BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CAULIFLOWER SANDWICH

Kim Knight finds surprise and delight in the Park Hyatt Hotel’s dinner offering

Sometimes, you see a city in a different light. You turn a corner, cross a street and remember why you like living here. Auckland has too much traffic and not enough house. Too hot, too wet and too expensive. But it’s also more diverse and more dynamic than anywhere else on this island. On a good day, Auckland crackles — and on a good night, it sparkles.

This is a restaurant review and I’m supposed to be talking about food and ambience and service. First, a public service announcement. Onemata is a high-end waterfront restaurant in a brand new five-star hotel where a plate of tomatoes and cheese costs $26 and a one-night stay begins at $324. Fortunately, you don’t need to spend a dime to wander around the outside and admire that view back across the Viaduct at dusk, when the sky dims and Auckland lights up like a party. Of course, it’s even better from a window seat.

Onemata at night is truly elegant. It has that timeless, expensive feel that is the hallmark of an international hotel; a liminal space where you could be anyone or anything. What we were was hungry. The obnoxious joy of places like this is that guests can be as excessively demanding as they want and staff (mostly) just go with it. We ordered three small plates, two large plates and a side of chips because they came with bacon jam. Dear reader, do not be like Kim. Listen carefully when the waitperson politely suggests some of your choices are “quite filling”.

We live in quite strange times. Still, I never thought I’d be recommending a cauliflower sandwich. The (huge) slice of sourdough was splodged with a piquant sweet-spicy sauce, luscious cauli and blobs of buffalo mozzarella. There were pine nuts and olive oil and, had I ordered a small salad, this might have been the perfect meal — and I don’t even like cauliflower that much, so this is quite high praise.

It wasn’t all downhill from there, but nothing else matched that cauliflower caponata ($22) for surprise, value and absolute deliciousness.

I’d been really excited about the paua risotto ($39) with shiitake mushroom, miso butter and an “onsen” egg which was as gooey and melty as any human hot pool experience. Sadly, I just couldn’t taste shellfish. Maybe all that umami had combined to create something my palate was more used to, but if asked to guess the main ingredient, I would have said parmesan.

Green-lipped mussels and squid ink cavatelli? Sounded divine. The latter is an egg-free pasta; it was dense, almost nuttychewy, and, combined with a nori butter that was no shrinking violet, quite confronting. The mussels felt like an afterthought, it was all about that pasta. I kept going back for another bite and the memory is like an intriguing dream I’m still trying to figure out. I’d order this again just to get to the bottom of it. Literally. We were stuffed and still had two big plates to go.

It’s a small thing, but I really liked the gridded layout of the menu. I approached it like a spreadsheet, scanning for anomalies like the column headed “Clevedon buffalo dairy”. Everyone talks about an “ingredientfirst” focus; Onemata’s paperwork walks that talk, then delivers with a dish like the $37 “curd, charred octopus and local green beans” (an important descriptor in a country that imports around $7m worth of beans from Australia annually). There was a lot of food and a lot was, unexpectedly, potatoes. I love this combination, perfected in Spain’s ubiquitous pulpo gallego but, as per paragraph five, we’d ordered spuds.

Our second main was duck breast ($38). The meat was sublime; the accompanying apples tasted like they’d been soaked in cheap air freshener. A strange note in an experience that had, otherwise, exuded good taste.

Onemata is one of those useful places to keep in the back of your mind for an after-work bite with well-heeled friends, a graduation dinner with grandparents, an elegant, sophisticated pre-or-post theatre gathering. The chairs are comfortable, the service discreet and the menu runs from the classic to the clever. Cauliflower has never been this elegant.