I get scared when I am planning a trip to a new city. Scared that I will make poor choices. I see a long weekend broken up into distinct sections dictated by the meals I can eat and the meals I will not be able to eat. I will enter every possible permutation of search strings to find out the broad critical consensus of what is good. I will dismiss ideas that are too frequent as populist and therefore not worthy of my time. I will dredge apps and websites I don’t respect to find out what the people I don’t like don’t like and mark those as potentials. In short: I panic. But this weekend it paid off; I spent three days doing very little other than eating and drinking in Auckland and it was incredible. I tried to write as close to finishing the meal as possible and where possible I have not gone back in to edit anything, hoping in some way the experience may be more present as a result. This list is totally subjective and skews very heavily towards my addiction to breads and doughs, it is not hyperbolic to say that I genuinely believe dough to be one of the highest forms of art and culture. Enjoy.
Gloria’s
Commercial Bay Ground Floor, 7 Queen Street, Auckland CBD, Auckland 1010
Pepperoni, hot honey and ricotta | potato and guanciale
Gloria’s used to be that little shop on K-Road that knew how to create the most beautiful looking sandwiches. It was a shop that built up a real community around it; anyone that had been once became evangelical about it and with good reason. I remember my first visit: the guy behind the counter proudly talking me through the combos of the day and slinging us a couple of free cookies to enjoy just because. It was also that little shop that also understood that the bread was probably the most important thing about making a perfect sandwich. So they made their own, fermented over days and forming the most perfect, bubbly focaccia that by all means should probably just be enjoyed on its own with some grassy olive oil. Well, that shop grew up and has now somehow metamorphosed into something that seemed so impressive that the first thing we did on arrival in Auckland was to drive right at it and pay for on-road parking in Britomart. For those of you that have only salivated at its frankly ridiculous Instagram page, I promise you that it is not a disappointment. It is now a bodega in Commercial Bay that sells sandwiches, and now slices, of the most exquisite pizza al taglio - a square pie sold by the slice originating in Rome. Pies topped with things like potato and guanciale, or pepperoni and hot honey. I had both and both slices did that thing of being all of the best bits of all kinds of pizzas: crispy base and corner pieces where the oils and fats have percolated down and fried it all, and gooey deep pockets of dough and cheese, full of salt and sweetness. The bologna sandwich was an unnecessary third item on the order, but one that I have thought about every couple of hours since eating. This place has been open five weeks, yet it already feels like a staple of Auckland. A beacon of what fast, affordable good food can and should be in any major city.
Lilian
472 Richmond Road, Grey Lynn, Auckland 1021
I know this may sound a bit extreme and bombastic, but on reflection I think Lilian may be a perfect restaurant (Brunswick House - UK, Margot - NZ). There is something ethereal about a perfect restaurant, something intangible that cannot be planned for. It isn’t food, nor lighting, nor the uniform the waiters wear. It is something else, hovering in the room that just makes it all work. The second you walk into Lilian, you know you are somewhere important. Somewhere you will return to time and again. The dining room has a stripped back luxury of somewhere in Italy at some point in the past, sometime happier and more carefree: the linen-like whitewashed walls, burgundy leather banquettes and deep natural woods. This contradiction of simple luxury makes its way into every last detail. The cocktails feel timeless yet modern. Spirits that would have been drunk on rivieras in the 20s like pisco and vermouth, but now made contemporary with passion fruit skin tisane or lemongrass. The menu is built around the woodfire oven they have out back, one that gets hot enough to leopard spot all of their flatbreads and pizzas and char any of the proteins they finish in it. The flatbreads are a work of art, arriving at the table literally steaming from the oven and almost spherical with energy. They have been drenched in olive oil and are blistered all over - fingers are burnt with the impatience of waiting for them to cool down. There are so many options of what to have with flatbread and we chose a generous slab of chicken liver parfait, rich with mineral and iron and blanketed in a salad of parsley and pickled onions. It is the combination of fats and breads and herbs that makes Fergus Henderson’s bone marrow and parsley salad work at St Johns and it is just as impressive here. Next is a perfectly blush duck breast with braised radicchio and blueberries on a parsnip puree. Duck fat is one of life’s great pleasures and here it is perfectly rendered and seasoned, the bitter radicchio and sweet berries and parsnip creating one of the most balanced and enjoyable dishes in the history of duck. A pizza of creamed chilli, chorizo, honey and pickled onions is the pizza I have always imagined could exist. One that has heat and fat and sweetness and acidity and all of the things happening all at the same time, but just somehow manages to keep it all under control. Just like Lilian manages to do; so many incredible things are happening in that gorgeous room and it is all under control.
Daily Bread
Various locations across Auckland
One of the disadvantages of ageing is the inability to sleep in for any meaningful period of time. What it does mean is that walking down Ponsonby Road on a Saturday morning at 7:30, we walk into a near empty Daily Bread with all the possible pastries and breads piled high and fully stocked. From what I hear, this is very rarely the case. Morning buns are one of the single greatest things to originate from the Nordic countries; here the dough is laminated rather than enriched and is laced with green cardamom and dusted with sugar. The pleasure gained from sitting outside on a sunny morning, a newspaper open in front of you going unread, as you tear apart the sweet knot and watch the street getting busier with people is almost total. Put next to that a spiralled maze of a pan aux raisin, the raisins tumbling out as each layer is peeled away before being stuffed back in using the sweet crème pat as a glue, and you are somewhere close to heaven.
