Herald rating: * *
Address: 170 Jervois Rd Herne Bay
Phone: (09) 376 5367
www.menus.co.nz
Open: Dinner Tues-Sun, Lunch Tues-Fri
Cuisine: Seafood
From the menu: Marinated gamefish kebabs, fennel balsamic vinaigrette $7.70; Thai fish green curry, jasmine rice claypot $20.90; Sour lemon cake, citrus curd $6.90
Vegetarian: Limited choices
Wine list: In-fin-itesimal; BYO
Sam hankered for seafood. Kai moana. He's spent the past year hustling the young and the listless around Roman bars and frying hangover specials in Austria, about as far as one can be removed from Cornwallis and the Kakamatua Inlet where he was born, grew up and gathered mussels and pipi for the pot. Can't do that on top of a mountain outside Kitzbuhel.
Jude (Sam's mum) and I enjoy fish, ingest Omega 3 from natural sources, or resources, as often as our internet banking sites allow. But for a city spanning two harbours Auckland doesn't do the casual BYO/bistro end of the fishmarket very well. And it was Sunday, of which more later. Inspiration! "Bet Frankie's Fish House is open."
Frankie is actually Michael Devereux, who last year reinvented his Red restaurant into a casual (by the look and prices) fish, bivalve and crustacean (by most of the menu) hangout.
This night, one waitress managed the restaurant: "Things might be a little slow, I'm the only one on," was her introduction. She needn't have worried: she knew her stuff, she kept things ticking along, charmed all four tables.
Before we pick up a knife and fork, know that we three sat next to a large tank, home to four small... fish. They swam up to one end and back to the other. Then swam up to the other end and back to the one. And watched us.
Almost all the dishes come from somewhere: Portuguese mussels, Mexican spiced beans, Southern Malaysia laksa, Thai fish green curry. Carnivores and vegetarians should head for the small plates because they'll be disappointed later.
We had salt'n'pepper squid and Thai fish cakes with a sweet-sour sauce that were as good as anything you'd find on Dominion Rd, which may be praising with faint damns. Pork, pickled cucumber sprouts and iceberg salad was the pick of the three, though it was no contest.
On to the ocean mains! Full speed ahead and damn the torpid little chaps in the tank. Jude and I shared a whole baked snapper, though we had the head removed on aesthetic grounds.
The menu warned, "Each fish is for two persons" and the beast was appropriately vast. "I'll come back when you're halfway through and turn it, and tend to the bones," said the waitress. The un-lovely bones. Isn't that one of the bothers about eating whole fish, or fish whole? And the other bother is that it can be darned difficult to bake a whole fish, to order.
This one was a tad ... tell the truth, several tads too watery. So was the bok choi. And it didn't have that smack-you-in-the-fins kick that two associate with snapper. The menu said "baked" but the flavour had been stewed out of it.
Or perhaps it was Sunday night, and Anthony Bourdain has some intriguing thoughts about ordering fish in a restaurant on the Sabbath. While we're name-dropping, A.A. Gill is typically opinionated on the ethics of ordering fish in restaurants (no, we will not segue into a joke, because Viva is much too grown-up to make puns of people's names. Google "Gill fish" yourself).
Sam fed his kai moana addiction with one of Frankie's several claypots. Not laksa nor beans nor gumbo but seafood. If a place-name had been prefixed it might be Cadiz or Malaga: pipi, calamari, mussels, prawns in tomato sauce. Very thin tomato sauce. Lots of it. Reduced, it might have rediscovered its roots, or its fruit flavour.
"How is the seafood?" we asked. "Not the best pipi, or mussels," said Sam, who's picked them off rocks in Fiji and Turkey as well as the Manukau and is, apart from being a chef, an aficionado.
I looked at the fish in the tank. They swam up to one end and back to the other. They looked as if they knew what they were up to, but they might have been bobbing in the current without a clue where they were going.
