Restaurant review: Peach Pit, Auckland CBD

The Peach Pit on Karangahape Rd. Photo / Getty Images

Address: 352 Karangahape Rd, City
Ph: (09) 377 4630
peachpit.co.nz

I love K Rd. It's the beating heart of the inner city, most of the rest of which often seems to me like a well-dressed corpse - pretty, but lifeless. Every time I find myself on that street, I say a little prayer that progress will leave it alone or at least touch it lightly.

Peach Pit, which is barely 18 months old, is very K Rd. I don't much care for the name. Hipper people than I ­- which means pretty much anyone breathing - tell me it is a reference to Beverly Hills 90210, which was not very K Rd at all when I last looked.

I was also puzzled by the fact that neither its website nor its Facebook page has a current menu. Are the clientele so hip (my companion and I lowered the cool factor by several orders of magnitude as soon as we walked in) that even though they live online, they order food by saying, "Like, whatever" and the waitress brings, like, whatever?

Well, I have to say I liked what she brought, which, I hasten to add, we specifically ordered. The food style is difficult to classify: there are recurring Korean notes with a hippie vego thing going on, too, although if you don't like Korean food and have horrible memories of soybean patties, you shouldn't be discouraged.

There is a zing about the food here that is at once playful and relaxed, pleasant but not anxious to please.

We found it hard to leave anything off our order (apart from chicken wings; the only good place for a chicken wing is in a stockpot) and the woman tending bar and serving tables flinched slightly when we finished our list. "That's a lotta food," she whistled, and persuaded us to drop the seafood pancake (fish, prawn, baby octopus, spring onion).

Everything we had was a version of something familiar but given a zinger twist. Cubes of tofu had been dusted with a szechuan pepper; the bone marrow (which we didn't get) comes with kimchi wontons; and the roasted mushrooms, which had a real smoky flavour, came with pearl barley, that rib-sticking soup essential, that was given a lift by having been cooked in miso broth.

Nachos (called "kind of nachos") used those puffy prawn crackers instead of corn chips, added chilli to the cheese and included pork (called "pig") as an optional extra.

Roast vegetables avoided the obvious in favour of turnip, eggplant and alliums (a junior member of the leek family), most memorably in a dish of lamb shoulder, roasted but not slow-cooked so there was texture to match the dense, rich flavour.

In all it was a meal as memorable as it was unassuming (and almost as cheap as chips). We finished with a pineapple sorbet that was, with a rum jelly, a sort of solid pina colada. It was a promise of summer to come and an unambiguous invitation to return.

Dishes $9-$20

Verdict: Playful, pleasant food at bargain-basement prices