dish Co-Founder Catherine Bell Opens Parnell Store

Catherine Bell, a co-founder of dish and the Garden to Table Trust has opened the doors of Epicure Trading Store, a Parnell concept store full of beautiful international homeware.

With Moroccan tableware, French market baskets, Spanish terracotta kitchenware and all other manner of artisanal, planet friendly goods, you can be sure to find some beautiful things at Epicure Trading Store, Parnell's new homeware store.

Yet with dish co-founder and founding editor Catherine Bell at the helm, we are even more excited. She started the Epicurean Workshop in 1989 and it wasn't only a food education business and cookware shop, it was an incredible cooking school that hosted a huge array of famous chefs from around the world, as well as other classes taught by, among others, Catherine herself and our Food Editor Claire Aldous.

The cookware shop too was way ahead of it's time, and was really the only place in New Zealand where you could buy French cookware in New Zealand so that chefs and home cooks alike could get the cookware that they needed to recreate what they'd learned at home. The workshop closed in 2006, and, sadly, nothing like it really exists in New Zealand anymore. But from that business, both dish magazine and Epicure Trading Store were born. 

And though Catherine hasn't been on the dish team for many years now, we do watch her many projects with pride and we are delighted to see that Epicure Trading Store now has a retail presence.

"I’d been thinking about opening a small retail concept for a while but was kicked into action by Covid-19," she says. "Like many businesses Epicure Trading Store lost considerable revenue due to lockdown so it suddenly seemed like a positive thing to do to help it recover."

"We have kept things simple by opening the store in the front of our office and warehouse, located very near the Faraday St/ St Georges Bay Road precinct and La Cigale market. Although I didn’t ever think I’d have another retail store, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to curate collections of all the items we import."

On top of her legacy as a food writer and educator, Catherine founded (and continues to Chair) Garden to Table, a project which teaches children to grow, harvest and prepare their own food, as well as arm them with a knowledge and love of food. 

We are very excited that such a special shop has opened and can't wait to go down and check out.

Epicure Trading
epicuretrading.co.nz
31-33 Ruskin Street, Parnell, Auckland