Culinary Capers
Anna King Shahab visits Onehunga eateries ahead of Elemental Festival
The High Street — a time-honoured concept that has died a car-and-mallinduced death in many parts of Auckland. Not so in Onehunga. Onehunga Mall still has that mainstreet vibe, in spades. Despite Dressmart, that paragon of discount shopping, rising up adjacent — or perhaps partly because of it — the Mall is a bustling strip where you’re likely to find whatever it is you seek. A strip you can spend a good few hours browsing — shoes and clothes and books and second-hand furniture interspersed with many good places to break for a bite to eat.
Onehunga is a great place to arrive hungry — a concentration of great eating and drinking that draws inspiration from the varying cultural heritages and philosophies of the operators.
As part of this year’s Elemental Festival, the inaugural Onehunga Culinary Crawl (Saturday,
October 17) has been designed to showcase the very traipse-able nature of the suburb’s food and drink hotspots. Ticket-holders visit four spots to snaffle a course and drink in each spot, with live entertainment en route. The beauty is that this way of exploring an area can be done by anyone, anytime.
Grab a few friends and mark up your own trail to sample some of the culinary delights of this multicultural neighbourhood. Here are some ideas to get you on your way.
ALL CAN EAT
With the success of its initial Mondayonly outpost on Karangahape Rd, Everybody Eats launched a permanent home on Onehunga Mall last year. It fires up as ONE Cafe by day, and then each evening a team of chefs from a rotating roster of the city’s top restaurants pitches in to serve a three-course meal (a vegetarian option is always available), using surplus food. You pay as you can — and as you feel — choosing to eat here is a win-win way to vote with your dollar for a kinder, more sustainable food city.
FILIPINO FANCY
A restaurant, a grocery store, a bakery all offering Filipino flavours: Onehunga is fast becoming the place to explore a cuisine that the world has a zeitgeist for right now. Arjoy and Fernando Evangalista serve up home-style classics at their restaurant Manna Kitchen. Fernando has worked in top hotel restaurants serving high-end European and Chinese cuisine, but Arjoy was determined their Onehunga eatery — humbly decked out in second-hand furniture, the walls dotted with photos from their home provinces of Bicol and Bohol — would champion straightup Filipino cooking with no fusion distractions. Among other dishes, try the lechon (crisp pork belly), adobo (sizzling chicken in a lip-smacking vinegary sauce) and halo halo — a layered, colourful, and textural dessert topped with vibrant ube (purple yam) icecream. Recently Arjoy opened Filo Goods next door, which she’s stocked with a vast array of Filipino groceries (and huge packs of chicharrons — pork crackling — very hard to resist).
The window front display at Bread N Butter Home Cookery is like a piece of 1950s nostalgia in full glory — paper doilies piled with butterfly cakes, louise slice, cinnamon buns and my favourite doughnuts in town (the OG crisp deepfried round bun, sweetened cream, dot of jam variety). Then you step inside and it gets even better, because as well as those Kiwiana favourites, the bakery’s owners also excel in Filipino-flavoured baking: try the sugared, fluffy ensaymada swirls, ube-filled sweet buns and flaky chicken empanadas.
AS IN JAPAN
Proving that beautifully presented food isn’t only found in hushed, high-end surrounds, chef Daizo Yamada of Sashimi Bar Ajimi delicately prepares eye catching — and mouthwatering — sashimi platters and more. Modelled on Japan’s ubiquitous izakaya — bars with casual dining — Daizo has gone for large shared tables, and sake cases as chairs, to create what he calls “a cosy space … where you can relax with family, friends and other customers”. Ask staff for a sake recommendation and settle in as dish after dish of umami deliciousness arrives.
THE A-TEAM
A good banh mi starts with an exacting recipe for a particular type of baguette: a ratio of rice flour to create a crisp shell that shatters to reveal a soft interior. So it’s a good thing that the namesake of Mr T and father of the family business, Dieu Tran, is an expert baker. As well as the banh mi breads he also bakes sourdough, seedy loaves and croissants, which feature on the menu as well as being available to take home for private snaffling. Although you can also order typical cafe fare of eggs, smashed avo on toast and the
A strip you can spend a good few hours browsing — shoes and clothes and books and second-hand furniture interspersed with many good places to break for a bite to eat.
like, the Vietnamese offerings here are not funkedup versions; they’re made as the Tran family themselves would enjoy them at home.
AT THE BAR
For one suburb, Onehunga boasts three quite different, enticing places to enjoy a tipple, depending on your mood. The Good Home is a family favourite with its enclosed, sunny outdoor play area, nicely balanced by the elegant interior of this handsome ex-library building. Brothers Beer nails that sacred marriage of beer and barbecue, and it is a lovely old building with a courtyard out the back. There’s Brothers and Piha beer on tap (a tasting paddle is the best way to sample the range from hoppy ale to tart-salty gose) and the barbecue food, which might be served up nice and quick but it’s been days in the making — meats brined and slow-cooked over native and fruit woods.
As sophisticated as it is fun, The Bramble is one of very few suburban cocktail bars in Auckland — unassumingly tucked away, it relies on wordof-mouth, which has been filling it since 2007. Owner and chief drinks-fixer Dan Sullivan takes an intensive approach to designing cocktails — like his “Frost on the ‘Simmon”, a concoction featuring persimmon, rooibos, ginger maple syrup, dried persimmon and a host of things beginning with “A”: Applejack, Aperol, and aquafaba. Says Sullivan, “I heard [food writer and blogger] Nicola Galloway on RNZ explaining a persimmon and rooibos tea cake and thought, ‘I can work with that to make a drink.’” So began a process — as with all Dan’s cocktails — of researching what flavours pair well and the best vehicle for said flavours. Our job is to enjoy the fruits of Sullivan’s labour, which in turn gives him the satisfaction that keeps this gem of a bar humming.
A food community is a circular thing, and Onehunga closes the loop deliciously.
Culinary Crawl is a ticketed event on October 17, part of this month’s Elemental AKL Festival. With four different start times, the progressive dinner takes in a dish or drink at four of Onehunga’s best eateries and bars, with a chance to meet the operators and enjoy live music, performances and light displays en route.