Through the bar and into the dining room at Advieh, Gareth Stewart's new restaurant at the InterContinental Auckland. Photo / Supplied
Through the bar and into the dining room at Advieh, Gareth Stewart's new restaurant at the InterContinental Auckland. Photo / Supplied
Kina butter, pistachio butter, brown butter yoghurt - pass the fresh-baked flatbread, says critic Kim Knight after a look at the menu at the new InterContinental Auckland’s restaurant, Advieh.
Is “egg yolk butter” the new mayonnaise? Or is it just mayo?
My grandmother would call that kind oflanguage “gilding the lily” and there was a small bouquet’s worth of it going on at Advieh. Coastal lamb neck. Day boat market fish. Matakana watercress. Dog poo crap leaves.
I beg your pardon?
Fortunately, I grew up in a province plastered with wine labels, and unlike my companion who will be following up dinner with an audiologist’s appointment, I heard correctly: “Pāua dolma, with Dog Point grape leaves,” said the very lovely waitperson.
The best way to test a restaurant’s wares is to order something you don’t usually like. I’ve never really understood dolma/dolmades (although, in the writing of this review, I did learn the former is Turkish and the latter is Greek). Either way, I’ve always considered them earnestly uninteresting rolls of rice wrapped in vineyard clippings.
Until now. I laughed when the cigar-shaped dolma arrived balanced in a perfect pāua shell, but this was, I think, a nod to the beach and not the bach ashtray.
The distinctive briny smell of pāua hit on first bite and settled pleasantly in the back of my throat while I dipped the dolma in a rich, tangy tzatziki made with zucchini instead of cucumber (because well, why not?).
There is a persistent rumour that some restaurants cut expensive pāua with cheap squid.
Advieh’s rice-based approach is both honest and clever. The grain really soaks up and enhances the shellfish flavour; the presence of pāua in a dolma gives you a clear cuisinic steer.
If you want an international guest to appreciate the kaimoana (and creative Aotearoa spin on a middle eastern classic), get the dolma. If you want your own taste buds to collapse in a puddle of gratitude, get the chicken liver baklava.
Was it the crunchy, flaky pastry? Was it the lightest touch of savoury-sweet mānuka honey?
I have eaten a lot of iterations of liver in my life but Advieh’s is the only one I’m still thinking about. And the more I think, the more I suspect butter. I counted six different expressions of it across the menu. From the pistachio butter in a Black Doris pudding, to the brown butter yoghurt that came with the fried cauliflower, this restaurant makes the social media butter board trend look like amateur hour.
(Advieh is, I suspect, no bigger on butter than a lot of restaurants but it is, perhaps, more honest. I say honesty is always the best policy and pass me another flatbread, stat).
A selection of snacks from Advieh at the InterContinental Auckland - the chicken liver baklava (top left), crispy kataifi and coastal lamb chop. Photo / Supplied
The biggest things on the menu here are, indeed, big. An entire duck. Bone-in ribeye ($21-$30 per 100g) with kina butter that requires a waitperson to discreetly shift a chair out of the way so chef Gareth Stewart (Nourish Group’s former national executive chef) can personally push this trolley of shared performative eating to your table.
My dining companion was vegetarian. We had the eggplant.
Before that she’d had the fried kale and I think enough time and memes have passed that we can agree the kale chip is, essentially, a good idea.
The sturdy green leaf with labneh and a lot of lemon zest came in a set of three and made me feel less sad she couldn’t have the chicken liver.
I wonder if vegetarians get tired of eggplant as a meat-free option? They certainly get very discerning.
“No,” said my friend, after her first mouthful. The presentation was beautiful, but the many individual components (including a caramelised whey and black sesame tahini) were blobbed rather than layered.
It was difficult to get a bit of everything and sometimes it was too sweet and sometimes it was too bitter and always we thought the eggplant should have been more unctuous.
Luckily for me, I had a wagyu shish waiting in the wings. Essentially a meatball on a skewer, the beef had a chunky, juicy, hand-chopped consistency that made me regret a lifetime of pre-blitzed supermarket mince choices, but you don’t know what you don’t know and that is the wonder of letting a restaurant take care of dinner.
You order the carrot hummus because it sounds like a reasonable starter to share and it tastes like a Turkish-buttery blaze of glory with a spike of pickled mussels.
On paper, Advieh is a hotel restaurant in a shopping mall - in person, it’s a sophisticated space doing interesting, Middle Eastern-inspired things with a hard focus on local ingredients.
Kim Knight has been a restaurant critic for the Weekend Herald’s Canvas magazine since 2016. She holds a master’s degree in gastronomy and in 2023 was named one of New Zealand’s top 50 most influential and inspiring women in food and drink.
Sip the List
by Yvonne Lorkin
When Kim disclosed that the drinks list at Gareth Stewart’s new spot was a “monster”, she really didn’t impress upon me the true King Kong-sized scale of the paperwork. Ten pages, 12 bourbons, 18 gins, seven vodkas and the whiskies. Oh, the whiskies. If you’re an amber nectar nerd you’ll go nuts over examples from four Japanese regions (Hokkaido, Osaka, Yamanashi, Yamazaki), Australia and Ireland. Four different single-malt drops from Waikato’s own Pōkeno Distillery and, if you have a spare $84, you too could enjoy a dram of Macallan 18-year-old Sherry Cask, a $53 glug of Johnny Walker Blue Label or $28 splash of Highland Park 15-year-old from the list of 20-ish Scottish icons. A smorgasbord of sherries from Lustau and Hidalgo, ports from Graham’s, Dow’s and Churchill’s and sweet wines from Rock Ferry, Testalonga, Belingard, Carmes de Rieussec and (of course) Ch d’Yquem (1988, at $1899 per bottle) will have your taste buds singing and your tooth cavities screaming.
The wine list is a work of art. Yes, I know how wanky that sounds and no, I won’t apologise. Clearly there’s someone on Stewart’s team who has great taste. Adventurous taste. Adventurous in that in addition to an exceptional list of classic varietals, the list features chunky selections of orange/skin contact/natural wines, chilled reds and gamays, exotic reds (cinsault, zinfandel, nerello or pinotage perhaps?) alternative whites (fiano, assyrtiko, albarino anyone?) and a By The Glass selection that’s seriously impressive. Plus there’s a Wine Of The Day system, giving you the opportunity to taste something new or hard-to-find. Excellent list, Advieh.
