AN EPIPHANY IN A FORMER CONVENT
Worship at the pasta altar of Ada
Patience is a virtue. Greed is a sin. It took a month to get a reservation at Ada, the restaurant in the hotel that used to be a convent. When I got there, I ate everything.
“I’m still dreaming of the beef short rib,” Stephanie emailed. The night before, she’d been the first of our party to arrive. “It’s so nice here,” she texted. “I need one of you to create a diversion so I can go and move into a room upstairs.”
Ada sits inside The Convent Hotel, a gleaming-white Spanish Mission-style building, risen from grim headlines. Once occupied by nuns, more recently it was a privately owned boarding house. Twenty tenants lived in what was dubbed “a slum in the heart of the city”; a residence deemed so dangerous that the head of Auckland City Mission said “You’d be a lot safer just sitting under a bridge.” In 2018, it sold for a reported $4.1 million and, late last year, reopened as a boutique hotel.
Now, the rooms start at $149 a night, and the main risk is probably a butterblocked artery. Ada operates independently to the hotel.
It’s helmed by Hayden Phiskie
(Cotto) and Johnny Price (Wellington’s Rita) and the food is staggeringly good. There was nothing on the menu I wouldn’t order and nothing I ate that I didn’t want to immediately eat again.
Summer is in full swing and it finally feels right to start with tomatoes bathed in basilinfused buttermilk and scattered with geniuslevel fried lentils ($18). A simple salad that was anything but. How much thought must go into a dish like this? How long does it take for a chef to so completely and successfully reinvent a flavour combination as old as Italy? I’d wax even more lyrical but there were at least six more dishes on their way.
In my experience, panzanella is a fancy way of describing one of the worst foods in the world: soggy bread. Ada’s was mercifully crisper than many, punctuated with peach and fennel and tricked up with the thinnest shard of dehydrated ricotta ($18). I liked that the fruit was still slightly sour — the dish was an aperitif, readying the way for the mouthcoating creaminess of straticialla cheese, with
its milky strands that muddled into cooked-down field mushrooms and whole mint leaves like a dream ($18).
Eighteen months ago, it seemed every new Auckland opening was Asian-fusion focused. More recently, there has been a swing to Mediterranean flavours. The pasta, pizza and small vege plates space is getting crowded. For my money, Ada easily makes the top three — and ranks number one for ambience.
Despite the building’s most recent dreadful past, there is a sense of peace and solidity in the restaurant’s soaring walls. Half of the dining room sits under a glass roof (with newly installed shade cloths to keep those long Friday lunches from getting too hotheaded). All that white stucco and blue sky combines to form a light, elegant cocoon that you never want to leave even before that beef short-rib ($18) arrives.
The skewered slab had been spiced with ‘nduja paste and sat in a puddle of walnuts. The meat melted like the crispy end of a Sunday roast and we would have ordered a second round if we weren’t waiting on the white pork ragu ($24) that will make me question every spag bol I have from now on. Is tomato really necessary when you can saturate chunky pork mince in what tastes like wine, butter and a lot of its own porky fat? That sauce lay under a luxe drape of pasta and I don’t want to get too weird about this but the effect was as seductive as a silken sheet or a velvet bathrobe.
If the fazzoletti (see above) is a mistress, the cavatelli ($22) is the mother of your child. Gnocchi-like nubs of pasta smothered in cheese are a guaranteed salve to a bad day. It was the most comforting of comfort foods. Rich, carbheavy and definitely made for sharing.
I was in a sort of food coma by the time I paid the bill (which also included two bottles of cava, a luscious dark chocolate tart and a small pizza, which was absolutely unnecessary and utterly delicious on account of the decision to fry-not-bake). I think the waitperson said that the night of our visit had been the quietest since opening. If you, like me, have been struggling to get a table, you should persevere. Ada is a food altar worth your worship.