Green pea (and kūmara) goodness from vegetarian restaurant Forest, newly relocated to Auckland's Dominion Rd. Photo / Babiche Martens
Green pea (and kūmara) goodness from vegetarian restaurant Forest, newly relocated to Auckland's Dominion Rd. Photo / Babiche Martens
It starts with a random whiff of daffodil. The smell of yellow, a sure olfactory harbinger of spring.
The seasons have changed. The Uber driver said so, my hayfever said so, and so did the addition of freesias to my weekly corner dairy flower purchase (it’s an extravagance, but onceyou quit smoking you can justify buying just about anything, for just about forever).
Has your spring not sprung? Book a seat at Forest, the blooming beautiful new Dominion Rd restaurant from chef and owner Plabita Florence.
Forest is an oasis of charm. Its ornate, pressed tin ceiling is painted bush-green and everywhere you turn there are mismatched vases of fresh flowers and foliage. It’s not just a “look”, it’s an ethos. The napkins, for example, are proper cloth. The candles are real, the tables don’t wobble and the paper menus are pristine. All this attention to detail is so reassuring. Absolutely nothing bad could happen in a room this lovely.
Forest used to operate as a tiny set menu space on Symonds St. Its recent shift to Dominion Rd means more tables and more customer choice. The new menu is a la carte and will change according to what’s good, what’s available and what the chef feels like inventing.
A few weeks back, I interviewed that chef for a piece on post-pandemic dining and asked why, given the brutal couple of years just gone, would anyone want to open a restaurant? Her reply: “I genuinely don’t know the answer to this question. I think maybe restaurateurs are a weird sort of masochistic type. If my peers are anything like me, you can tell them the stove is hot, but they just have to touch it for themselves to double-check.”
I want a restaurant run by someone who thinks like this to succeed.
The food is vegetarian and most of it can be made vegan but if I’m making Forest sound like a temple of virtue then I’ve gone too far. Stash your yoga mat under your chair - the seaweed-spruiked hot chips are truly excellent and the golden syrup sauce on the pumpkin icecream will hurt your fillings.
Megan wanted the lettuce and I wanted the kūmara and in the end we just ordered all four items from the “dinner to share” list. Do you like a roast? The kūmara ($32) was that mouthful of bliss you get when you smoosh a forkful of soft, roasted root vegetables into a pile of peas and then drag the lot through the gravy (which, in this case, is a Marmite cream so savoury you truly won’t miss the meat).
I alternated the above with piles of crunchy lettuce ($22) and it was a weirdly brilliant combo enhanced by the spiky salad dressing on the fresh greens - jalapeno pickle juice, according to the menu, but I’m sure I also caught some lime.
When you routinely eat meat, it’s hard not to consider food through a carnivorous lens. The brussels sprouts ($27) arrived whole and barbecued on a skewer, and my first thought was “vegetable meatballs, how clever”. In fact, it’s just clever. Also really delicious. The leaves had been blasted black and coated in a sweet (and sour) sticky mushroom vinegar; the sprouts were cooked but still crunchy. Loads of texture and even more flavour.
Green olive tofu? Fine, but not as moreish as what had gone before. Start with bites of “cheffiness” - the show-off snacks that make life interesting for both the diner and the kitchen. At Forest, that means a potato fritter. Fish ‘n’ chip shop tradition says it’s bad luck to serve this item solo, but Forest’s are not your usual flaccid Friday night affair. Fluffy inside and coated in crisp, light (rice flour?) batter, with a rhubarb ketchup that tastes like a superior Speedway sauce, this is everything you want in a $9 single-serve bite. (The more virtuous might consider the witloof taco but don’t blame me when you’re looking at a salad leaf and wishing you’d selected fried potato).
On the night of our visit, there were two pudding options. Warm sticky rice ($18) came with salted coconut whip, nashi and jasmine sherbet. It was a lot for one plate - and palate. Sadly, the rice was more sloppy than sticky, and it entirely lacked sweetness. “I quite like it,” said Megan the vegetarian. “It tastes like penance,” said Kim the reviewer. I had not been missing meat, but I did wish I’d skipped this dessert.
Salvation was a vegan pumpkin icecream ($15) with a gloriously, gold syrupy sauce. If you, like me, are a sucker for all things caramel-adjacent, then definitely order this - your dentist is the only person who will wish you had shared.
They say the eye is automatically drawn to the top right-hand corner of any document, but on the top left of Forest’s list are the words “Salted Yuzu Vodka Martini $21″ and that’s not something I could easily ignore. Three other cocktails, Green Apple and Sorrell Whisky Sour, Hibiscus Negroni and Passionfruit Skin Gin Fizz share the page, so good luck wresting your gaze from those. Garage Project and Urbanaut dominate the beer list, and top marks for having the delicious Brothers Fill Yer Boots 0 per cent IPA for the sober side. There are just 12 organically inclined wines on the Forest list and I applaud that. It’s so refreshing and sexy and DGAF cool. Never tasted wines from the talent that is Lauren Swift? Fret not, a quarter of the wines are hers (try the Marceline Blanc de Blanc Methode named after her dachshund). Pet nat fans can get their fizz on with the Tettonica sauvignon blanc/pinot noir blend, sauvignon blanc, pinot gris, chardonnay and riesling lovers are catered to by Windrush, Bostock, Maxim and Felton Road. Roaring for a red? Carrick, Scout, Swift, Decibel and Bostock have you sorted for pinot noir, chilled reds, syrah, malbec and merlot respectively. Feel like finishing on a sweet note? Prophet’s Rock Vin de Paille 2020 has your sugar fix sorted. And guess what, sportsfans, they’re all available by the glass! Forest, your drinks list well and truly floats the boats.
