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New WOAP boss: ‘You can’t live here by accident’

Friday, 28 February 2025

For Penny de Borst, who grew up on a Te Kūiti sheep and beef farm eating meat and three veg, Wellington is the full palate.
For Penny de Borst, who grew up on a Te Kūiti sheep and beef farm eating meat and three veg, Wellington is the full palate.

For Penny de Borst, who grew up on a Te Kūiti sheep and beef farm eating meat and three veg, Wellington is the full palate.

“I really love that you can go, ‘I feel like X’, and you’ll be able to find it. There are people who do amazing things ‒ from KC Cafe to Graze, my local favourite. There’s such a diversity of offering in Wellington, and there’s no snobbery. Food is for everybody,” she said in an interview.

The new general manager of the Wellington Culinary Events Trust ‒ the team that’s behind cherished local hospitality events Wellington On a Plate and Beervana ‒ is speaking to The Post about the events’ future under her new leadership.

From left, some of the Wellington Culinary Events Trust team: Brandie Stephens, Eleanor Stewart, Penny de Borst, Beth Brash and Ryan McArthur.
From left, some of the Wellington Culinary Events Trust team: Brandie Stephens, Eleanor Stewart, Penny de Borst, Beth Brash and Ryan McArthur.

She’s taken over the hot seat from Sarah Meikle and will help deliver the festivals alongside Beth Brash for Wellington On a Plate and Ryan McArthur for Beervana.

Previously the head of business development for the trust since late 2022, de Borst entered the world of hospitality with a career traversing roles in advertising, partnership and business management, and media.

Growing up, she wanted to be a war correspondent or an anthropologist, and jokes she got out of Te Kūiti as fast as she could, even though living rurally gave her pragmatism and a sense of resilience. At the end of sixth form in the 1990s she moved to Auckland to study communications, majoring in radio.

Years later, de Borst (who grew up with a horse and motorbike, and was obsessed with the Romanov dynasty as a teen) spent a life-defining half year in 2013 travelling with her husband Igor across South Korea, Russia, Mongolia, central Asia, Turkey, the Balkans and western Europe on a motorcycle ‒ a trip the pair independently organised.

The couple then ended up spending four years in London, after some friends lobbied them to spend time there.

But after a bad motorcycle accident in the United Kingdom in which she broke multiple bones, de Borst realised she was no longer interested in advertising work. She wanted to pursue things that really mattered: connection, collaboration, community and doing work that feels like it leaves the world in a slightly better place.

That inspired the move back to Wellington, first to work for a plain language consultancy, and now, for the culinary events trust.

A 2024 Wellington On a Plate event at Charley Noble restaurant.
A 2024 Wellington On a Plate event at Charley Noble restaurant.

De Borst sees the the trust’s key motivations as supporting the capital’s hospitality industry and brewers to do well, and helping make Wellington a great place to live.

She wants its festivals to continue to drive resident pride and be exciting for people to be involved with. But she also wants to foster even more community and collaboration. Recently the trust has started a bi-monthly coffee meet-up for industry representatives to come and share ideas, learnings and experiences.

And she sees Wellington On a Plate and Beervana cultivating deeper bonds with some of the city’s other premier events: World of WearableArt, CubaDupa, the Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts, sporting events and so on.

“Those events are the things that make a city what it is,” de Borst says.

As always, the festivals will respond to changing consumer taste and behaviour, and be anchored in exploration, creativity and innovation.

Beervana takes over the concourse of Wellington’s Sky Stadium each year.
Beervana takes over the concourse of Wellington’s Sky Stadium each year.

She stresses the trust exists to promote the amazing things that businesses are coming up with ‒ “we are not the hero of the show … it’s their creative genius”.

This year’s WOAP theme is “food is love”, a giant love letter to Wellington and its hospitality scene. It also alludes to things like recipes being passed down through generations, and food being at the centre of so much relationship building in life ‒ as well as it being an entry point to a culture or people.

There’s also a new element to this year’s WOAP programme that’ll celebrate the connections between Wellington’s venues, in which businesses will work together to make something unexpected and compelling.

De Borst says more than anything, the festival will keep embracing its Wellington-ness with events that can’t be replicated anywhere else: think a hāngī at Government House, or a Narnia-themed event at the British High Commission.

With Beervana, the team is reimagining how it can differentiate its day and night sessions better ‒ for example, in the day, perhaps there’ll be more opportunities to meet brewers or talk to people about home brewing, and at night there may be more beer cocktails and different music.

Penny de Borst pictured at Double Vision in Miramar, an organisation that participates in both Wellington On a Plate and Beervana.
Penny de Borst pictured at Double Vision in Miramar, an organisation that participates in both Wellington On a Plate and Beervana.

What’s certain is that the popularity of low carb and non-alcohol drinks will continue shaping the beer industry’s (and therefore Beervana’s) future.

There’s no doubt hospitality has been doing it tough amid the cost of living crisis ‒ it’s not hard to compile a list of the many bars, cafes and restaurants that have shut doors in Wellington over the last couple of years.

But de Borst has been keeping her eye on the new places opening and the success stories, too.

“You can’t live here by accident,” she says. “Wellington is a city of action… Wellington attracts people who just get out and do things. … I just really love Wellington. I really want to be part of making it a great place to be ‒ that's kind of why I get up every day.”

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