Jesse Mulligan Restaurant Review: Arrowtown’s Aosta Dazzles With Signature Dishes

Ben Bayly’s award-winning Aosta dazzles with inventive Italian-inspired dishes, even on a night when the service was stretched thin.

We weren’t the only dinner guests at Aosta in Arrowtown last Thursday night, but we may have been the only ones who arrived by public transport.

In Queenstown, you bleed money from the moment you arrive, so spending $200 on a cab to and from dinner starts to look less preposterous than it actually is. But I wasn’t falling for that one. I did my research and discovered that not only are the two towns connected by a regular bus service, but it is astoundingly cheap!

It cost Victoria and me just $2 each to ride the 20km from our hotel to the restaurant, in a climate-controlled coach with WiFi. It takes the scenic route, over Skippers Canyon and the dramatic Shotover River, then through the tussocked valley of a snowcapped mountain range. By the time I arrived in Arrowtown, I felt euphoric - about saving some money, sure, but mostly about beating the system.

We had time for a G&T in front of the fire at the local cinema’s dedicated gin bar, then wandered down the lane to Ben Bayly’s Aosta, recently named Regional Restaurant of the Year in Cuisine magazine’s excellent Good Food Guide.

But as I stepped inside, I immediately felt the chemistry was off. It was a full house, but there were almost no wait staff. We waited for some time next to a chef’s bottom (just bad timing this one - he was bent over at a table right next to the front door), until eventually the restaurant manager found us and directed us to a table.

“You’re early and everyone else is seated, so you may have an extra wait time for your food,” he said briskly, then left me to hang my jacket over my chair. I looked at my watch - it was 12 minutes before 7pm, the time we had booked for.

I started to worry. This was all set up to be a perfect night, but the signs were not good. The waitress tried to talk me out of sampling one of the wines, then disappeared for ages before returning with our drinks.

I will cut to the end of the story here and tell you that I later discovered three service staff, including the bartender, had called in sick for the dinner shift.

“I’m usually in operations,” said the manager to me at the end of the night. “Thankfully, the guys at the bar next door agreed to make all our cocktails tonight.”

By this stage, I had been rumbled as a reviewer by one of the kitchen staff and, as you’d expect, the service improved considerably after that. But it was good to experience things as others would. Bad luck for Aosta that they were so short-staffed on the night I visited, and you can’t blame the waiters who did show up for doing their best under the circumstances.

There was no problem with the menu, which is Italian-themed and full of show-stopping local ingredients and theatrical flourishes. The components of the wild-shot “tahr tartare” are wheeled out on a trolley and combined in front of you, then served with a lovely flatbread cooked in the pizza oven of restaurant Little Aosta. It’s a mild tartare this one, with just a lick of mustard and some lemon juice for flavour, but it’s lovely.

The fish carpaccio is a totally unexpected dish: some discs of agria gnocchi, with a little beurre blanc, translucent sheets of kahawai and then homemade bottarga (cured fish roe) shaved all over the top. The fish is cold but so thin that I couldn’t work out from the colour whether it was cured or raw - it was more about the texture than the taste.

You can do 10 courses here for $120 and, if you have a decent appetite, this would be a good-value option. But I recently turned 50 and have vowed to show a bit more restraint in the second half of my life than in the first. So we ordered only eight dishes, and I sampled just four of the wines. I know, I know: it’s the new me.

We loved our pasta dishes. The pāua pappardelle is their signature, and must completely stun the tourists (we were surrounded by beautiful, wealthy Australians). It’s served with a whole egg yolk, which creates a rich sauce as you stir it up with the handmade pasta and slices of pāua. It’s rich but moreish, and the shellfish stock at the bottom of the bowl is so wonderful you could drink it out of a mug. The hāpuku was a lovely creation too, the confit technique adding a little lusciousness to what can be a wet, fleshy mouthful.

We paid our bill and wandered to the bus stop, where it was -2C, and the 9.48pm back to Queenstown was running late. Victoria put on a brave face, but I could tell what she was thinking: “If I’d married one of those Australians, I’d be in a cab right now.”

Aosta

Cuisine: Italian

Address: 18 Buckingham St, Arrowtown

Drinks: Fully licensed

Reservations: Accepted

From the menu: Foccacia $7, sardines $11, kahawai carpaccio $24, tartare $39, monkfish maltagliati $46, pāua pappardelle $49, white turnip $16, tiramisu $20

Rating: 16/20

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