Arbitrageur is boisterous but the service is good. Photo / Getty Images
Herald rating: * * * 1/2
Address: 2125 Featherston St, Wellington
Ph: (04) 499 5530
Website: arbitrageur.co.nz
Open: Dinner Tuesday to Saturday; lunch Thursday & Friday
Wine list: Among NZs best
Vegetarians: Plenty of choice, especially in tapas
Watch out for: The cellar
Bottom line: Feels like a bar, though serves good food
An arbitrageur is someone who buys commodities in one market and sells simultaneously in another where the price is higher. I would call such a person a profiteer, but I probably need to get up with the play since one of them may soon be running the country.
Applied to this casually classy Wellington bar and eatery, the word seems not to have caught on, however. There is a curlicued "A" above the door, but the sign says "The Wine Room" and the business card describes it as a "wine room and delicatessa". (No, I have no idea what that last word means, either, but I reckon whoever chose it might be a teensy bit pretentious).
In the middle of the business district, the place plainly aims at the weekday trade - it opens on weekends only for functions. When we bowled up, the air was thick with the chatter of well-dressed people with briefcases. We were accompanied by a cousin of mine, Richard, a man who delivers scant special education resources - his weekly budget is probably what an arbitrageur spends on a good lunch - to the deaf schoolchildren of Porirua.
I had suggested Matterhorn, newly crowned as Cuisine magazine's restaurant of the year, but he said it was hideously noisy so we dropped that idea.
As it transpired, The Wine Room was a shouting zone too: the punters' babble and some odd music choices, including bass-heavy rap, meant we were sometimes conversing serially, with person B passing on to person C what person A had said.
In essence, this is not a restaurant but a very upscale bar. The wine list consists of about 60 by the taster, glass or carafe and about 10 times that number by the bottle alone. A cellar with a door of (presumably reinforced) glass makes an impressive sight on the way to the loos. But they do food too. An excellent-looking antipasto menu offers tapas, charcuterie (cold meats) and cheeses and there is a small and serviceable dinner menu as well.
The fare is perhaps best described as posh peasant: the burger includes duck liver parfait and red onion marmalade, and there's ribollita, the classic Tuscan bread-and-bean soup on the pasta menu. The veal in my vitello tonnato was sliced almost carpaccio-thin and drizzled with a delicate tuna mayonnaise, and it came dotted with delightfully crunchy roasted capers.
I asked Richard to ask the Blonde what she thought of her simple salad of smoked salmon, orange and baby spinach and he came back with the answer that she liked it.
Richard for his part reckoned the delicate taste of his juicy thick slab of slow-roasted pork shoulder was rather overpowered by the puy lentils it sat on.
My cassoulet, spooned into a small oven-to-table dish, topped with breadcrumbs and grilled up to serving heat, seemed a slightly offhand execution of a classic, particularly at the price. It was short of the large lumps of duck and pork that make the dish the treasure it is.
Desserts were excellent and the service smart and attentive, but at the end of the (working) day The Wine Room is really a wine room, for arbitrageurs and people who make an honest living too.
