RESTAURANT

Amano

Lettuce doesn’t usually make me lick the plate. And I didn’t actually lick the plate at Amano, but we did order bread specifically to mop up the extraordinary cultured cream dressing that pooled on our plate of charred cos.

At last, a menu offering definitive proof of life beyond green beans and almonds. The “vegetables” list includes a strawberry, radish and ricotta salad and witloof with an anchovy dressing. There’s a cucumber dish, asparagus and spuds, and the tomato salad comes with butter and charred bread. Yes, there’s a lot of charring going on, but what’s the alternative? Scorch. Burn. Cauterise. Nobody is going to order cauterised chicken, even if it is organic ($30).

Amano is a 120-seater Britomart behemoth brought to you by the group behind Ortolano, Milse, The Store, etc. It was, mostly recently, a carpark and it’s been heaving since opening night.

Half of the restaurant is available for bookings. I wish we had, because despite clearly telling the waitperson we were a party of three, the offer of a seat at the bar while we waited for a table (20 minutes) came with only two chairs.

That bar is wide and gleaming. It is made, apparently, from oyster shells and though it could be improved with a couple of handbag hooks, it screams luxe. The edges of this cavern have been softened with rough-sawn roof beams and enormous bunches of dried flowers slung from the ceiling, but I still felt like I was in a posh hotel lobby — complete with marble accents, plinky background music and several groups of impeccably blonded and bronzed women of a certain age ordering oysters.

At our table (two brunettes and a blonde) we were ordering cheese. I love that there’s a special section called “dairy”. In Italy, stracciatella means “a little shred”. It’s the stringy drizzle of protein in an egg-drop soup and the fine, frozen flakes of melted chocolate churned into icecream. At Amano, it’s torn mozzarella stuffed inside focaccia ($14). Order twice as much as you think you’ll want because, basically, it’s a toasted sandwich on crack. Burrata ($26) had a more solid centre than is traditional, but its soft milky flavour, set against astringent artichoke heart, appealed. They make their own pasta. Heck, they grind some of their own flour. The square-cut chitarra was a little tough (in so much as pasta can be “tough” — obviously you’re not going to break a tooth here) but again, the flavours — courgette, almonds and mint, were highly moppable.

Charred Wairarapa octopus ($21) is, according to the menu, caught in cray pots, which will serve the octopus right. I wish we’d just got the crayfish — it comes in egg dough pasta parcels — because the octopus was dull. Despite the presence of burnt chilli salsa verde, the dish just didn’t fire our taste buds like, say, the lamb. Oh, the lamb — $32 worth of rare meat slicked with eggplant, yoghurt and rosemary anchovy sauce. More bread, please. And maybe the porchetta with parsnips and the chicken liver bruschetta because (hooray) it’s organic.

We shared everything and there was plenty to go around, and (see above) plenty more on the menu we would have liked to have tried. Desserts are generous. A $14 espresso and mascarpone trifle was easily the pick of the bunch, but if you just want a little something sweet, then share the dainty gelato bonbons. Bite-sized plugs of icecream encased in dark chocolate. No plate-licking required.