Paris Butter
166 Jervois Road, Herne Bay, Auckland 1011
I’m not sure if there is any point in trying to write something new about Paris Butter, the place that is lauded as one of the best restaurants in the country and whose dishes are half a guide to the provenance of Aotearoa and half art installation. I wonder if there is any point describing the brilliance of the staff working both in the kitchen and front of house; how they made all of us feel so immediately welcome and almost every interaction was one that was informative, passionate and often very funny. It won’t surprise you to know the wine list is perfectly focussed and has great bottles from Aotearoa and the old world, a great example of an Alsace Grüner and a something from Jura hitting the spot. I don’t know if it would be helpful to describe the startling variety in each dish brought to our table, from those first four snacks delivered by Cuisine Chef of the Year, Zennon Wijlens, to the quite remarkable complexity of the final desert. There is no point me trying to describe to you how thin the pasta was, how verdantly it existed and became like moss atop the mushrooms and grains. Little point in me trying to convey how deeply savoury and smokey the tri-tip beef was from the hibachi grill, or how their take on kiwi onion dip all had us laughing and dragging the glazed milk buns greedily across the dish when it had long gone. So often visiting ‘the best’ restaurants are a disappointment; they can never live up to expectations or have an element of the emperor’s new clothes to them. There is none of that here. If you were to ask me, this is a truly world class restaurant operating at the highest standard it is possible to operate at. I cannot wait to return.
Norma Taps
90 Wellesley Street West, Auckland CBD, Auckland 1010
Norma taps is a warehouse space down the end of Wellesley Street that is currently hosting a semi-permanent pop up by nomadic pizza fritta slingers Passa Passa. The bar has a revolving set of taps serving the best beers from Aotearoa, some interesting low intervention wines, and a handful of classic cocktails. The room is exactly the kind of space that shows a city is fostering talent in hospitality; the passion behind what they are doing is palpable and the room feels lively and important. But those pizzas, and I hope you will forgive me for this phrasing. Fuck. For an article that has a lot of dough-talk in it, these guys are something so very special. A sourdough base is deep fried before being topped liberally, covered in Parmesan, and blasted back in a hot oven to crisp up even more. The first we had was covered in spiced Calabrian sausage nduja, providing heat and a natural sourness, and Italian uber cheese Taleggio. All this on a fried base that had chew and crunch and a savouriness all to itself that is. Just such fun. The other was covered in thinly sliced chorizo, jalapeños and fior di latte. This is exactly the food that the great beers and wines of this country were made to be eaten with. In a city with a lot of great dough, this place is absolutely holding its own.
Peach’s Hot Chicken
2 Queens Road, Panmure, Auckland 1072
There is something quite beautiful and democratic about a restaurant of this size starting life as a food truck some years ago. It seems to suggest that this massive diner, opened at the end of 2022 on the corner of a busy intersection in Panmure, has done all the important work and is cooking something up that people want - and judging by the number of people in here at lunch time on a Friday, they really want it. Now in it’s third iteration, Peach’s Hot Chicken serves legit Nashville fried chicken using exclusively free range and high welfare birds. This isn’t always a given with chicken shops and it is something they should be genuinely proud of; it makes a difference to the quality on offer. The leg and thigh piece was about as traditional as it gets, served on a slice of white bread with a couple of sharp pickles on top. During cooking, the paste and crumb coating on the bird acts as a casing that hardens, the rapidly heating liquid in the bird escapes and forms a protective barrier from the oil. This means when done properly, as here, the bird retains all of its moisture and feels anything but greasy. It is crisp, juicy and the medium heat option I went for has real heat. Not that silly kind of heat reserved for eating competitions, but a broad and detailed spice that develops as you eat. Sides are phenomenal and we went slightly crazy. Jalapeño mac and cheese is rich and has a real vinegar punch of spice while the tater tots were crisp and salty in all the right ways. Hush puppies are the star of the sides’ show, a deep fried ball of cornmeal batter served with a whipped maple butter. If I ever move to Auckland, Panmure will find itself pretty high on my list of suburbs.
Lebanese Grocer
65 Pitt Street, Auckland CBD, Auckland 1010
There is something special about a chef deciding to open a place that reminds them of their childhood, a place with a limited menu that sells provisions as well as food. It lets us know they are genuine; they want to share something of themselves with us and don’t want to hide the produce they use or who they are. At the Lebanese Grocer, Elie Assaf is certainly not hiding away. The high ceilinged room is dominated by the marble countertop spilling over with produce, with an open kitchen to one side and shelves of goods the other. A concise menu is always a good sign and here there is shawarma, sojouk, falafel and a fattoush salad. The shawarma changes each week and the day I visited it was chicken shawarma, pomegranate BBQ sauce, garlic rouille, fries and pickles. Take a moment to read back over that again. I sat on one of the two outside tables with both this and a pot of Lebanese coffee - brewed directly on the hot top, its fine grind and gentle spicing something really rather remarkable indeed. The shawarma itself is the kind of thing made by a team of people that really know what matters - sauces. Here the generosity of the pomegranate BBQ sauce offers sweetness and a piquancy that is then supported by the garlic rouille, a development on basic mayonnaise with the addition of breadcrumbs and spices, adds a luxuriousness to the whole thing. I want to walk past this shop every Sunday around midday and simply sip at the glorious coffee and watch the world go by before ordering whatever genius they have on that week. I will sit there for a while and just enjoy it all.
Just before I left my niece handed me a muffin she had made; it was delicious.
This makes me want to visit Auckland immediately! I totally relate to the stress and need to plan for the perfect food experience for every single meal while on holiday - as I 100% trust your recs, I now have a whole list ready to go for my next trip. Gold. 😊