Last night we had our dinner at Hiakai, the new hottest thing in Wellington. This is a high-end restaurant that uses Maori/ Pasifika ingredients and has created a great deal of buzz including an article in the New York Times and this interesting piece about the challenges of sourcing native produce in NZ.
It’s located in Mount Cook, so in the afternoon I went down to nearby Newtown to an Indian-run beauty parlour to get my eyebrows threaded and arms/ legs waxed. I make a point of finding the South Asians for this sort of thing, they know how to do it properly. In this case they had two people do the waxing together which was nice and quick though a bit tricky as I was unused to angling two limbs at a time for the waxing. The threading was very good. Afterwards I had a couple of hours before the booking (it was an early evening booking, the only one available) so I walked through Newtown and admired its slightly ramshackle houses and the general buzz of a non-whitebread part of town such as Kelburn where I am presently staying. I then walked up an inevitable hill and through a reserve (foolish in my expensive leather shoes), eventually finding a small playground where I listened to music until I got chilly and a little damp from the very light misting rain. So I continued to the restaurant which had Massey University directly opposite and went in the latter to find a sofa to wait in. I do find universities very comfortable spaces and never have any hesitation about walking in and making myself at home.
Eventually it was 1730 so I went across to Hiakai which had quite a nice building, over old brick kilns (imagine a future restaurant in a Pakistani brick kiln, my God). The Gentleman Friend arrived.
The meal itself was good, but showed to me what a long way there is still to go. It was very Micheliny, Noma-esque; it should have been more Hedone and drawn on native techniques as well as ingredients. It used excellent local produce but used it in a way that made it indistinguishable from any competent fine dining experience. There was no showcasing of flavours and textures. For instance, a green lip mussel ice cream was very tasty but came in a classic vichysoisse which dominated the more delicate local flavours. A thin gelee made with a local berry was wrapped over rhubarb sorbet; when I peeled off a bit of the gelee and tasted it it was very nice, but in the dish the rhubarb overpowered it. Similarly, there were excellent strawberries macerated in a gin infused with what we were told was a very hard to find flower which certainly added a tropical undertone but I would have liked just a drop of the gin to taste it in isolation. Similarly, a bit of leaf or whatever. This is why I think Hedone would have been a good model, as their aim is to reach the essence of an ingredient so when you have a peace millefeuille it really tastes like the essence of a summer peach. A serious mis-step, I thought, was the cutlery. There was the usual focus on shallow bowls for beautiful plating, but in almost all cases the cutlery was inadequate. For instance a single spoon provided for a dish which required you to saw into a bit of tomato and then you had to use your finger to actually get food onto the spoon. Or, worst of all, a deep fried fish, quite large and bony (excellent, one of my favourite things) that you ate with your hands but there was no way provided to clean your fingers afterwards. A Japanese style hot towel would have been perfect.
So yes, a good competent effort (aside from the cutlery) but I would have really liked it if it made the ingredients sing instead of the technique. A little forgettable too; until it came to writing this blog post I had completely forgotten about it.