Reviewer regret: Failing to order the escalivada at Josh Emett's new restaurant Gilt. Photo / Babiche Martens
According to my husband, the perfect meal is one you can put between two slices of bread. In his world, dinner is nearly always improved by adding a sandwich.
He would have loved Gilt Brasserie.
The crayfish club sandwich was a January menu special. At the time of its consumption, my husband was burying snapper carcasses next to the courgettes. The moral of this story: If you spend your summer kayak fishing, your wife will find someone else to dine with.
Miri declared the crayfish starter her favourite. Truly, what is not to love about white bread made luxe? Toasted sandwich slices, chopped lettuce, ripe tomatoes and heavenly dollops of seafood sauce-soaked cray - it was an elegant picnic on a plate and a peerless match for Auckland’s equatorial weather. When it’s too hot to cook, have someone make you a sandwich.
Contrarily, everything about ordering baked oysters in high summer felt wrong. Trust the chef, because these were buttery, briny and decadent.
The barely cooked shellfish (plumped up in a bath of warm beurre noisette with a smidgeon of soft leek and pickled vegetables) was the Gilt experience in miniature. I felt chic and also mandated to slurp the brown butter sauce.
Josh Emett opened Gilt last November. He is the former MasterChef NZ judge whose gluten-free mac ‘n cheese comes approved by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop lifestyle empire.
With his wife, Helen, he operates Waiheke Island’s Oyster Inn and Auckland’s Onslow (which recently hosted Barbie actor turned gin-trepreneur Margot Robbie).
Now the pair are in this big Chancery Chambers space with a reputation for housing ambitious restaurants. I recall loving a sorrel-smothered egg when it was Inti and loathing the one-way glass in the bathrooms when it was Meat Fish Wine.
The new incarnation has a slightly indefinable quality. Have you ever had a friend who began his working life as a debauched journalist and is now the chief executive of a company? Gilt reminds me of him. Sophisticated, well-mannered and still utterly capable of a very wild time.
I suspect this ethos also applies to the waitstaff. On the night of our visit, they were equal parts polish and personality - when your lunch turns long, they are the highly trained professionals you will want by your side.
The menu easily segues from lunch to dinner and the portions are generous. They fall under headings like “vegetable”, “salad” and “potato”. The “raw” list includes a delightfully simple $16 courgette and parmesan carpaccio that should be in the recipe collection of every home gardener with a courgette glut, and I haven’t even started on the “pasta” or “large” options (whole flounder with a seafood and mushroom sauce, roast duck with frites, etc).
Cobb salad is what’s in your fridge chopped into even pieces and reorganised to look like an Instagram influencer’s bookcase. All style and quite a bit of substance but, post-mixing, there was a dull uniformity to every forkful. Personally, I prefer a salad with surprises.
I wish I’d ordered the escalivada with the luscious strips of roasted capsicum and aubergine. Or the endive gratin. Or the crumbed and fried tomato schnitzel. This might be a wild extrapolation on my part but, based on Gilt’s crumbed and fried lamb chops, I have extremely high hopes for that tomato.
Pork scotch fillet with a mint-forward herb sauce was good. Three crispy sage-leaf smothered lamb cutlets on a splodge of piquant yoghurt were sublime, with a terrifically crispy coating and exactly the right amount of fat left on the meat.
Obviously we ordered the confit potato squares with saffron aioli. Obviously we should have also ordered the pomme puree with olive oil and chives. In France, the expression “avoir la patate” describes someone who looks good and feels great. It literally translates to “have the potato”. I need no further encouragement.
We could have easily shared a protein (though we would have fought over the spare lamb chop) and our desserts were similarly proportioned.
Texture is subjective, but I thought the crema catalana slightly too runny and the rum baba cake too light. You may be tempted to say yes when the waitperson offers to pour more sauce on the latter. Be warned. This is, by necessity, a porous dessert and Gilt does not go light on the rum. The baba quickly became rocket fuel.
“I knew I should have got the doughnut sandwich,” said Miriyana.
Gilt Brasserie: 2 Chancery Street, Chambers, Auckland, ph 09 300 3126. We spent: $272 for two, including two $16 flutes of Spanish bubbly (and could have saved around $60 if we’d skipped the raw courgette and shared a meat option).
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 & inspiring women in food and drink.
by Yvonne Lorkin
Someone handing you the large, leather-bound folder containing Gilt’s drinks list, all 15 pages of it, is a total power move. They’re saying “Here, we nominate you to peruse this impeccably stitched, crisply papered, fabulously fonted folio, so do take care to choose wisely. And don’t let us down dear boy”. But you won’t be intimidated because thanks to someone very switched on in the wine department, every bottle is a banger. Gilt’s by the glass menu kicks off with Champagne (Louis Roederer $28), local methode (Clos Marguerite rosé $21) and a cracking Spanish cava (Privat $16). The still wines also come by the carafe, which holds enough for three small glasses or two glasses and a decent top-up splosh each. The bottle selection is eyepoppingly international. Turbiana from Lugana? Si. Treixadura from Ribeira Sacra? Si. Zinfandel from Sonoma? Chenin blanc from Swartland or Osteiner from Central Otago? Go on then.
And sure, of a sizzling summer afternoon you could sooth your oesophagus with a bottle of something crisp and pink from Beaujolais or Bandol, but when there’s organic, biodynamic, barrel fermented, unfined and unfiltered rosé made from Xinomavro (see-no-mav-ro) grapes grown by Thymiopoulos in Náoussa, Northern Greece, I mean, why wouldn’t you?
The concise cocktail list is cleverly divided into “day drinkers” (I’m all over the Paloma, made from mezcal, hopped grapefruit, prickly pear and soda) and “after dusk” (sling a Belvedere Martini my way please, barkeep). And there’s more agave, rum, vodka, gin, whisky, scotch, cognac and digestif’s than you could shake a swizzle stick at. Beer fans may need to quake-proof their wallets as 440ml of McLeod’s “Sunset Belgian” Wit will cost you $20 (it’s $13 for 440ml over at Origine) but what’s a little shaking when the sipping is this good?
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