position from the bulging embrace of the shifting beans. We sat outside but soon regretted it as we struggled with the bright sun reflecting off the white-painted wall that hemmed in the space. Another umbrella would have been useful out here.
