Fish
Three spoons
Level 1 The Hilton, Princes Wharf
09 978 2020
Entrees $18-35
Mains $38.50-45
Desserts $16.50-18.50
There’s a lot right with Fish, Simon
Gault’s new venture at the Hilton, but there’s a lot wrong with it too. Let’s
hope they get the bad stuff fixed before the Rugby World – oh.
The Cup must be the reason they’ve opened quickly,
before the website is finished – not even a PDF menu! – and before they’ve finished
cleaning out what I presume is the winelist of former tenant White. Two weeks
after the place opened, some wines were no longer available. Our sommelier
promised that the list would be better soon, and I believed him.
That poor sommelier. He moved to New
Zealand from a Michelin-starred London restaurant for the job and the wait
staff won’t let you speak to him. You don’t expect a waitress to have all the
answers, but you expect her to know where to find them. It wasn’t until I
suggested it that she finally called him over, and he was a rockstar – ignoring
the measly selection he’d inherited and pouring me something nicer that was
open.
Most of the renovations to White are
cosmetic, but there is a beautiful new deck out front, with probably the best
restaurant view in Auckland. Unfortunately we were seated on the other side of
the room, ten metres from said deck, looking out at the hotel fire escape. Yes,
on day two of the Cup, in one of the only rooms in the city with an unobstructed
view of the Cloud and all the activity around it, the maitre’d of an empty
restaurant put us at a table facing the other direction.
Even in a good seat, it’s difficult to
forget that you’re inside a hotel – the shared lobby, the buffet-width central
bar, the generic music piped through speakers in the ceiling. At one point,
while the waitress stood there trying to think of something to say about the
house pinot gris, I listened to an entire verse of Madonna’s ‘Crazy For You’.
But the food, it’s great! This kid in the
kitchen knows how to do fish – preserving its precious moist flesh by cooking
it whole, or in big hunks, or crumbed in something tasty. Over two visits I ate
almost half the menu and nothing was overcooked, nothing was underseasoned,
everything was fresh and flavourful.
Some
highlights: whole baked flounder with café de paris butter, hapuka with a crab
and prawn crust, salt and pepper paua, beef carpaccio with parmesan crumbs and
a clear gazpacho jelly. And a whole blue cod, his smile baked onto his face,
fleshy and juicy and scattered with shellfish.
My only complaints about the cooking were
conceptual: mussel parpadelle seemed mismatched with its thin watery sauce,
‘pea and carrot textures’ contained precisely two textures: whole peas and a puree.
And, considering the uncertain service, the menu is expensive – $26.50 for four
scallops, that sort of thing – of course, they do have that new deck to pay
for.
For dessert, if you like, a chef will come
to your table to create chocolate mousse in front of you using liquid nitrogen.
If only he’d come earlier during the Madonna track, that dry ice would have
suited the atmosphere perfectly. We tried some other good desserts too, on the night
Fish discovered why you don’t serve melting scoops of ice cream on flat,
edgeless plates.
See what I mean? All quite fixable stuff.
The waitstaff need to sharpen their act, that’s the main thing. I asked one of
the head guys whether they had any interesting beers and he replied that he
didn’t drink beer so he hadn’t looked. That stuff’s cute if everything else is
immaculate, but when a restaurant is very clearly still getting up to speed, joking
that you don’t care is really just annoying.
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