Frankie's Fish House

The southern gumbo of seafood at Frankie’s Fish House. Photo / Richard Robinson

Rating out of 10
Food: 8
Service: 4
Value: 8
Ambience: 5
Verdict: A pretty grim start, alleviated by excellent and well-priced food.

Address: 170 Jervois Rd, Ponsonby Ph (09) 376 5367
Our meal: $86.60 for two starters, two mains, three beers and two glasses of wine.
Wine list: A choice of 10 New Zealand wines, but Frankie's is also BYO wine.

It's not easy to find Frankie's Fish House. We cruise up and down Jervois Rd, we ring 018 again to get the street number and eventually spot it, tucked up against its grander neighbour, Vinnies.

Frankie's presents a somewhat unprepossessing facade, and inside it's not much better; a long, narrow space where the walls are lined with blackboards. Two carry the menu, one on each side of the room, but another running alongside the bar seems surplus to requirements. Blackboards are for children to draw on. This is a bar. There are no children.

The menu itself is brief and to the point. The food leans heavily towards fish, which is what you'd expect, but there are vegetarian options as well as a couple of chicken dishes.

All starter plates are $7.70, all claypots are $20.90, and the house specialty, Frankie's paella, is a very modest $24.90. All beers, whether local or imported, are $5.90, and special coffees and cocktails go out at $8.90. We order Heineken for Bill, and a glass of Omaka Springs sauvignon blanc for me. It had to be that, because it's the only one on the wine list. Likewise, there's one riesling, one pinot gris, one chardonnay ... you get the idea.

One real oddity on the menu is a range of condiments, all at $1.20. What can this mean? Our waitress, who seems almost comatose, which could explain why she appears to have forgotten to put on her skirt, says the range of sauces that come with the dishes can be swapped around. For example, you can have salt and pepper squid with a honey and chilli glaze instead of nahm jim, or Thai fish cakes with saffron aioli instead of sweet and sour sauce. Hmmm.

We order the squid with nahm jim, and sesame prawn toasts with ketchup manis, an Indonesian spiced soy sauce. The squid are tender, and the hot, sour and salty nahm jim a perfect accompaniment. Bill's prawn toasts are not the usual fish paste-like offerings, but made with real prawns and very good.

Another beer, another glass of wine, and we're ready for the main course. Bill has the pot of mussels, fish, calamari and tiger prawns with house-baked bread. It's huge and cooked to perfection, to the point where he has to be forcibly prevented from licking out the last of the sauce from the (metal, not clay) pot. My gumbo arrives, redolent with a spice I have difficulty identifying, but eventually settle on aniseed. The gumbo is thick with fish, shrimp, chorizo, tomatoes and rice, and very spicy. It's star anise, I finally decide, rather than its stronger cousin, and lends itself beautifully to the fish.

The waitress stirs herself sufficiently to fetch the bill, which, given the small range of prices, should be a doddle. It isn't, but between us we fix it. Frankie's is testament to the axiom that you can't judge a book by its cover.

It's worth a visit for the food, if nothing else.