HIGHER POWER
This former convent waves goodbye to monastic simplicity and hello to fabulous flavours within a chic hotel setting
The genesis of Ada, one of Auckland’s hippest new restaurants housed in a former convent.
Hayden Phiskie, of Auckland’s Ada, wasn’t sure how business would go when the restaurant opened in November last year. Three months on and the consistently full, buzzing space – and the tired but fulfilled smiles of Hayden and fellow head chef Johnny Price – say it all.
A Spanish mission-style, stucco-rendered building stands proud on a windswept stretch of busy Great North Road in the Auckland city-fringe suburb of Grey Lynn.
It’s been there almost a century. Designed by architects E. Mahoney & Son and built to house St Joseph’s Convent, the building went on to become a boarding house when the nuns departed in the 1990s. It reached a sad state of disrepair by the time developer Andy Davies bought the building in 2017. With a heritage listing on the building having been lifted, there was nothing to stop the building being torn down and the prime site used for apartments or some other faceless development. Yet Andy’s interest was in rescuing a building he had always admired – he and his team spent two years almost entirely rebuilding the rundown interior and sprucing up the still-solid exterior to create a 22-room, six-suite hotel.
On a hot summer’s day, The Convent
Hotel stands out against the Marian blue sky. Inside, white walls are graced with a host of art and relics, many nodding to the Catholic roots here, but also works by local artists. “We wanted there to be an interesting artwork at every turn of the head and around every corner,” says project manager Claire
O’shannessy. While the art adds plenty of colour, the rest of the interior design – the work of Andy and Claire – blends clean and simple with raw touches that speak to the archaeology of the structure. “We stripped back layers to expose old paintwork and brick – we wanted to be true to what the building was, not to try to cover things up, but to still put a new spin on it,” says Claire.
A bar at the front of the hotel is peacefully empty when I arrive mid-afternoon but, come evening, it’ll be bustling with customers enjoying a drink or being seated for dinner. This space hosts overflow for the restaurant, with access to everything on the menu apart from pasta. “Serving pasta that far up the hall from the restaurant would just get too messy,” say Hayden, as he wraps up his lunch shift in the main restaurant and joins me on the bar’s balcony for a chat. The stucco arches frame a view out west and, as school has just finished for the day, of happy kids spilling out of neighbouring St Joseph’s school. “The balcony is the prime spot – you could be anywhere in the world sitting here. At night, the lighting grazes the arches and it looks so nice.”
Hayden’s CV is impressive. He started cooking at 18 and did stints in Argentina and Melbourne, including at high-end Vue de Monde and at Shane Delia’s Maha – the Maltese-lebanese cuisine at the latter
making a lasting impression on him. Back in Auckland, he came on board with exdelicious head chef John Pountney at The Refreshment Room – an ahead-of-its-time bistro nailing full-flavoured classics – then teamed up with him to open pasta darling Cotto, which has helped cement Karangahape Road as an exciting culinary neighbourhood.
Hayden came on board Andy’s project here early in the piece and convinced him that the restaurant offering would be best designed not as a site that would service the hotel, but as an independent operation open to all.
The restaurant space is beautiful – the vaulted glass ceiling creates a sense of space, and the understated interior design is elegant. Despite loving how the space looked and felt, and the way the menu had come together, as opening time approached Hayden worried people wouldn’t come.
The restaurant, at the back of the building, doesn’t have street presence; you have to know it’s there and if you haven’t booked, you might be a bit shy walking up the front steps to enquire about a table. He needn’t have worried; the place has been packed since opening. “The building itself, the way Andy has designed it, draws people in,” he smiles. And don’t be shy about walking up those steps: a portion of seats in the restaurant are reserved for walk-ins, plus the bar and balcony house overflow.
I’m struck by how concise and producedriven the menu is. “Instead of building dishes around meat or protein as the hero, which in formal training you do, I like to start with the vegetable component front of mind. That’s what people want. Vegetables lend themselves to many cooking techniques and flavour combinations, and they’re truly seasonal, which our menu aims to be. Twice each season we’ll make tweaks, and then with each change of season there’ll be a full menu change.”
When meat does appear on the menu, it’s often in a supporting role, or used in small amounts to spike a dish: duck fat to coat potatoes with flavour, staccato bursts of anchovies, or the umami background hum offered by nduja.
The small scale of the site, and the few items on the menu, mean more time can be taken over each dish, an approach that Hayden is relishing. “Presentation is important, but mainly I want things to look clean and tidy.
I don’t like things fussed over, too ‘placed’ – smears and that kind of thing. One thing I disliked working overseas was the feeling of too many chefs having touched each plate of food… the idea of people being seduced by the look of the plate rather than the flavours. In Italian cooking there is nowhere to hide. There are generally three key flavours in a dish, and you should be able to taste each of them and they should also all work together.”
While Hayden is clearly influenced by that stripped-down Italian approach, it’s not to say that Ada is a strictly Italian eatery, or a pasta restaurant – it’s more fluid than that. The broad scope of the Mediterranean is a key inspiration, but you won’t find any kooky crossover between distant cuisines. “My biggest thing when I cook is ‘no confusion’. The cooking here isn’t seeking to emulate, nor to reinvent – merely to help good ingredients along to become dishes that just taste great.”
Working alongside Hayden in this endeavour is Johnny Price, who Hayden employed several years ago at Cotto, and who moved up from Wellington and hospo scene darling, Rita, to take on the role of co-head chef at Ada. Both head chefs are hands-on in the petite kitchen