Cartas Cartel
Cartas means cards. We wanted a name that sounded good out loud and carried a bit of Latin America with it, and Cartas Cartel did both. The menu followed. The King is pork, the Queen is beef, the Jack is lamb, the Joker is chicken, the Ace is mushroom. There are two of us, Matthew and Andrés — one from Methven, one from Santiago — and we’ve each spent most of our working lives in kitchens. The truck we found on Facebook, except it wasn’t a truck. It was the kitchen box off the back of one. It took over a year before we could cook in it. A forklift had bent the driveshaft lifting it, and there wasn’t a replacement anywhere in New Zealand or Australia, so we had one made. Then the rust, then the repaint. Matt flew his mate Joshy over from Melbourne to hand-paint the characters and the signwriting. Somewhere in all that it stopped being a box and started being ours.
Matt grew up in Methven and moved to Christchurch when he was about ten. He was in a kitchen by thirteen. After that came Australia, Germany, the US, South Korea and Southeast Asia, and for the most part, the work was hospitality. Every kitchen gave him something to bring home. It became a bit more serious at Wakefields in Sumner, under Rob Hope. Rob ran a calm kitchen and ran it as a team, Matt’s cooked that way since.
Andrés is from Santiago. His first professional kitchen was a grill, at eighteen, where the whole job was doing the same thing right every time. Then several years in Italian restaurants, learning the traditional way first and then looking for where it could be better. He moved to New Zealand in 2015, started in Queenstown and ended up in Christchurch, working through as many kitchens and styles as he could. He and Matt met cooking in the same restaurant in Sumner. He’d always wanted to build something of his own rather than cook someone else’s idea of it.
The one we wrote.
A panuozzo is pizza dough baked until it blisters, then filled with South American barbecue: charcoal chicken, slow-braised brisket, smoky mushrooms. Italian bread, South American filling. South American culture is built around celebration, and we want this to be somewhere people forget about everything else for a bit. A good Saturday is a line out the front, music on, people passing food across the table. We’ve spent a long time cooking other people’s menus. This one we wrote.
— Matthew & Andrés