Restaurant

The air was dense and hot. Wring the city out like a dishcloth. Inside, there was a small flood. From the kitchen? The bar? The restaurant was so small the whole place was a segue.

The clean-up was modern dance. Beautiful people ducking and weaving in this room that left zero room for errors. If somebody had told me Netflix was, right this second, casting for an edgy indie drama set in a steamy Auckland pasta kitchen, I would have sent them to Pici. My new favourite restaurant was a claustrophobic hot mess and I loved it.

Pici (pronounced “peachy”) opened late last year in Karangahape Rd’s St Kevin’s Arcade. The food is served on no-fuss bluerimmed enamel plates and the menu is as petite as the place — five starters, six mains, two desserts.

Begin at the end, because Pici’s cheesecake might easily stake a claim as our new national dessert. The Godfather of fusion, Peter Gordon, once told me this country’s lemons are among the best in the world. Our dairy is definitely top class. Now add extra virgin olive oil and sea salt. The dial on that rich creamy mouthfeel is suddenly cranked to maximum; that ripe, fragrant lemon has just dropped from the tree on to a fresh-cut lawn. Pici’s cheesecake is a blanket in the sun on the hot grass just before it drops away to a white sand beach and the ocean. It costs $10.

The most expensive thing you can eat here is a $24 oyster fettuccine — which is the kind of food my wildest dreams are made of — but in asparagus season I must order asparagus. In mid-december it was cheek to jowl at the bar seats, cheek-and-jowl on our plates — fettuccine, asparagus, pecorino and guanciale ($18). Bright and juicy with vege, there was a gorgeous spring in every bite of the homemade pasta and the cured porkcheek was draped like a culinary cashmere shawl. Paper-thin, heavy on the luxe factor.

I can’t overstate how tight the space is at Pici, so unless you’ve scoped it out and booked according to your needs (there’s more room, for example, at the tables that spill into the arcade), be prepared to get to know your neighbours. I personally became very familiar with the waitstaff, who bumped me almost every time they went into the kitchen. (Three $10 proseccos made everything softer around the edges.)

My seat provided a direct view of a kitchen that would give the Tardis a run for its money. I’m sure I counted an impossible seven people in there, straining pasta, ferrying plates, sizzling sauces, dressing desserts and peeling a startlingly large amount of garlic. Virtually everything is made onsite. One notable exception — the star of the pork and fennel sausage ragu ($18), which comes via the Grey Lynn butcher because why fix what isn’t broken? It’s very generously blobbed into a light tomato-based sauce. The pasta is rigatoni, and it’s worth checking Pici’s Instagram account for the “making of” video. Toy factory-cute tubes plop rhythmically from the machine; think rain on a window or waves at the beach. Zen and the art of delicious pasta-making.

We’d started simply. Fresh-baked rosemary-oiled focaccia ($6) with cheese, tomatoes and cold meat. Okay, more accurately creamy, stringy stracciatella and plump, wrinkly ox-heart tomatoes — $18 for a plate that was as gleamingly joyous as a sunrise. And the meat was salty, beefy bresaola ($13), still quite red in the centre and spiked with horseradish. Nostril-clearingly excellent when the humidity has made the outdoor air thick enough to serve with a spoon. Maybe finish with the bresaola? There are no rules in this part of the city.

Karangahape Rd is the best place to eat food in Auckland right now. Sure, there are swisher precincts and new hotel builds and malls with multiple offerings but there’s something about the energy of this infamous street that is literally adding flavour.

Gentrification is ongoing (bicycle lanes! Organic wine!) yet anything can — and still does — happen on K Rd. Think of its newest restaurants as your really cool friends who spent years in London-tokyo-new York. They never get sauce on their organic cotton T-shirts and they’d rather buy good cheese than a new car. They try hard to give a f*** about the world. They are here for a good time but also, I hope, a long time.

Small room, gigantic pasta flavour