The best (and possibly most divisive) new dish in Auckland right now is a $10 slice of toast, writes restaurant critic Kim Knight.
It isn't the prettiest plate in town but one bite and you're mainlining summer: anemones fold lazily over your fingers, Neptune's necklace seaweed stews in the sun,mussels are smashed open shoreside. Food to be slurped, not knife-and-forked.
At Kingi, you admire the massive kauri slab bar top and the glorious, glinting fish-scale light feature. You feel quite pleased with yourself for wandering into a corner of Auckland as close to "international" as it gets these days with its laneway vibes and outdoor tables tucked against soaring walls, nothing between you and the humid night sky. And then you inhale the kina toast.
I ordered this dish twice in as many weeks. One dining companion loved it; the other was repulsed. Stripped from their spiky shells, the tongues of sea urchin roe are very rich, very briny and a little bitter. Soothe the palate with a thin layer of lightly torched lardo. It's the cured pork fat that is the brilliance on this plate, the moment that screams "restaurant". Still, at the back of my palate, somewhere near where the nose works as hard as the taste buds, I was at the beach. Wet togs, hot dry rocks and the pungent promise of kaimoana.
An acquired toast? Kingi's lardo-laden kina toast is dividing diners. Photo/Kim Knight
That feeling returned over and over at Kingi. Half of you is in a restaurant and half of you is somewhere entirely more elemental.
Perhaps it's because the menu tells you exactly what boat your fish was caught from. Perhaps it's the lack of obvious trickery on your plate (though I feel compelled to quote Einstein who said "it takes a genius to make something simple"). Perhaps it's just the drop-dead gorgeous fit-out but Kingi feels like a restaurant for these times. Even the reported controversy over its name (culturally appropriated versus properly consulted) is an argument of right now - the kind of debate some of us are shamefully late to realise we need to have.
Kingi's menu is fish-heavy and you'd be hard-pressed to find a better "raw" kahawai ($25). Dry-ageing creates a fantastic texture (akin to that silken bite you get in sashimi trevally) and it's paired with Colman's mustard (a revelation), soy and a molten glass plate. You don't eat the plate but it is somehow integral. Tom Hishon and Josh Helm (the pair behind Orphans Kitchen) have clearly thought very hard about their new venture.
The dining room is beautifully planned to span multiple moods and eating occasions - buzzy seats at the bar, quieter family seats in a semi-separate space shared with the wood smoke-scented kitchen; and tall, casual tables for walk-ins. Kingi services the brand new Britomart Hotel, but it exists as a distinct entity that is (so far) my pick of Auckland's recent high-quality restaurant openings.
Kingi restaurant inside the new Hotel Britomart. Photo/Dean Purcell
I uniformly loved the serving ware, particularly the pretty lemon-yellow ringed plates and the stainless coupes for the $11 icecream dessert options - cool in every sense of the word. I did not uniformly love the service. Spectacular on my first visit, on the second time around the maitre d' was spectacularly grumpy - no greeting, no smile, no water or attempt to take a drinks order, just a barked instruction about when we'd need to leave (15 minutes earlier than the 90-minute limit we'd agreed to when we booked online). I get that restaurants want to turn tables over but they should also want repeat custom. Hopefully she was just having a bad day.
You will need two visits to do the menu justice. If the hāpuku taramasalata ($12) is on, get it - salty, smokey and just when you think it's too much, an exploding pop of warm, oily salmon roe. Eat it with the wood-fired bread ($8) which has a crumpet-like texture that sounds weird but is truly wonderful. Another must have: The pescetarian-approved alternative to fried chicken. Blue cod wings are crispy-crunchy at one end, meaty at the other and the $25 serve needs to be shared.
James had the venison ($35). The meat was beautifully cooked and served with raw, raspberried beetroot, and flecks of crunchy puffed buckwheat. I had the asparagus ($9), on a bed of something creamy and hemp heart-infused. Neither really appealed to me (and I normally love asparagus) but I could admire the honesty of the flavours - snout-in-the-ground earthy stuff, as evocative in their own way as the kina toast.
Oh go on, slum it with a burger. Kingfish when we visited, and still pink in the middle. Buttercrunch lettuce on a buttery-brioche bun, with the hot staccato of chilli-pickled zucchini. It's an ouch-inducing $26 (the crayfish roll is only $22) but it was a complete meal, jam-packed with the restaurant's namesake (arguably - please see paragraph six).
It's an eclectic menu and that's a plus. One person's "challenging" is another's "interesting". Get burrata and bread or push the boat out with hemp and kina and the bits of the fish we usually throw away. We're stuck here for the foreseeable but Kingi proves we can still expand some horizons.
Kingi, 29 Galway St, Auckland. Ph (09) 300 9595. We spent: $207 for two.
