Monsoon

By ELEANOR BLACK for canvas

After two years living in Auckland, I had come to view Monsoon, a cosy little Thai/Malay restaurant in Devonport, as one of my best finds - a reliable, relaxed and affordable place I could confidently recommend to friends from out of town (and feel a bit smug and citified in the process).

But my latest meal there, featuring undercooked chicken, sluggish service and sickly sweet fish, means I won't be recommending it to anyone again.

I ordered my favourite Monsoon entree, ayam serai, chunks of marinated chicken coated in sesame seeds and served with a ginger plum sauce ($8.90). As always, it was piping hot and delicious, a deceptively simple dish which was easily the highlight of the meal. In contrast, Tim's mixed selection plate ($9.90) - one each of a vegetable samosa, beef curry puff, beef and vegetable spring roll and Thai chicken satay - was unforgivably bland.

The spring roll and curry puff were okay when dipped in the accompanying sweet chilli sauce, but the samosa was so dull as to be forgotten as soon as it was eaten. The best offering was the chicken, which came with a hefty dollop of peanut sauce.

A bottle of Seifried Estate Gewurtztraminer ($28) sustained us through what felt like an age between courses, but being a very sweet wine, it tasted better with food. It proved a fine foil to the spicy mains, especially Tim's chicken and pumpkin green curry ($17.50), a slow-burner. The curry sauce itself was terrific - thick, aromatic and just hot enough - but the chicken was unpalatably pink, and some pieces looked dangerously raw. The safest route to satiety was for Tim to pour the sauce on to jasmine rice ($1.50) and work his way through the pumpkin, of which there was plenty.

I chose the seafood special ($22.90), which sounded divine - scallops, prawns and an unidentified fish in a creamy coconut sauce, with mushrooms and lemongrass - and it would have been wonderful if everything wasn't drowning in sugar. I couldn't taste coconut in the sauce, which was brown in any case, and so sweet as to make me feel I was getting my main and dessert in one dish. It could probably have been saved if it was served with a wedge of lemon on the side to squeeze over the seafood. As it was, I tried to wipe the sauce off the scallops and prawns before eating, but found they had absorbed the sweet flavour and were virtually ruined.

By 10pm, two hours after arriving with empty bellies and high hopes, we were irritable, itching to leave and wondering what had happened to a first-rate restaurant which seemed to have sailed through a change of owners about a year ago.

Where: Monsoon, 71 Victoria Rd, ph 445-4263

Cost: Two entrees, two mains, rice and a bottle of wine, $88.70

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