The French Cafe was named the fourth best in the world in another widely trumpeted poll of TripAdvisor members, which, to my mind, just confirms what a crock best-of lists are. Unlike many reviewers, I have not felt the need to assess it every six months to ensure, on their readers' behalf, that it is still up to scratch. But since I had not been since 2008 and its website was celebrating a "new year, new interior", I thought it worth taking the Professor back to the place we last went to celebrate her being made a professor.
To be honest (see "feeble memory" above), I can't remember what it used to look like but the interior, the main room dominated by an exquisite Karl Maughan canvas of rhododendrons, is a study in the same restraint that informs that "get a babysitter" request. I watched a waitress reset a table with such precision that she barely stopped short of using a spirit level and a digital caliper.
The service was warm and professional without a trace of that creepy obsequiousness that can curdle fine-dining experiences. And the food was, well, perfect really. Amuse-bouches of gritty corn croquettes and little caviar ice-cream cones; starters of ceviche with scampi or fig tart with a puffy, lightly roasted globe of goat cheese; a duck leg, as perfect in shape as a pear, which came with silky pumpkin mash and citrus notes alluding to the very French canard a l'orange. It was all wonderful, and yet ... So what's the but? It's a valentine, of sorts, to the Auckland restaurant business. So much has happened in the past decade. Interesting, exciting, paradigm-shifting dining is to be found all over town. A dozen or more trends have bloomed (and some have mercifully withered) since I was last here. And the result is that it feels stuck in a sort of time-warp. Like Antoines in Parnell, this is somewhere you go to be comforted by the thought that, the more things change, the more it will stay the same.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. Readers given to star-counting will wonder why my misgivings are not reflected in a less-than-perfect star rating. But a South Indian hole-in-the-wall joint called Satya got five stars in my third review in these pages for the same reason: what it seeks to do could not be done better.
Perhaps it's unfair to suggest that time has taken its toll on The French Cafe. Fiendishly expensive (the menu breaks down to something like $55 mains and $30 entrees), it is still in the very top tier of occasion dining in town. But whether that is enough to make it the transcendent experience it once was, I am not so sure.
A la carte: three courses $110 pp; four courses $135 pp. Tasting menu: $155; paired wines $85.
VERDICT: Still sublime, but in something of a time-warp.
