So bad it’s good
Where the decadent and the wholesome mingle perfectly.
I’m always drawn to the ‘‘weird & wonderful’’ list at Hamilton’s Mr Pickles. The other day it was smoked Baltic sardines, kahawai pate, and the most divine manchego and anchovy spread. You’ll find weird & wonderful among the shared plate selection at Mr Pickles Bar & Eatery, in the heart of town. The shared plates are typically ordered as starters, but you could happily wolf one on your own and call it lunch or dinner.
Mr Pickles’ signature plates are a different species from the ‘‘same-old, same-old’’ ones that we’ve grown rather tired of. Mr P has ever-changing choices with lashings of flavour, and you mix and match from lists of charcuterie, vegetables, cheeses, and weird & wonderful. Each plate comes with a support crew of crispy seed crackers, fresh bread, and preserves and pickles.
Head chef Maurice Montero says a decent shared plate needs colour, texture, and seasonal vegetables. At present, he’s making pickles from fennel, red cabbage, cucumbers and red onion, and enjoying a goodly supply of fresh figs. When the eggplant harvest ends shortly, he’ll swap his babaganoush for another seasonal beauty. He is auditioning as we speak.
Montero says his kitchen team makes dishes they like to eat themselves, and he’s particularly partial to the smoked sardines, manchego and anchovy spread, and kahawai pate.
The sardines, he says, are Latvian, sourced from a Russian supplier in Auckland. ‘‘I grew up eating things like this.’’
Montero is from the Netherlands; his mother is
Dutch, his father Spanish, and he has cooked in both countries. He has lived in New Zealand for more than a decade and he and business partner Mat Pedley opened Mr Pickles last year, offering food that takes you outside the box.
Montero worked in a tapas bar in the Netherlands where they put offcuts of manchego cheese to good use, blitzing them with anchovies, heaps of parsley, garlic, olive oil and seasonings for a sweet, nutty, salty, savoury spread. Nowadays, this fetches up at Mr Pickles.
His kahawai pate is from an old-school 1980s recipe, where the fish is smoked and flaked and mixed with whipped butter, cream and egg yolk. ‘‘It is so bad, and so delicious,’’ says the chef. ‘‘The Dutch are good at things that are bad for you; that’s why we bike everywhere.’’
So when you swipe some of that bad boy kahawai pate onto a seed cracker, you need Mr Pickles’ pickled vegetables to cut the richness. There are other happy relationships: Montero’s beloved French Brie de Meaux is perfect with fig puree, or preserved figs, and Mount Eliza cheddar, from Katikati, works neatly with apple jelly. The orange whipped feta could be a treat on its own; feta and cream whipped with heaps of blood orange peel and juice. But it is extra good with cured meats from Europe. And so on.
The plate in front of us today has sous chef Harriet Boucher’s favourites: the manchego and anchovy, red capsicum relish, nutty cheddar, apple jelly, sardines, piccalilli, cured meats, and figgy titbits. As Montero says, by way of understatement, it’s the little extras that make the difference.