Casa Tua in Pakuranga. Photo / Babiche Martens
Herald rating: * * * 1/2
Address: 190 Fisher Parade, Farm Cove
Phone: (09) 576 3739
Open: Dinner Tue-Sun
Cuisine: Italian
From the menu: Sauteed king prawns, herb and pepper butter $17.50; Fettuccine, chicken, mushrooms, cream sauce $22; Osso bucco $25.50; Tiramisu $9
Vegetarian: Naturally
Wine list: Tutto Italiano
As soon as someone can find the rubber stamp, we'll be a Super City with a Super Mayor with the authority to make the buses run on time. To see how super the city is already, Jude and I took the Southeastern Highway to the hinterland.
I was pursuing my
seemingly futile quest to find a halfway decent Italian restaurant in Auckland. We succeeded, in Pakuranga of all places. But only if you read the first sentence of this paragraph very carefully.
Little less than a year ago Fabio Manna opened Casa Tua, which means "your home"; for him that's Naples. His family ran cafes there, and he took to hospitality like a duck to orange: restaurant management at London's A-list San Lorenzo and the Royal Caribbean cruise line, then mixed his computer programming and business skills as 42 Below's sales manager in Miami and the Caribbean. When the vodka mavericks sold out to the Bacardi moguls he came back to New Zealand, where he'd worked in the 90s, to open Casa Tua in a little breeze-block of suburban shops.
The food is Italian but you knew that already. The better news is that it's not, unlike so many others using that label, "Italian country-style" or Ameritalian, aka lashings of thick, sugared tomato sauce atop mince and garlic with a grind of pepper.
Munching pizza bread and sipping glasses from the short, tutto Italiano wine list, we decide to break with tradition and go pasta-carne-dolci. Three courses.
Jude, arbiter of all things gnocchi, asks if it's made on the premises. "No," admits the waiter. OK, not quite Casa Tua then. Still, the tomato sauce is admirably thin, the eggplant and mozzarella complementary. Spaghetti alla puttanesca - thin strands with capers, olives, tomatoes and onions in a red wine sauce - is over-powered by anchovies. And I like anchovies.
Mains arrive. Jude reminds me that, "We eat with our eyes first," so we put them on. Hers is the best dish of the night, white flesh of pan-fried tarakihi and scallops set against orange shrimp and fresh green herbs. Bejaysus, that sounds Irish but it's pure Italian, lightly sauteed in olive oil.
I had thinnish slivers of pan-fried pork, nicely tart from lemon juice and capers, freshened with parsley and a sweet white-wine sauce. At $26.50, with vegetables, it was good eating and value for money. We ordered tartufo, the dark chocolate dessert with secrets hiding inside. It was a mistake. It might have been made on the premises but you'd wonder. Fortunately, we'd struck up a conversation with the boss by this stage, and he bought us limoncellos (limoncelli?) to cap the night. And that is never a mistake.
A nice touch is that you can take-out any of the dishes. A constant stream of locals were doing that, maybe because the little restaurant and its terrace were full, maybe because the good folk of Farm Cove know the old Calabrese proverb: "E megliu nu pezze e pane cu cipuli a casa tua ca storzi a la casa e l'attri," or "Better bread and onion in your own home than great feasts in the homes of others". Sometimes translated as, "Eat our food at home tonight because there's a 15 per cent surcharge since it's Anzac Day."
As we pay and leave, Manna apologises for the surcharge, which elevates our dinner from $140-ish to $158. Casa Tua is a good neighbourhood eatery, and if I was living in the neighbourhood it'd be a more than attractive alternative to eating at home.
