Restaurant

WITH PONSONBY PRICES

Build a screen and they will come? In the decade-plus that I’ve lived in Auckland at least three restaurants have closed on this corner site. I have higher hopes for the longevity of the latest tenant. On the night we visited, a combination of cold beer and Test cricket was packing them in at Hotel Ponsonby.

That’s “hotel” as in “pub”. If you’re thinking beer barns and wedges with sour cream, think again. That’s “Ponsonby”, as in your steak will be wagyu.

To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed the television screens until the bar-stool critics started their commentary. I still don’t know who was playing but I can tell you the $13 lamb heart with fried curry leaves and a sticky paprika-spiked jus was bloody brilliant. Offal always sounds scarier than it looks. The small, warm, well-browned lump might have been mistaken for a petite roast if you hadn’t read the menu.

I was grateful the kitchen had done the slicing. A knife to the heart is still a knife to the heart and I’m happy to take my viscera thin cut by someone else. Less grainy than liver, it tasted delicate and minerally all at once. Growing up, offal was not a big part of my family’s food story and, as a consequence, I rarely cook it. In a restaurant setting I like how it forces me to more fully confront how and why I consume meat. Liver, kidneys and heart et al are cheap to buy and, on multiple levels, enriching to eat.

I didn’t talk about any of this over dinner because my guest quit lamb (and lamb-adjacent products) a couple of years back. She still eats seafood. Frankly, the bowl of clams with an insanely dunkable aniseedy-spicy pernod and ’nduja broth ($21) was at least as squeam-inducing. Those suckers are huge, you’ve got to wrestle them out of the shell and they were so perfectly lightly steamed there was no mistaking they were once a living, filtrating organism.

So, anyway, this is not the kind of pub where the kids are in the car park with a packet of chips and a raspberry and Coke. Actually, where I grew up, the kids were inside playing pool and helping to carry beers back from the bar. It was 1979-ish — around the same time Marie Rose sauce was last in vogue.

Remember the mayonnaiseworcestershire mix from such classics as The Shrimp Cocktail with Shredded Iceberg Lettuce? It’s sophisticated Ponsonby cousin swaps crustaceans for a cephalopod. Yum. The squid was lightly crusted, flash-fried and so tender ($16). The sauce was not as integral as it was in the 1970s but, in these uncertain times, a little nostalgia goes a long way.

At the table next to us, it was evident someone had won the cricket. Four men finally stopped shouting and started eating. Three plates of wagyu beef looked splendid; a chicken schnitzel sufficiently old-school to make me wish I’d ordered it too. The thing is, despite excellent table service and an interesting menu, in the middle of that upmarket pub vibe I felt slightly self-conscious sitting at a leaner eating food that needed a knife and fork.

Hotel Ponsonby was, most recently, Augustus (memorably French) and then Augustus by Mud Brick (less memorably Italian-ish). On previous visits, I’ve been led past the bar area and into a definitive dining space. That area was all full when we arrived but, if you’re planning on three courses including pudding, you might want to hold out for a seat at those tables (or keep going until you hit the beer garden).

We finished with a $17 smoked fish rillette. Too overtly buttery for me, the portion size was, however, generous and it had been bolstered by a pile of pickled things. Add a brick of herb-heavy focaccia for a very reasonable $6 (and if you order the clams, you absolutely need the bread).

Vegetables? We went for the tomato and peach salad, which was the second time in three weeks I’d seen this combo on a menu. I’m not sure it totally works. In this version a basil dressing was too bitsy and a shaving of sharp cheese did nothing to tie it all together.

It’s a pub, so yes, they have fries. It’s Ponsonby, so yes, that will be $10.

Fear not the offal at this modern pub