Jesse Mulligan Auckland Restaurant Review: Palato In Browns Bay Has The Best Pasta Menu In The City

It’s nice to still be surprised in this job, writes Jesse Mulligan.

Just as you sometimes make the best dinners when there’s nothing in the fridge, I’ve discovered a couple of incredible restaurants I might not otherwise have visited unless I was, you know, forced to.

It’s been a quiet winter for openings and, sadly, a busy one for closings. With nowhere new to review, I found myself once again braving Exit 410 to East Coast Bays, this time heading to Palato, an Italian restaurant of great promise but even greater travelling time.

Among others, frequent Viva Dining correspondent Brent had alerted me to this Brown’s Bay gem. “Good combination and we were replete,” was my favourite phrase of his feedback email, and I made a note to visit one day and experience this repleteness for myself.

I arrived early for my table so had time to walk around the Brown’s Bay shops like the tourist I was. The mainstream dining selection looks a little grim but I was interested in the huge number of Japanese restaurants that seem to have made their home here. Most exciting of all was something called “Washo Cook”, which has the peaceful, design-led beauty of a Tokyo boutique, offers a vegetarian-friendly tasting menu and runs cooking classes for anyone interested. I made a note to return, then wandered over to Palato, a dark but appealing restaurant space around the corner that you’re unlikely to find unless you know it’s there.

The restaurant was opened by an American couple with a very impressive pedigree. She was an investment banker, he was a chef at a Michelin restaurant in San Francisco, and one day they said, “you know what would be even more exciting than this? Brown’s Bay in Auckland”.

Well, okay, the journey was a little more circuitous than that, but this is where they’ve ended up, and they’ve created what I’m going to call the best pasta menu in the city. This is no disrespect to the other handful of contenders: Pici, Bianca, Bossi (among others) make me happy just to think about them. But despite (perhaps because of) its geographical obscurity, eating at Palato feels like you’ve discovered a wonderful secret.

The first revelatory dish was bucatini. It came with prawns – fat, juicy and spicy – in a garlicky wine sauce, spiked with nduja and finished with cream. I love that the chef had done all the deshelling work in the kitchen (making a world-weary diner pick through a piece of shellfish to find the meat is simply too much to ask in 2025), and that he served it with a side of pickled fennel (“we’re about to add this to the dish and I didn’t want you to miss out on the experience” – and note that neither had recognised me as a reviewer at this point; that heart attack moment came when I introduced myself after paying the bill). There was as much excitement and flavour in this one dish than I have experienced in a whole evening elsewhere.

That bucatini (spaghetti with a hole in the centre) is the most familiar shape on the menu and I had to look up the others (mafaldine, radiatori, campanelle). “We bought the pasta machine and we got to choose the dies, so we went for shapes that were a little different”, she told me.

It was just the two of them that night, and their calm and charming sweetness dominated the service experience. “I’ll save your arms,” he said, rushing out of the kitchen to take the empty plates off her when she lingered to answer my (never-ending) questions.

They undersell their signature dish, which is listed on the menu as, simply, “tomato sauce, black pepper”. And it is barely more than that but, to quote Darryl in The Castle, it’s what they’ve done with it. The mafaldine has wavy edges that keep their shape when cooked, which helps hold on to the tomato sauce but there is something else going on because the pasta and sauce cling to each other like desperate lovers, with a little parmigiano and pepper on top but nothing else. While we’re handing out trophies, in my view this tomato pasta sauce – apparently cooked in several ways over several hours – is unrivalled in New Zealand. But of course, at this level, it’s not a competition – just a gift for whoever gets to taste it.

(Breaking: I asked on the night if there was a secret ingredient in the sauce and they said no. But just before publication they sent me a clarification: “there IS a secret ingredient – but it will have to remain a secret.”)

A seasonal pumpkin dish was a little more complex: bitter walnuts and a pumpkin puree, almost too sweet until you squeeze lime over it. The pasta is campanelle, a sort of twisted bell shape, but the star ingredient is brown butter, which coats everything and adds a rich luxeness to what could otherwise feel like a worthy dish. There are about a thousand other things going on flavour-wise for which, apparently, we have an almost invisible Mexican mole to thank.

The entrees and sides are pretty spare – we had a good, standard Caesar salad and pieces of haloumi coated in nuts and seeds then deep-fried. Both are lovely but the pasta is clearly the focus for the owners.

There is room for growth on this menu if they decide they want to expand but I suspect they are happy enough in the space they’ve created, serving happy locals and a few others who’ve made the effort to get here. I never expected to find Auckland’s best pasta in Brown’s Bay but it’s nice to still be surprised in this job. What a treat. My advice to you is: drop everything and go.

Palato

Address: 1A/4 Bute Rd, Browns Bay, Auckland, ph 09 948 0954

Drinks: Fully licensed

Reservations: Accepted

From the menu: Caesar salad $19, nut-crusted haloumi $19, tomato malfadine $28, prawn bucatini $37, pumpkin campanelle $32

Rating: 17/20

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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