Apadana feels a little like the insurance office that preceded it.
Herald rating: * *
Address: 692 Dominion Rd, Balmoral
Ph: (09) 631 0001
Website: apadana.co.nz
Open: Daily from 5pm
Wine list: Short, basic, very good value
Vegetarians: Plenty of choice
Watch out for: Belly-dancing nights
Bottom line: No surprises
Restaurant reviewers are like any other diners - always longing to be surprised. If you get a sense the minute you walk in that a place isn't going to deliver, it takes some strength of will to turn around and walk out, particularly if you're in a group.
So you stay and hope that you'll be wrong.
Apadana, alas, did not surprise. It was almost exactly as good as I expected the minute I walked in, which is to say not very good at all.
I was there, with a couple of hungry university students in tow, at the suggestion of a bloke whose taste is plainly impeccable since he gave me my first job in journalism. I don't think he would object to my saying that he's not an air-kissing, shaved-fennel-and-pinot-gris kind of guy and he certainly didn't present the place to me as Balmoral's answer to el Bulli. This was more a good honest feed than fine dining, he seemed to suggest.
Well, yes and no. It was a feed, certainly, and I have no doubt at all about the establishment's honesty. It's the "good" bit that's causing me a few problems. Apadana could not be accused of pretentiousness but the problem is that the food is very ordinary and not notably cheap.
The restaurant's name, Persian for palace, was, I learn, applied to the great hall at Persepolis (in modern Iran), the capital of the Persian empire about 2500 years ago. It seems a slightly overblown moniker for premises formerly occupied by an insurance company: they've tried to conjure up some atmosphere with swathes of fabric and a few faux classical columns, but the commercial blandness cannot be erased.
Still, it's clean and bright and a central gas fire warms the room, as did the chirruping of a table of happy women in headscarves having a right old girls' night out.
But if the name is Persian, the menu is not conspicuously so: the only Iranian dish I could detect was a ghormeh sabzi, a piquant stew of lamb, kidney beans and dried limes, which is apparently the Iranian national dish - although a salad of cucumber, red onion and tomatoes was described as "shirazi", which may entitle it to the benefit of the doubt.
The rest of a menu described as "Mediterranean" consisted of kebabs, pastas and pizzas - and steak, eggs and chips, presumably for diners who think that chicken lasagne is foreign muck.
I have to say that I rather enjoyed that ghormeh sabzi, a genuinely fragrant concoction with a whiff of desert breezes about it. However, too much of the rest was not notably well executed: the garlic bread was undercooked (in the case of one piece, no heat seemed to have been applied at all); a "veggie platter" entree consisted entirely of those tiny spring rolls and samosas such as you get as finger food at a bad party; the bacon on a very uncrispy pizza comprised cubes of highly processed meat; and a combination kebab meal was glorified takeaways on a plate with rice and salad and, at $28, hardly good value.
In serving Turkish and Italian food, Apadana is operating in a couple of very crowded middle markets. But, like so many of its ilk, it serves unremarkable food at remarkable prices. That, alas, is no surprise.
- Detours, HoS
