Restaurant Review: Is Ooh-Fa The Perfect Neighbourhood Pizza Joint?

OOH-FA

Cuisine: Pizza

Address: 357 Dominion Rd, Mt Eden

Contact: Oohfa.co.nz

Drinks: Fully licensed

Reservations: Accepted

From the menu: Gabagool $13; roasted carrots $16; rocket salad $12; tomato pizza $15; potato pizza $19; nduja pizza $20; dark chocolate and lemon sorbet $7

Ooh-Fa is the sort of restaurant where you know you're in the right place as soon as you walk in. It reminds me a lot of Karangahape Rd's Pici, which is unsurprising the two restaurants have the same owner but also confounding.

How is it possible to recreate the magic of one dining room in an entirely different location? It must be very frustrating for other restaurateurs to visit one of these places and try to work out what they’re doing right. Is it the food? The service? The lighting? The layout? The answer to these questions is yes, but there’s something in the DNA too.

It’s busy, from the moment the door swings open at 5pm until it locks again late in the evening. I know this because we were the last customers to leave one Wednesday.

I was catching up with an old friend visiting from London and this was the perfect environment to tell loud stories, drink lots of wine and, from time to time, switch mouth modes from talking to chewing.

Ooh-Fa gets through 70 customers a night and they could do more if they wanted to but they’ve committed to being a restaurant where people connect, rather than eat and run.

So although the pizzas are small, if you order three of them they’ll arrive in three courses, from light to heavy, with a little break between each one for more chat or to stagger to the bathroom, on the way passing by the beautiful dome-shaped pizza oven, the roaring heart of the restaurant.

The staff are incredible and, inevitably, extremely cool. What must the job application process look like for one of these restaurants? While other businesses rely on CVs and formal interviews, I can only assume the Pici/Ooh-Fa HR department is based on a picnic blanket at a music festival.

You don’t just want to order pizza from these people, you want them to spend Sunday afternoon with you, drinking pet-nat and telling you about the time they played putt putt with Timothee Chalamet.

And they really know their stuff. “If you’re looking to order wine, I’ll get our expert for you,” said one of them early on, but over the course of the night each of them engaged with us on what we were drinking, not relying on some adjectives they’d been told to remember, but ad libbing comments here and there that couldn’t have been prepared. And they were just as good with the food.

We started with carrot, the unlikely star vegetable of Auckland in August 2022. Its reputation as a dull back-up singer has been debunked, and you’ll now find it in the spotlight on many city menus. Here it is wood-fired and chopped over whipped ricotta with pistachios adding a little oleagic crunch.

“I saw one customer do this and now I’m telling everyone about it,” said our bartender (we were sitting at the bar, which I’m convinced is the best spot in the room). “Grab a slice of the gabagool and wrap it around the carrot.”

We did it and, of course, it worked, the salty fat in the meat hitting perfectly with the creamy ricotta and vegetal roasted carrots. Can you think of another restaurant where they’d recommend taking two separate dishes and mooshing them up into a mouthful with your fingers? That’s one example of the easy confidence that ripples through the room at Ooh-Fa.

And, of course, the pizzas are incredible. Four slices to each, they’re about the size of an old 45 record and have a light puffiness to the base that takes 72 hours of dough fermentation to achieve.

The head chef (not there when we visited, though you wouldn’t have known) is a pizza obsessive, and if there’s any aspect of your food you’re not completely happy with, you suspect he could give you a two-hour slide presentation about why he made that choice.

The toppings are simple, with occasional surprises. The tomato sauce on their version of the margarita is so beautifully garlicky you wonder if they’ve sprinkled it on raw after cooking.

A potato pizza isn’t the usual thin slices but roast spud scooped from its skin, topped with prosciutto so salty it could almost be anchovy.

The final, indulgent nduja (spreadable salami) pizza comes with ricotta and honey, creating a flavour profile that is almost dessert-like until you get a hit of that spicy sausage.

Book ahead, or take a chance by just showing up and asking for one of the bar seats they reserve for walk-ins.

If there’s a wait, you could wander up for a drink at the recently reviewed Bridgman, a couple of hundred metres north on the strip, where a cold beer might be just the ticket to whet your appetite for the delights ahead.

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