Verbena. Photo / Babiche Martens
Herald rating: * * * ½
Address: Verrans Corner, Birkdale
Phone: (09) 483 9571
Website: www.dinefind.co.nz
Open: Dinner Tues-Sat
Cuisine: Modern NZ
From the menu: Panfried squid, fricelli pasta, roasted pumpkin and pinenuts, preserved lemon vinaigrette $16; Seared marinated duck breast, apple & date pudding, soft polenta, saute spinach $29.50; Yoghurt panna cotta, orange and Grand Marnier soup, glass biscuits $12;
Vegetarian: Risotto, gnocchi
Wine: Above average
The wine club picked its way daintily (they were on their way in) past the three blokes winding down from the afternoon's golf game, the couple who couldn't be bothered cooking that night, the family celebrating their daughter's 15th birthday and the neighbours who were catching up.
There
might have been 20 of them, there might have been more. The maitre d' let his other guests know he'd seated the club at the far end of the restaurant and hoped they wouldn't be too rowdy.
They weren't. They were happy and bantering and having a good weekday evening meal out and so were the three blokes and the couple and the family and the neighbours.
Verbena is like that: it is the kind of suburban restaurant that everyone says they want at the end of their street and that we don't do very well in Auckland.
Social history - or anti-social history - could be a reason. You couldn't serve alcohol with food until 1961 and then mostly in hotel dining-rooms. Until 1967 pubs closed at 6pm: not much chance of sophistication there, then. Restaurants serving wine were rare until the early 70s.
We never absorbed the culture of gathering, eating, chatting, sipping places: the British pub, the French café, the Italian bar, the Greek taverna, the Aussie BYO (ours were a weak imitation of Surry Hills, Ultimo, Carlton). Syncopation and immigration: many of our suburbs have a good Chinese, Indian, Thai but not...
Somewhere like Verbena. Could be the pub set for a UKTV adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel, 30s lounge chairs and long, island bar. The place where the colonel interrupts his evening walk with the spaniel for a bracing tipple, or tippling a brace.
The dining-room behind is well-mannered and a little old-fashioned (so is Birkdale). Stephen Thompson, the highly regarded chef who opened Verbena two years ago, is maitre d'; the ideal front-man for the Modern NZ cuisine of Stephen Locke.
It's certainly a neighbourhood restaurant for Locke: he lives downstairs. Few neighbourhoods, though, dine out on truffle-scented veal loin with quinoa and couscous salad and tomato chutney. Locke has cooked in London, Switzerland, France, Sydney and, beside Thompson, at Partingtons.
His food has almost as many stamps in its passport. Jude's Sicilian gnocchi goes through personality changes on the way south from Milan. It's ricotta-based, not potato-based, and hangs out with basil, parmesan and pine nuts, old friends from pesto days. And it's rolled in slices of grilled eggplant, then baked. It's rather delicious.
My entrée had Lombardy roots, too: risotto balls, flavoured with sun-dried tomato, surrounded with beetroot, feta and cucumber salad, puddles of capsicum coulis. You could channel summer in Santorini.
A strong, sharp dose of chargrilled venison brought back the right season. And the right seasoning: the meat, chargrilled rare, is juicy, has a black-peppery flavour that sat well with port jus. As do the slightly blue-cheese dumplings, shallots and peas. I'd prefer it wasn't served in a stack: it looks dated and gravity lowered more juices into damp dumplings.
Jude's pan-roasted hapuku had multi-national offspring: pumpkin rosti, steamed Asian greens, tomato pickle. Metaphor for suburban Auckland in 2008.
Thompson stocks a mid-range cellar: most bottles are in the 30s and 40s, and we're talking price not vintage. He paired slightly chilled Babich pinot gris with both entrées, St Clair's crisp and full-fruited sauvignon blanc with the hapuku, and matched the venison's peppery flavours with Matahiwi merlot.
The wine club panned someone's riesling, appreciated someone else's sav.
We shared a platter of lush passionfruit jelly, vanilla-bean creme brulee, chocolate tart and vanilla-bean ice cream, and appreciated our savvy in not cooking that night.
