The Great New Zealand Toastie Takeover is back for its ninth year, and from 24 June until 5 August, 200-odd venues from Paihia to Dunedin will be arguing their case for the country’s best toasted sandwich. There’s whitebait in there this year. Veal. Prawns. Raclette. Somebody has gone paneer. It is, as always, an exercise in seeing how far a grilled cheese can be pushed before it stops being a grilled cheese.
But if you actually want to understand what makes a Toastie Takeover entry work, don’t start with the sandwich. Start with the drinks match - exactly what will balance all that cheese and acidity?
Shining Peak Brewing usually enters the competition always as a brewery first: toastie on one side of the pairing, beer suggestion on the other. This year they’ve gone one further, building a full drink to match rather than just a suggestion, and the drink might be the more interesting creation of the two.
A brewery that thinks in matches, not menus
Shining Peak’s whole operation celebrates pairing. Every beer comes with a suggested food match as standard, which head brewer and co-founder Jesse Sigurdsson says has been core to the place since it opened. It’s partly practical — a genuinely enormous range of beer styles and flavours gives you far more to play with than the traditional wine list — and partly a deliberate play for people who wouldn’t otherwise order a beer. “It’s trying to capture people from all walks of life,” Sigurdsson told me on More Good Drinks this week, not just the beer-drinking crowd that would find the brewery anyway.
The toastie itself leans hard into that pairing instinct rather than sitting on the sidelines of it. It’s built on pickle-studded bread, layered with smoked beef and smoked cheddar, caramelised sweet onion and pickle relish, finished with pickle aioli and served alongside a beef consommé for dipping — a nod to the traditional beef dip. Sigurdsson tried for the first time in Vancouver last year and has become a fan of the richness and depth of flavour it delivers.
Why there’s a margarita involved at all
The brief to the bar team was simple: everyone online is mixing pickle juice into Coke and Pepsi, there’s clearly an appetite for pickle-forward drinking right now, so what happens if we take that seriously? Restaurant and bar manager Luke landed on a margarita almost immediately (sorry cola & pickle, this is not your time to shine) — tequila, triple sec, lemon juice, McClure’s sweet and spicy pickle juice, rimmed with pickle and chilli salt — reasoning that a margarita’s citrus-forward brightness was already halfway to pickle territory.
It’s a good instinct. Pickle brine and a well-made margarita are chasing the same thing: a clean, high-acid hit that resets your palate rather than filling it up. Put it next to a toastie that’s rich with smoked beef, caramelised onion and a consommé dip, and the drink is playing a key role in delicious balance and leaving you begging for more, instead of bloated and full.
Sigurdsson’s own explanation of what makes a beer work with food doubles as a pretty precise account of why this pairing succeeds: it comes down to balance, and to matching texture as much as flavour. A rich, fatty dish wants something with genuine acid cut, he says, in the same way a bitter IPA can work brilliantly against pork belly. The margarita’s job here isn’t to complement the toastie quietly. It’s to argue with it a little, in exactly the way a good pairing should.
There’s experience and passion behind the philosophy and execution. Sigurdsson has been brewing for close on fifteen years, starting out scrubbing floors and cleaning kegs at Whitecliffs Brewery north of New Plymouth in exchange for the chance to learn. Fifteen years later, his conversation keeps coming back to drinkability and inviting people into a great beer experience the same way chefs develop tasting menus. It also fits a brewery that’s built its identity on very local, very specific storytelling — beers named for Taranaki eccentrics like the Citroën-obsessed Mad Max, another local hero now celebrated.
How to get amongst it
Toastie Takeover runs 24 June to 5 August, with finalists announced on 5 August and the Supreme Winner revealed on 20 August. Every entry has to sit between two slices of bread, include cheese (or a vegan alternative), be eatable by hand, and feature McClure’s Pickles — the Detroit-founded, now globally stocked pickle brand behind the whole competition, distributed here by Cook & Nelson. Judging runs on presentation, preparation, eatability, taste, provenance and innovation, with a People’s Choice vote running alongside the judges’ picks, so turning up and ordering the thing genuinely counts for something.
If you’re anywhere near New Plymouth — or Christchurch, once Shining Peak’s new site is open — this is the entry worth ordering as a pair rather than picking apart. Get the toastie. Get the margarita next to it. Notice how much work the drink is quietly doing. Then go find the venue near you doing the same thing badly, so you know the difference when you taste it.
Full entrant list and voting at toastietakeover.com.
