Aqua Matta, Auckland

By MICHELE HEWITSON for viva

At Aqua Matta, if you order a glass of the expensive red plonk, it arrives in a glass the size of a goldfish bowl. "We call this a balloon," said the charming wait-woman.

I might have been tempted to call it pretentious but for the fact that it was rather funny to watch the Television Critic's head disappear from time to time into it, and to wonder who one might call should he get his head stuck in the thing.

Then, when your mains arrive, a wait-person chases them up with a giant pepper grinder, despite there being perfectly adequate little grinders on your table.

So when the TC ordered the oven-roasted tuna loin (which the wait-woman warned was well-cooked, not your horrible seared raw stuff), I wondered aloud whether a whale might appear on his plate.

We were beginning to feel like Gulliver in Brobdingnag.

There is some further silliness on the front of the menu, which is somebody's idea of art: a Philip Pearlstein nude reclining. It's ugly and what's it got to do with what I'm having for my dinner?

I did like the food books on the shelves next to our table, though. If you were there with boring people you could happily spend the night flicking through one of the three illustrated volumes of I Funghi dal Vero, the fungi equivalent of the bird spotter's manual.

One last complaint about Aqua Matta - because what I was having for dinner was fine - is their liking for daft dinner ware. Their bruschette al pomodoro e insalata di ruclola (tomatoes on toast, with salad, $12.50) comes on something which looks like an artist's easel with a trough for the salad. Silly.

But the bruschette is glorious. Many places attempt it and it is often horrid: dry bits of old bread with tasteless toms. Aqua Matta's bruschette bears no resemblance to such horrors: the bread is made in the kitchen and, who knows how, they found some tomatoes which taste like summer in winter.

With this we shared (well, he complained and said "I ordered that" and snaffled the lion's share) the prosciutto and mozzarella. Now, having complained about other people's pretensions, I hesitate to say this is what I ate when stuck in Italy recently in a one-horse town in a restaurant many miles off any gastronome's map, but where we found a gloriously rude waiter and gloriously simple food.

Off course this is not cooking, but you can tell a lot about a kitchen by the quality of its raw ingredients.

Aqua Matta does simple beautifully. Which is why I also ordered saltimbocca Roma style with sage and the parma proscuitto (I believe in a balanced diet) and a little zucchini souffle. In Italy you didn't get this souffle business: you got your bit of meat. The chef at Aqua Matta is horrified by New Zealand meat but he'd managed to find some nice veal and his saltimbocca was every bit as good as the stuff I stuffed myself with nightly in Italy.

The TC's tuna cost $31 and was good. It was stuffed with lovely salty things such as anchovies and capers and olives and it tasted like it had had a recent swim in the sea.

To pud. He had the chocolate profiterole ($10.50). The choux pastry was, alas, stale and tough. I had the creamed rice and honey tortino which was a bit like an Italian version of sticky toffee pudding.

Next time we will have cheese. Aqua Matta has a treasure chest of cheese which they import from Italy and they will lovingly show off these cheeses, in their temperature controlled case, with the pride of new parents.

Which is what they are really. Aqua Matta is three months old and, on a Wednesday night, was as quiet as mould growing. The wait-woman was very good at her job but she did hover.

Perhaps she was lonely, but I don't really care for being asked whether everything is all right before I've had the chance to stick a forkful in my mouth.

But we will go back. There's lots of good-sounding stuff on the menu to eat, they do the simple stuff extremely well, and I want to see how those cheeses are behaving.

Open: Breakfast, lunch 7 days

Dinner: Wednesday to Saturday

Owner: Sergio Cherici

Executive Chef: Camillo Bisaccioni

On the menu: Giant penne with braised oxtail and 12 months aged pecorino di pienza, 19.50; ossobuco in gremolada, $31; panna cotta alla fragola, $12.50

Vegetarian: Oh, have some cheese

Wine: Small, interesting list with Italian and French wines by the glass

Parking: Not really

Bottom line: Good, smart mix of traditional food with a modern twist. Does the simple things simply beautifully. Nice touches include a complimentary bellini on arrival. Gorgeous staff who love to talk about food. They could lose the boom-boom music, though.