Kermadec

By EWAN McDONALD for Viva

Glenn blanched at the memory of Kermadec, especially its legendary seafood platter, which the menu describes precisely if not poetically as "a banquet of hot and cold Pacific seafood, including sashimi, smoked salmon, scallops, prawns, mussels, smoked eel, crisp Simu scampi, john dory, snapper".

It doesn't get me going because, like a surprising proportion of the population, I'm allergic to shellfish. So I wondered about his extreme reaction.

Turns out it was the bill for lunch. "I went there with a lawyer," he recalled, the experience seared if not panfried into his memory, "and I was paying. She asked to see the bill and when she looked at it she laughed. She said it was less than she earned in an hour."

Ouch. That platter is $37 a head (and scales, and tails) and Glenn stumped up for a decent bottle and probably the "Crayfish At Market Prices" as well. He'll learn: next time he'll make a 15-minute appointment at her office.

So let's get that one out of the way. Yes, Kermadec is in the top price-bracket of restaurants around town. It caters largely to corporate diners (and Glenn) and to overseas visitors who don't pay in Pacific pesos. And even when the restaurant is owned by our largest privately owned fishing company, seafood is not the cheapest ingredient around.
But there are times when (sorry, you should have seen this one coming) you have to push the boat out. And when you do, there aren't many places in town like Kermadec.

For one thing, the site: high above the Viaduct, the boats, the night lights, the people-watching. For another, the decor: each room or bar is a Pacific art gallery. In the restaurant, Gavin Chilcott's and Ralph Paine's paintings grace the white oak floor; columns tell of Polynesian voyagers and their bases record the marks of the chiefs who signed the Treaty. Utter fantasy in the brasserie, a palisade of driftwood tree-trunks beneath a ceiling covered with flax mats patterned in Niue designs by John Pule.

Then there is the food and wine. The general manager, Takashi Nakamura, came to New Zealand to cook for the Japanese consulate; when he moved downtown he poached head chef Ian Werner from the Regent Hotel (now Stamford Plaza) and previously the Cumberland Hotel in London, the QE2, LA and Moscow.

Venner's approach is more simplistic than often found in those kitchens. He prefers to concentrate on flavours more than presentation, taking a bland fish like orange roughy, baking it in a thick herb crust and serving it with oven-roasted vegetables and a maple lemon dressing that is, if you swapped the fish for lamb, reminiscent of a traditional Sunday roast.

The snapper goes to the Med, a crispy skin fillet accompanied by a Spanish tortilla, shellfish and orange salsa; salmon to Asia, oven-roasted with lentil and fava bean samosa and coriander aioli; pan-seared john dory to Northern Africa to pick up buttered couscous and lemon poppyseed vinaigrette.

Service is formal, restrained. Perhaps that, and the fact that one large kitchen feeds the restaurant, the brasserie and the smaller rooms, combine to give an impression of an impersonal evening, rather than at somewhere like Vinnie's, where you feel that Prue and David hover at every dish.

From a discerning list, we drank R.D.1 chardonnay, just to see if Roger Donaldson makes his wine in Central Otago in the same masculine, upfront way he makes his movies (Thirteen Days, Dante's Peak, Smash Palace) in Hollywood. He does.

Food: Modern NZ, mainly seafood

Owners: Simunovich Fisheries Ltd

General Manager: Takashi Nakamura

Head Chef: Ian Venner

Smoking: Smoking/non-smoking areas in restaurant; pipes, cigars after 10.30pm

Wine: Mainly premium New Zealand wines

Noise: The sound of two jaws chomping

Cost (mains for two): $50-$55

Vegetarian: Salads on the menu

Bottom line: While Leo, Eric and Johnny-come-latelys trade interior designers and food concepts on the quays below, the queen of the Viaduct sails on, charting a course or three of expertly crafted, rigidly executed, mainly seafood dishes…even if the sheer size of the operation can make for a somewhat impersonal occasion.

* Read more about what's happening in the world of food, wine, fashion and beauty in viva, part of your Herald print edition every Wednesday.