Harbourside Seafood Bar & Grill

By EWAN McDONALD for viva


Scoff at those glossy, adjectively overendowed tourist brochures if you like, but they've got one thing right: on a sunny afternoon there is no better place to be than on the terracotta terrace at Harbourside, ferries, cruise liners, yachts and even kayaks below, fully loaded champagne flute at the ready. Okay, cocktail glass, if you prefer.

To get there you have to walk through the restaurant, redecorated by Patrick Steel, frock-maker to the stars. It's all a matter of taste, of course, but a friend commented after a recent visit that the turquoise chairs and sculptured glass reminded him of a 1970s hotel dining room. He even knew which one: the Royal International on Victoria St West.
For my money (and this place has had quite a bit of it because Harbourside is, deservedly, one of the city's classic restaurants), the new look is one of the few things that restaurateurs Tony Adcock and Jimmy Gerard haven't got quite right since they opened in 1988.

Perhaps that longevity alone shows Harbourside's class: how many other restaurants in Auckland have survived, much less prospered, over 13 years?

Posh, in a nice kind of way, and large, in a less than obvious kind of way - it can seat 200 inside and 140 on the balcony - Harbourside's tourist-friendly reputation is founded on its focus on New Zealand seafood and wines.

The key to its success has been the owners' ability to reinvent, Madonna-like, the restaurant and its food, though far less often and far more subtly. When it was fashionable, for example, the meals came in stacks, an irritating fad.
Now it features ingredients like chargrilled radicchio, tatsoi, parmesan pinenut wafers; the salmon roulade ($29.40) is a modern take on a French classic, with a horseradish crust, asparagus, scalloped potato, bearnaise sauce. Even the year-in, year-out favourite - fish-and-chips - has been remade and remodelled. This spring it comes as snapper tempura ($29.40), the fish deep-fried with saffron mayonnaise, tomato crisps and fries.

As for dessert, Ann has long thought that Harbourside's creme brulee is one of the seven wonders of the world and its present incarnation, a lime and ginger version with maple syrup shortbread ($12.50), has done nothing to alter that opinion.

In their white shirts, ties and black aprons, the staff are attentive and mostly knowledgeable - Adcock and Gerard pride themselves on training. They're a little more formal than in most Kiwi restaurants, but that's appropriate for a place where many of the guests are visitors from ... no, not Hawkes Bay, but places much further afield and generally nor'nor'west of New Zealand.

Yes, it is pricey for diners condemned to using the New Zealand dollar. For most of the mains, you'll get just a silver coin back from $30. And I think $18.50 for some of Kapiti's less distinguished cheeses, quince jelly and crispbread is over the odds.

But on that terrace in the sun ... hey, sometimes you've got to push the boat out.

Open seven days from 11.30 am, Sunday brunch from 9.30 am.