Chef Michael Meredith's new SkyCity Auckland restaurant, Metita, is named for his mother. Photo / Supplied
At home, on my couch, I can inhale half a cake of chocolate after dinner without thinking. In restaurants, where chefs tell stories on plates, I’d rather stick to the savoury.
The restaurant dessert is a blunt instrument. A predictable line-up of chocolate, citrus, seasonal fruit or caramel - the culinary equivalent of a beach read, a sweet satiating of the masses.
Now consider the steamed bun, stuffed with tinned corned beef and topped with caviar. The eel doughnut served on a spicy banana puree. The bowl of sliced raw geoduck combined with sweet, fresh coconut and pops of finger lime. These are the dishes you want and remember. The clever snacks that amuse and confound - contemporary poets, better than any pudding.
Metita had been open a little more than a month when we pulled up our stools at a bench that proffered premium views of the wood-fired grill station of Michael Meredith’s new kitchen. Duck, beef and lamb. Fire, smoke and sizzle. A charred symphony of main character action at a restaurant Auckland should have been enjoying for decades.
Samoan-born Meredith named Metita for his mother. It’s in the SkyCity space most recently occupied by an Italian restaurant operated by an English chef who is mostly based in Australia. What does it say about this dining precinct that it offered porchetta years before povi masima? That triple-cooked potatoes are all over the city but no one is double-boiling a taro? (That second cook involves coconut cream. And then it’s adorned with chunks of corned beef. Do not attempt solo).
When the cheapest thing on the menu is a single oyster cooked in bone marrow ($9) and the beef rib eye runs to $125, a customer needs some guidance. Our waitperson was, perhaps, still coming to grips with the list. The large dishes (like that on-the-bone beef that comes from Nadia Lim’s Royalburn farm or the $50 pork hock) might serve three people, she said, before recommending one of those for the two of us, along with three or four other options and definitely the taro ($25) and possibly something from the snack menu (priced per piece).
I am easily led. We were utterly stuffed, but about that corned beef and caviar: It’s meaty salt and fishy salt, and a steamed white bread bun, and a slick of lardo, which is a fancy name for pig fat. It is the $23 culinary and cultural collision every Aucklander should try once - our city on a plate (and also Meredith at his genius best. Remember that time he opened his eponymous restaurant on Dominion Rd and made headlines with licorice “soil”?).
These days, fine dining menus are less fussy and ingredients get a higher billing than technique. At Metita, what you see on the page is what arrives on your plate.
Pāua, so often served garnish-sized, shone in an intriguing dish that combined decent chunks of the stuff with paneer and a bitter orange-infused oil. A curl of tender octopus sat atop a lip-smackingly rich ferment of coconut. A huge fried pork hock with obligatory crispy skin came with next-level sapa sui - enoki mushrooms had been added to the soy-soaked tangle of vermicelli, adding subtle texture.
Dessert? The list is small but predictably flavoured. The panipopo comes with caramel. Pasifik Koko is chocolate by any other name. I ordered out of duty: “Passionfruit, coconut yogurt, sasa lapa”. Google revealed the latter as soursop - a humidity-loving fruit that smells like pineapple, tastes like apples and strawberries and has the texture of a banana.
Okay. I was a little bit more interested than usual.
What landed was, quite simply, the best dessert I have ever eaten - surpassing (and this is no easy feat) even the cheesecake at Pici. I immediately proclaimed it the dessert of my reviewing career.
The passionfruit was sans seed and delivered as a semi-frozen curd, solid enough to bite but liquid satin on the tongue. It was as sweet as it was sour and that exquisite balance extended to the accompanying curls of sorbet and soft meringue. If I had not been sitting directly in front of a dozen chefs, I would have licked this tropical island of a plate clean. I am happy to eat my dessert-loathing words; Metita has rewritten the restaurant pudding book.
Metita, 90 Federal St, Auckland. Phone 09 363 7030. We spent: $306.90 for two (but definitely over-ordered).
Kim Knight has been a restaurant critic for the Weekend Herald’s Canvas magazine since 2016. She has a particular interest in food journalism and, in 2019, completed a Masters in Gastronomy. In 2023, she was named one of New Zealand’s Top 50 most influential & inspiring women in food and drink.
by Yvonne Lorkin
I should have known, just seeing a non-alcoholic charcoal margarita cocktail called “The Mist of Ana Ahu” and a rum espresso called “Danger on the Okuk”, that this drinks list was going to be seriously sexy. Clocking a pale ale from McLeod’s and a lager from Hallertau on the Tap list, alongside brews from Vailima, Urbanaut, Parrotdog, Garage Project, Brothers and Sawmill – has me happy as a clam in terms of fizzy amber treats. The aperitif, sake and vermouth menu has me a-flutter as do the vodka, gin, rum and tequila selections.
An impressive, woof-inducing, 150-strong wine-by-the-bottle list has prices starting from $80 for an Astrolabe Kekerengu Coast albarino 2020 (which also has the lowest by-the-glass price of $16) to a $6900 bottle of Ch Petrus 1985 from Bordeaux. 125mls of Champagne will set you back $30 (Taittinger) or stylish sparkling by Huia ($19) or Quartz Reef ($24) will sort you nicely. Still, it’s only 125mls though. Sigh.
While it’s short and stylishly simple, what I also really like about Metita’s By The Glass list is that it carries an example of pretty much every style of wine on the list. A rosé fan? Go the Palliser Estate. Never tried orange wine? Give a glass of Pyramid Valley pinot gris/sauvignon a nudge. They also state that the riesling on the list (Maude, “Mt Maude”) is “dry” so there’s no confusion.
Want to try viognier? Syrah? Gamay noir? There’s something by the glass for every good boy and girl.
Reka Metita! Nice list indeed.
— Yvonne Lorkin
Is it possible to have a tidy divorce? Leading barrister Sharon Chandra explains how.