Herald rating: * *
Claret the Restaurant
127 Onehunga Mall
Onehunga
Ph: 622 2988
www.clarettherestaurant.co.nz
Wine list: Short, with few by-the-glass options.
Vegetarians: A pasta and a vegetarian stack.
Watch out for: The BYOW corkage - $7.50 a bottle seems excessive.
Bottom line: Very nice, apart from the food and the prices.
KEY POINTS:
The menu said "king prawns and scallops, sauteed in garlic butter, served with asparagus and saffron foam on crab chive mousse" but the plate in front of me was swamped with a thick, mustard-yellow sauce that resembled bernaise.
By process of elimination, I deduced that this was "saffron foam". But this was saffron foam in the way that white rice with a teaspoon of turmeric chucked in the water is "saffron rice", which is to say not at all. It had virtually no taste - certainly no notable trace of that delicate red thread which is one of cuisine's most expensive spices.
The scallops and two rather small prawns had plainly spent most of the recent past in a freezer, which is hard to understand anywhere in Auckland and hard to forgive in a $16 entree. The "crab mousse" was four starchy discs which, the waitress assured me, acquired their faint crab taste from crab, not surimi.
There are two problems with Claret: the food and the prices. The latter encourage you to think that the former will be excellent but in fact this is very ordinary food at rather extraordinary prices. It's officially known as Claret the Restaurant - presumably to distinguish it from Claret the Hardware Store up the road - and it's no fault of theirs that I find the name slightly old-fashioned and pretentious.
I blame Basil Fawlty: "Most of the guests we get in here wouldn't know a Bordeaux from a claret," he said as he snobbishly tried to ingratiate himself with a posh guest, and his attempt at recovery was even better than the gaffe. But the fact is, as Basil might say, you don't get much call for claret these days. It's all shiraz this and pinot noir that. I associate claret with gout and game birds and food that sticks to your ribs. And so, apparently, does the management at Claret (the Restaurant).
On a warm summer evening a bill of fare that ran to spice-roasted duck, steaks with potato bakes, fish pie and tamarind-coated pork loin seemed to be stuck in an endless winter.
It's all slightly unfortunate because the people are lovely and the welcome so warm. Claret is near the bottom of the mall, opposite the police station. It's a part of Onehunga given over to $2 shops and the like but the handsome old Edwardian Post Office building is a treat and the boss is alert to the need to adjust the wooden blinds to reduce the setting sun's glare to a dappled light. He is, like his staff, helpful, charming and friendly. The room is handsome. But even two glasses of Vavasour's excellent sauvignon blanc were not enough to blind me to the meal's shortcomings: an apricot and duck filo parcel was too much parcel and the filling was bland; a rack of lamb was unwisely dismantled into five tiny cutlets and set atop a medley of baked winter vegetables so large that the meat seemed like a garnish; the tiramisu did not deserve the name.
It's a place with ideas above its station, really, a neighbourhood eatery dressed up like a posh place. And it has some way to go to match the competition across town.
THE BILL
$165.50 for two
Duck filo $18
Prawn crab $16
Bluenose $33
Lamb $35
Tiramisu $12
Wine (3 glasses) $32
Beer $7
Liqueur $8
Coffee $4.50
