Jesse Mulligan finds his Achilles heel in a glossy, two-day master stock.
I don’t always trust local recommendations from people in the suburbs – food tastes better when you know you can walk home afterwards – but I had a good feeling about this one, which a lovely gentleman
“It’s Georgian and Turkish. It’s fantastic. You don’t need to review it. I just wanna get you there. It’s called Troy and you need to go.
“It’s in Torbay.”
Torbay is about as far north as you can go without hitting a regional park and though I didn’t know anything about the suburb or the restaurant, it seemed like a high-risk journey. The Viva budget doesn’t permit a lot of exploratory eating; I will sometimes abandon a review after having a miserable and hopeless experience, but I’d already done that very recently and really couldn’t justify paying for another meal I wasn’t going to write about.
But to paraphrase 20th-century poet George Michael, sometimes you gotta have faith. So I got in my car and drove for half an hour until I reached a small restaurant named after a famous ancient city.
The Greek army needed a cunning plan and a giant horse to get into the original Troy but it might be even harder to secure your entry to this one. There is no website, just a Facebook page with no contact information. “Book now!” says a recent post, without any information on how to do so. It seems designed for people who can pop in and write their name down on the way home from work and luckily, Christopher had done exactly that. I sat down and ordered a beer.
The restaurant is intricately and uniquely decorated, with dozens of coloured lamps that are also for sale. “Just the steak, the pinot and two lamps thanks,” is not something I can ever imagine myself saying at the end of the meal but, they’re apparently popular, and it’s this sort of quirk that makes a place like this worth visiting.
Because this is a restaurant of a style almost unrecognisable in the modern era: personal and without artifice. Nobody is trying to create a brand, or an experience. There is no “sell”, and no easy tableside patter. There was one couple, the owners, on duty when I visited – her up the front and him out the back. It seems funny to look at a menu (a single sheet of A4 paper, double-sided) filled with dozens of complex dishes, and then look towards a kitchen that is quiet and empty. But don’t underestimate the chef, who cooked for 30 years in some of the biggest, busiest kitchens in Australia and opened Troy for a change of pace.
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Advertise with NZME.“This is retirement,” he said, waving expansively at a dining room full of lamps but short of people. Though apparently, it does get busy.
“It peaks in the afternoon,” said Christopher, with a straight face. “It’s such a lovely place for a drink.”
I looked around the dimly lit restaurant and beyond it to some outdoor furniture on the border of a shopping centre carpark. I believed him even if, at this moment, it was quite hard to imagine.
The food is great. The chef is Georgian, born in Turkey, and while a lot of the dishes are split between those two cuisines, some of them are just recipes he’s made up along the way. We started with a generous mezze platter of the usual suspects – hummus, falafel, feta, dips and Turkish bread – done particularly well, then on to some mains I’ve never come across before.
Walnuts and pomegranate molasses feature prominently and the Georgian chicken starred both: chook thighs flattened on the grill until crispy and charred, served with lashings of a very rich walnut sauce and some of that sweet-sour molasses to finish. Beneath the chicken was a courgette “cake” – grated and packed together to soak up the flavour of everything on top. I loved it, and it wins the not-very-competitive award for best use of a zucchini on an Auckland restaurant menu.
A lamb rump dish could almost have been a classic roast meal, with a generous portion of beautifully cooked meat still rosy pink in the centre and an array of vegetables – potato, kūmara, broccoli – that would have gone great with a traditional gravy but arrived dressed in something much more complex: master stock, reduced to a glossy jus over two days of patient cooking, then sweetened and coloured with beetroot. If the kitchen seems quiet now it’s because much of the hard work has been done in the daytime ahead of service.
Keeping with the ancient Greek theme, the toilets are spartan, with no roll holder and a cardboard box in the corner for discarded paper towels. Back in the dining room, we received one small glass of water at the beginning of the meal, which was not refilled at any point during the 2.5-hour meal. Despite all this, I walked out happy.
Troy reminded me a lot of a Polish restaurant we used to go to in Shepherd’s Bush before a football match, where 17 quid would get you three courses and a shot of vodka. The third course wasn’t much to write home about and you didn’t always feel like the vodka but that wasn’t really the point. The point was they did things their own way – knew no other way to do them.
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Advertise with NZME.Blissfully, there is no ceviche on this menu. If it ever feels like Auckland restaurants are becoming too uniform, Troy is a reminder that some chefs will never fall in line.
Troy
Cuisine: Turkish/Georgian
Address: 4/1056 Beach Rd, Torbay
Phone: 09 473 1002
Drinks: Fully licensed
Reservations: Accepted
From the menu: Mezze platter, Georgian Chicken, lamb rump, stuffed eggplant, Tiramisu
Rating: 15/20
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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