Cherry-stone clams on vermicelli with black bean sauce at Live Fish Restaurant. Photo / Kenny Rodger
Where: 22 Jellicoe St, Freemans Bay. (09) 373 3616
Our meal: $186.32 for three entrees, three mains and three bowls of rice.
Wine list: A couple of local whites by the glass, reds by the bottle $30 and up.
Verdict: Down at the end of lonesome street where disappointment waits.
Out of 10
Food: 6
Service: 5
Value: 6
Ambience: 4
Some people - rather than know the awful truth about the food they eat - prefer to think chickens are born in supermarket warmers and come already flavoured with Cajun-spice.
Such people are advised to avoid the fish restaurants of Asia and elsewhere, in which tanks of
live dinner await your considered judgment before being killed and prepared.
Such a place is Live Fish in the western end of the Viaduct, a area which at night is so bereft of life that it has all the mood and gloom of a film noir.
It isn't an attractive place and, to be honest, nor is Live Fish.
Some have likened it to a Hong Kong restaurant, but my experience of various parts of Asia tells me Live Fish lacks one essential ingredient: customers.
On the night we sat under the marquee on uncomfortable chairs as wind whipped the plastic sheeting, there were only a dozen others in the place. Ambience it didn't have.
But, as I noted with cheery optimism when we found our way to it through the Auckland Fish Market, which was closing up and hosing down, great Asian food doesn't always come with matching decor.
And decor is something Live Fish also doesn't have - unless you count tanks of enormous crayfish piled atop one another, and gulping fish staring at you with what looks like baleful pessimism. Regrettably Live Fish didn't deliver great food either, and some of what we had was on the low side of mediocre.
There were three of us prepared to enjoy the evening, so we ordered from the long menu of shellfish, catch of the day and crayfish, avoiding the also-rans of various presentations of chicken, steak and pork mains (all $22).
For starters Sue went for raw Pacific oysters, Megan the diamond shell clams with ginger and spring onion and I opted for the cherry-stone clams which came with rice vermicelli and black beans. The oysters were acceptable (Pacifics can be bereft of flavour), but our clams were very good, especially mine.
Sue heroically, and after some cajoling, chose a 1.2lb crayfish ($48 a pound) with a rich butter sauce and noodles, Megan the prawns and scallops with soy sauce, and I went for the whole steamed wrasse - which I eyeballed before farewelling to the kitchen. Sue and I had long finished her oysters when Megan's clams came.
My clams arrived as her mains turned up, then came the crayfish and finally another wait for my fish. But we tried to enjoy the mains while they were hot.
That proved difficult with the crayfish, which had been chopped into chunks, which meant fragments of carapace were in the meat. And the meat was so chewy Sue actually passed on it. It was also saturated in the sauce, and the noodles were a gluggy mess.
The Scot in me, knowing this was costing $60, grappled with it manfully but with equal disappointment. Megan's medley was the best of the mains and although my wrasse was steamed to melting perfection, to say the taste was subtle is also to admit it required the sauce to elevate it beyond the ordinary.
We didn't bother with drinks - we weren't offered a list and you're not spoiled for choice - and within an hour of arriving we were done and glad to leave that chilly place.
To ameliorate our disappointment and to cheer up Sue, our guest, we stopped off at Tabou in Kingsland for a dessert because it never disappoints.
And we'd had enough expensive disappointment for one night.
