Auckland Restaurant Review: Tinfeny’s Brings Vibrant Cambodian Dishes To Auckland Diners

The flavours at this Ponsonby Central restaurant make “all kinds of sense”.

It doesn’t always happen, but as I ate the delicious food at Tinfeny’s, I began to settle on what the theme of this week’s restaurant review would be.

I’d just come out of a long radio interview with Dave Dobbyn, who’d talked for the first time about adjusting to life with Parkinson’s Disease, before we turned to the subject of Welcome Home, a song that celebrates its 20th birthday this month and captures perfectly the attitude most New Zealanders have toward our immigrant population: you are welcome here, and you make our small country better.

It was a tearful but also joyful conversation, and I was still pondering it days later. And as I sat inside this Cambodian restaurant, I was thinking “What this restaurant needs is more visibility from the owners – why are they out the back when they could be out here sharing their story?”

We’d been served by one nice, non-Cambodian New Zealander all night, and eventually I asked if I could meet the mother and daughter team who’d opened the restaurant. Turns out it was their one night off this week. They weren’t out there meeting their customers because they were, in fact, at home, catching up on all the other life admin that makes opening a new restaurant in Auckland city such a heavy lift.

So I scrapped my theme and thought again about the food. In New Zealand, in 2025, most of us don’t have to think about questions like “who will remember the recipes?”, but within my lifetime, Cambodia has been under the control of a dictator who literally banned cooking. Cambodian citizens ate a thin porridge gruel or starved – sometimes both – and a thousand years of kitchen history was nearly erased. I’m not trying to smuggle in a history lesson here, I just want you to know that when you order a meal at Tinfeny’s, you are helping snatch a memory from the jaws of evil.

The menu is split into sections, but you should ignore the nice-but-generic Asian fusion options in favour of the “Cambodian Staples”, a list of dishes that, as far as I know, can’t be found anywhere else in New Zealand (there are extensive vegetarian options too).

From time to time, the instructions for eating were unclear. A couple of dishes came with dipping sauces without much to dip into them, and the beef – beautifully tender cubes of eye fillet seasoned with a pepper they import especially – was sold to us as a “fill-your-lettuce-cup” situation but arrived with flimsy butter lettuce, no good for making a cup of anything.

But the flavours made all sorts of sense. The snapper dish, spicy and soupy but with recognisably tender pieces of fillet, was the best of the lot but I also loved the pancake, as thin and delicate as the crepes the Frenchies make across the alleyway but crisped up by the rice flour and golden brown, folded in half like an omelette over pork mince and prawn, with a peanut-fish sauce concoction on the side.

The desserts looked too good not to have a dabble with, so we shared a wonderful sticky rice – cooked with sweetened coconut milk and a pinch of salt, served in balls and wrapped in bright, tropical jackfruit with ice cream on the side.

Ponsonby Central’s main hall seems like a good place for first-time restaurateurs to test the waters, but Tinfeny’s has picked a higher-risk location, in a dedicated space on The Blue Breeze side of food alley. A few operators have tried to make this room work and I wish mother and daughter owners Richny and Felicity well – if they can capture Auckland’s Cambodian diaspora as well as plenty of curious foodies, they should be quids in.

And look, I don’t want to start a war here, but I can’t think of a local Thai restaurant that serves food this good. Tinfney’s may well be doing the best Southeast Asian cooking in Auckland. The owners should stick to their knitting and trust that their fellow New Zealanders are sophisticated enough to seek them out.

TINFENY’S

Address: Ponsonby Central, 4 Brown St, Ponsonby

Phone: (09) 360 8080

Website: Tinfenys.co.nz

Drinks: Fully licensed

Reservations: Accepted

From the menu: Beef lok lak $42; amok trei (fish) $38; ban chow (rice flour pancakes) $26, cha kuy teav (rice noodles) $28; sticky rice dessert $16

Rating: 16/20

Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12 Disappointing, give it a miss.13-15 Good, give it a go. 16-18 Great, plan a visit. 19-20 Outstanding, don’t delay.

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