KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * *
Address: 1 Pakenham St, Viaduct Harbour
Phone: (09) 365 2585
Web: www.chow.co.nz
Open: 7 days, noon- midnight
Cuisine: Asian plates
From the menu: Roast duck, egg noodles, shitake, bok choy in star anise and soy broth $16; Banana leaf fish with red curry, kaffir lime, honey, coriander, turmeric,
coconut dipping sauce $14; Lime posset, mint and mango salsa, coconut sesame wafers $9
Vegetarian: Some dishes
Wine: ... and cocktails and beer
Chai-pas is the word. For which the world has to thank Jimmy Chung, whose chic Shanghai Lily in Toronto's Chinatown tore apart the food map of Asia in the early 2000s. Chefs blended Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese ingredients with Western accents, turned out in contemporary presentations, to create dishes to be passed around the table, shared across cocktails.
Chai-pas as in "Chinese tapas". Some might call it fusion but Chung rejected the label: "It sounds like bok choy and spaghetti." Sauteed chilli-spiked Chinese long beans with black Greek olives. Wok-fried calamari with passionfruit infusion. Chinese ravioli stuffed with sweet-potato mash and mint with a mango aioli. Battered Japanese eggplant with a minty ginger dip.
These thoughts are inspired by Chow, freshly arrived from Wellington, where it has three berths in and around the Harbour Capital. The Auckland vessel moors a couple of blocks from the water, near the Tepid Baths and another visitor from Evans Bay, Monsoon Poon.
Both share a culinary horizon: salads, rolls, noodles, skewers in a fun place to gather a crew over nibbles and cocktails, or beers and bites.
Moonson Poon casts its ladle wider, incorporating Indian flavours, and feels like your friendly neighbourhood pub. If your friendly neighbourhood is Mumbai or Newtown.
Chinese-oriented Chow is more studied in style and substances. The style is 70s light-fittings and bare-concrete breeze-blocks, dividing the one-time chandlery, later Scandinavian furniture store, into an essay in retro.
The substance "combines the flavours of Asia in a fresh new way". It has one of those so-cute menus divvied up into Bowls, Salads and Long Plates. "Have you eaten at Chow before?" asked the well-schooled waiter.
He would go on to ask everyone that, and pretty much everyone had the same answer, "No." Not surprising, because the place had opened that week, and - much as it may surprise folk at the other end of the island - not every Aucklander goes to Wellington to eat.
So we were informed that: a, the food is meant to be shared and b, a couple of Long Plates with sides is a meal. More is a feast". Jude, Sian, Guy and I did the math and figured we'd start with three or four Long Plates and a similar quantity of Hoegardens and see where we went from there.
Rice-paper rolls were a promising start, vermicelli and veggies getting a kick from coriander and a lemon chilli dipping sauce. Promising, not rip your T-shirt off. Same for prawn and pork cakes, wham generated by red curry, coriander and Vietnam-ish nam yam dipping sauce. Fresh flavours next time around: mango chicken salad, the usual cashews and (there's a theme here) kaffir lime, coriander and a coconut chilli dressing.
Time to stretch for the touted "fresh new way" with Asian flavours. Blue cheese and peanut wontons? Hmmm. With berry coulis? "Why would anyone do that?" asked Guy, a reasonable question, which might also be applied to pumpkin and cashew fritters with saffron, sea salt and ... coriander and sweet chilli dipping sauce. Sian was rather taken by her soup, or should we say Bowl, of spiced beef with rice noodles, bok choy and crispy shallots, though someone might have left out the coriander and chili dipping sauce.
We'd knocked over seven or nine Long Plates and none of us felt, as the French say, complet. Another round might do the trick. Two plates were forgettable: mussel fritters with carrot, sticky rice ... yep, coriander and sweet chilli mayo were not. They were tasteless.
Bill for four, with beers, $200.
Concentrating on all-style and not enough sustenance, dumbing-down superb cuisines into Asia-lite: if Chow and Monsoon Poon are anything to go by, these must be Wellington things.
The problem is the gap between us on the map, and the easy way to reconcile it is eat in a decent restaurant, not a cocktail party with finger food that everyone else is invited to. There's more to a good restaurant than a recycled idea and a hip website.
Oh, one last thing before I go. Shanghai Lily's fusion-tapas experiment lasted less than a year in Toronto. It's now a sushi bar.