Herald rating: * * 1/2
Address: 108 Ponsonby Rd
Ph: (09) 361 5858
Website: prohibition.co.nz
Open: Tuesday to Saturday; 5.30pm-late
Wine list: Ostentatiously good
Vegetarians: One entree
Watch out for: All the copper in the dunnies
Bottom line: Overwrought
KEY POINTS:
Back in the days when restaurants were something of a rarity on Ponsonby Rd, the Bronze Goat was a landmark. For a quarter century it served Mediterranean and Persian food and it was exotic and bohemian and the coolest thing on the strip.
In recent years an Irish pub, the place has now reopened after months of refit. I express no opinion as to how much sense the new Russian owners have but they plainly have no shortage of money since quite a lot of it has been hosed around the interior: there are copper bathroom fittings, the furniture is heavy and handsome, the cutlery bone-handled, the glassware lead crystal. It is, more than a little self-consciously, old-fashioned.
This is no bad thing since new fashions often have so little to recommend them. But, as the name suggests, this is also a theme restaurant. It has a vintage car parked outside, and when you go for a pee a speaker booms a crappy pastiche of mobster talk. The staff dress like gangsters' molls (flounces and boas) or gangsters (spats, fedoras, pinstripe suits) and some wear bluetooth headsets. This does not look as silly as it sounds: it looks 10 times as silly as it sounds.
To their credit, the staff sustain this rather juvenile charade with no obvious sign of the cringing embarrassment they must feel. Diners may find it somewhat harder to shake the uncomfortable feeling that they ought to join in. But why?
This place belongs to an era of theatre restaurants that is about as remote as vaudeville or Jacobean revenge tragedy. Maybe it's a frightful wheeze in Moscow but it seems to me that the place for a Prohibition-theme restaurant is Chicago or New York where it could be booked out, three sittings a night, by busloads of bum-bag-toting tourists.
I presume Prohibition-era gangsters were fond of Neapolitan and Sicilian food though they doubtless enjoyed the sort served here as well. It's a kind of classic, highbrow European: quail with cheese-stuffed dates; langoustine and scallops on sweetcorn puree; fish/duck/pork/lamb/beef mains (to hell with the vegos), all made to rich and busy recipes.
There's nothing much wrong with any of the dishes we tried but the chef, Ryan Arboleda, who was at Bracu in Bombay, has abandoned the style of his old boss, Peter Thornley, who goes for simple and striking combinations of familiar ingredients.
Arboleda's mains options take at least two lines to describe on the menu and the overall feeling is cloying. He also failed to disprove my theory that brussels sprouts cannot be made edible, but he can't be blamed for that.
Sommelier John Ingle presides over a distinguished wine list with a gratingly cheerful manner. You can't quietly order a glass of house red without his being theatrically summoned and I, no wine buff, think the cut-crystal glassware quite unsuitable for good wine.
His bewildering glass-or-carafe serving system can also make for an expensive evening if you don't keep your wits about you.
In short, there is too much of the wrong sort of style here and the substance is food that is dated, fussy and expensive. In this economic climate, such a venture may most charitably be described as brave.
