AN OASIS OF CHARM
Does the 2.0 version of a vegetarian darling still wow, asks Kim Knight
It starts with a random whiff of daffodil. The smell of yellow, a sure olfactory harbinger of spring. The seasons have changed. The Uber driver said so, my hayfever said so, and so did the addition of freesias to my weekly corner dairy flower purchase (it’s an extravagance, but once you quit smoking you can justify buying just about anything, for just about forever).
Has your spring not sprung? Book a seat at Forest, the blooming beautiful new Dominion Rd restaurant from chef and owner Plabita Florence.
Forest is an oasis of charm. Its ornate, pressed tin ceiling is painted bush-green and everywhere you turn there are mismatched vases of fresh flowers and foliage. It’s not just a “look”, it’s an ethos. The napkins, for example, are proper cloth. The candles are real, the tables don’t wobble and the paper menus are pristine. All this attention to detail is so reassuring. Absolutely nothing bad could happen in a room this lovely.
Forest used to operate as a tiny set menu space on Symonds St. Its recent shift to Dominion Rd means more tables and more customer choice. The new menu is a la carte and will change according to what’s good, what’s available and what the chef feels like inventing.
A few weeks ago I interviewed that chef for a piece on post-pandemic dining and asked why, given the brutal couple of years just gone, would anyone want to open a restaurant? Her reply: “I genuinely don’t know the answer to this question. I think maybe restaurateurs are a weird sort of masochistic type. If my peers are anything like me, you can tell them the stove is hot, but they just have to touch it for themselves to doublecheck.”
I want a restaurant run by someone who thinks like this to succeed. The food is vegetarian and most of it can be made vegan but if I’m making Forest sound like a temple of virtue then I’ve gone too far. Stash your yoga mat under your chair — the seaweed-spruiked hot chips are truly excellent and the golden syrup sauce on the pumpkin icecream will hurt your fillings. Megan wanted the lettuce and I wanted the kumara and in the end we just ordered all four items from the “dinner to share” list. Do you like a roast? The kumara ($32) was that mouthful of bliss you get when you smoosh a forkful of soft, roasted root vegetables into a pile of peas and then drag the lot through the gravy (which, in this case, is a Marmite cream so savoury you truly won’t miss the meat). I alternated the above with piles of crunchy lettuce ($22) and it was a weirdly brilliant combo enhanced by the spiky salad dressing on the fresh greens — jalapeno pickle juice, according to the menu, but I’m sure I also caught some lime. When you routinely eat meat, it’s hard not to consider food through a carnivorous lens. The brussels sprouts ($27) arrived whole and barbecued on a skewer, and my first thought was “vegetable meatballs, how clever”. In fact, it’s just clever. Also really delicious. The leaves had been blasted black and coated in a sweet (and sour) sticky mushroom vinegar; the sprouts were cooked but still crunchy. Loads of texture and even more flavour.
Green olive tofu? Fine, but not as moreish as what had gone before. Start with bites of “cheffiness” — the show-off snacks that make life interesting for both the diner and the kitchen. At Forest, that means a potato fritter. Fish ’n’ chip shop tradition says it’s bad luck to serve this item solo, but Forest’s version is not your usual flaccid Friday night affair. Fluffy inside and coated in crisp, light (rice flour?) batter, with a rhubarb ketchup that tastes like a superior Speedway sauce, this is everything you want in a $9 single-serve bite. (The more virtuous might consider the witloof taco but don’t blame me when you’re looking at a salad leaf and wishing you’d selected fried potato).
On the night of our visit, there were two pudding options. Warm sticky rice ($18) came with salted coconut whip, nashi and jasmine sherbet. It was a lot for one plate — and palate. Sadly, the rice was more sloppy than sticky, and it entirely lacked sweetness. “I quite like it,” said Megan the vegetarian. “It tastes like penance,” said Kim the reviewer. I had not been missing meat, but I did wish I’d skipped this dessert.
Salvation was a vegan pumpkin icecream ($15) with a gloriously, gold syrupy sauce. If you, like me, are a sucker for all things caramel-adjacent, then definitely order this — your dentist is the only person who will wish you had shared.