District Dining
Four spoons
Ph 368 5315
Starters and sides $4-12
Sharing plates $18-31
Desserts $15
I never thought I’d miss those little
blurbs at the front of the menu that tell you what the chef’s ‘philosophy’ is
and how this will translate into your ‘dining experience’. They can be
eye-wateringly abstract, but more often they’re just too generic. Honestly, if
I hear from one more chef that his USP is seasonality,
or that he wants the ingredients to speak for themselves … it’s the culinary
equivalent of the ‘game of two halves’ speech.
But if District Dining needs anything, it’s
that. Something to help get your head around what links quinoa nigiri to carrot
salad to a beef chimichanga to steak tartare. Or if they aren’t linked, what
the chef wants to tell us about why this doesn’t matter. It’s not just an
intellectual complaint – everything gets delivered at once, so a bit of context
would help nudge it safely out of the pan-ethnic buffet danger zone.
This complaint aside, I’m in love with the
food. All sharing plates, the menu has a broad, nose-to-tail selection of
tasty, interesting cuts of meat with flavour packed accompaniments: nuts,
pickles, spice rubs and herbs. The fish is lovely too – cured trevally with
that quinoa, or meaty hapuku chunks with mussels, just the right amount of
fennel, and green spots of herby gremolata all over the white fish.
Vegetarian options are tasty enough to
order on their own merits, not just on the merits of letting an extra pig live.
Those carrots come with salted yoghurt, dukkah and almonds and wouldn’t be out
of place at London’s Moro, the spiritual home of that sort of Moorish, moreish
food and also a pretty unbeatable model for the sort of casual-but-exceptional
restaurant District Dining aspires to be.
The room is long and cool, with lots of
bare walls and lightbulbs, and enough of a window into the kitchen that
food-bores like me can lean in and ask questions. The trickiest thing now, I reckon,
will be getting service up to the same international level as the food. All
good-looking boys, they’re great fun, and proud to be working there, but they
don’t know enough about how the food is put together. You could say it’s
because they’re new, but I get the strong feeling it’s because they think part
of a relaxed attitude is not caring too much about what you know and what you
don’t. The other District Dining is in Sydney; I doubt the staff get caught
making it up over there.
Same with the wine. What a spectacular
list, full of European varietal oddities and obscure New Zealand labels. But they
need someone on the floor to learn it and love it, because right now nobody is
any help.
We walked out stuffed and tipsy for just
over $200 – pretty bloody good for the location. One of us would have been less
stuffed, except that when the waiter delivered our ox tongue he said to my
partner “I won’t give you cutlery, because you probably won’t eat any of this”.
So, of course, she had to prove him wrong by eating the entire tongue, once
again revealing her susceptibility to reverse psychology (I got her to agree to
marry me by dropping into conversation that she didn’t seem like one for
commitment).
All these new restaurants. It’s going to be
a brilliant Top 50 next year. District Dining has the potential to be amongst
the supreme awards, they just need that perfectionism in the kitchen to spread
to the floor. You don’t need to tuck in your shirts or anything boys, you just
need to know more about the food than your customers do.
Jesse Mulligan
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