Herald rating: * * * *
Address: Shed 22, Princes Wharf, Quay St, Auckland
Phone: (09) 309 9866
Open: Seven days and nights
Cuisine: Tradition meets try-modern.
On the menu: Sweet wild onion & cauliflower soup, $22.50; Alaskan crab with fried west coast whitebait, osciètre caviar butter & Alba truffle $26; Akaroa salmon & pork belly, truffle creamed savoy cabbage with apple cider gastrique, $39; Spoons of 2010 dessert of black truffle ice cream with fig & marsarla, organic yoghurt & gorgonzola honey egg, lemon apricot tea sphere with melon & passion fruit caviar, $15.50
Vegetarian: Mostly by request.
Wine: Extensive local and international wine list, including some vintage offerings. Good selection by the glass.
Given Simon Gault's propensity to cut up rough with restaurant critics, I was quite pleased to slip into Euro on a cold and quiet Monday night. No sign of the Nourish Group's executive chef who in April took out a full-page recipe for reviewer's testicles, saying "balls to
them" after Metro omitted his restaurants from its annual Best 50 list.
But there were plenty of other burly blokes in evidence: Euro is home turf for the chap with an expense account and a striped shirt. If he plays his cards right and lunch turns into dinner, he'll be joined at the bar by the sort of Auckland dollybird who does her most valuable shopping in the evening.
There's a pre credit-crunch ambience about Euro: a brash, flash side that's more Sydney than Auckland. With its waterfront view, grown-up waiters, worldly wine list and specials like Bluff oysters seemingly on tap, it's a place for showy fun. I've had extremely pleasant long lunches here and a few raucous late night trips which may have involved pizza, but this will be a relatively sober evening meal with my husband.
We're immediately offered a table, or a short wait for an even better spot in front of the fire. We happily perch and get just the right amount of friendly, but non-intrusive chit-chat from behind the bar, before our waiter seats us and offers the kind of informative menu explanations that give me confidence to turn over our wine choices to him.
After oysters and Rachel Scott's excellent ciabatta, with mushroom truffle cheese dip to share, I opt for steak tartare topped with egg yolk and served with almond truffle custard and toasted capers ($26). Having happily protein-overloaded, I go light with the beautifully dressed calamari salad ($18.50) and an artichoke salad ($9.50) on the side. My husband's entree of white asparagus encasing mozzarella in tempura batter ($18) is a delicate start, followed by Hawkes Bay Wagyu beef and portobello mushrooms (at $65 almost twice many of the mains). It's cooked medium by recommendation to bring out the flavour, but is so tender it could have been poached.
Away from usual bustle at the bar and on the terrace, the dining room allows a sense of spaciousness intimacy I'd not taken in before. Aside from the annoying sliding cutlery, there's little to find fault with. So we conclude well before dessert (a shared $15.50 Valrhona chocolate pudding) that how Euro isn't on anyone's Auckland top 50 list is beyond us.
I can see the obsessive foodie might find fault with the split between Euro Classics and the current menu on which Gault and chef Shane Yardley experiment a little with molecular gastronomy.. The old faithful rotisserie chicken is about the most popular dish, but a chef shouldn't be expected to forever turn out the same food.
Gault made his name with full-flavoured, fresh Italian-influenced cooking. The newer items have these hallmarks, but with perhaps less coherence in terms of reading his current oeuvre. The word that springs to mind is robust - it describes the atmosphere and the food. It's hard to imagine Euro not weathering the storm, precisely because robustness is the quality many of us look for in a restaurant.
