Point 5 Nine

By EWAN McDONALD for viva

Super chef Alain Ducasse is the only restaurateur who's needed to hire a fulltime staff member to splodge the Brasso on to his Michelin stars (11 of them, across three continents and outlying islands).

His big idea is "World Food", menus in which diners are encouraged to combine ingredients from different columns to "create the unthinkable": home-grown bean sprouts with pickled eggplant or steamed lobster with mango chutney and coleslaw with sesame seeds.

It's not 12,000 miles removed from the way that Peter Gordon made his name in Britain in the 90s. At the Sugar Club and now Provedores, he proved that fusion cooking was not just a fashion but a concept derived from carefully matching the ingredients in each dish: chilled roast beetroot, basil and lime leaf soup with creme fraiche and argan oil; two ox-tongues, one salted, one grilled, on herby lentils with roast garlic and herb dressing.

There is a point to all this, and it's not just to copy out menus. On Pt Chev's windswept square, right behind the elderly Chinese practising tai-chi in the dusk, Point 5 Nine produces remarkable fusion cuisine, or world food.
Both the restaurant's original chef, Phillipa Wylie, and her successor, Vincent Marshall, take classic dishes and breathe new life into them with the inspiration and influence of tastes from around the Mediterranean, Asia and the Pacific. Some coincidence, perhaps, that Ducasse's flagship in Paris is Poincare 59; none at all that Wylie worked with Gordon at the Sugar Club, or that Gordon has cooked in the Point kitchen.

Marshall's lightly steamed Thai chicken and shitake mushroom parcels are wrapped in cornets of banana leaves, the fennel bulb salad on a ramekin alongside. You'll wait for an entree of butternut and rocket risotto, with toasted pumpkin seeds and avocado oil, to arrive; as you should if it's cooked correctly.

His roast pork belly on garlic mash with bok choy and pineapple chilli sambal is a new-
millennium update on a favourite comfort dish; perhaps the smoked paprika oil around the roasted chicken breast, white bean hummus and roast tomatoes is a tad sharp.

It's quickly forgiven when dessert arrives, a trio of lemon curd tart, lemon sorbet and shots of limoncello.
Point 5 Nine is three years old (the carpet is a many splattered thing), a beautifully proportioned, high-ceilinged room, walls draped with tapa cloth. This motif is continued on the opposite side of the exposed island-kitchen in an unpretentious bar (does that make it Auckland's only tapa bar?).

Service is suave, smart, knowledgeable; the wine list proudly Kiwi until it reaches the deepest reds; the music and ambience relaxing, leaving diners to focus on the remarkable food.

And to wonder why this restaurant, which does everything so well, was all but empty on a night when places offering inferior, unimaginative hashes of predictably repetitive menus were packed, simply because they're on the Ponsonby or Parnell strips.

Best not complain. Char, next door, was voted one of the best takeouts in Auckland in Viva's awards issue and now the locals are e-mailing us to say they can't get in the door. You wouldn't want to miss out on a table at Point 5 Nine.

Address: 5-9 Pt Chevalier Rd Ph 815 9595

Hours: Dinner 7 nights Brunch Saturday, Sunday

Food: Innovative fusion cuisine

Owners: Jennifer Hurrell, James Tui, Sebastian Hurrell
Chef: Vincent Marshall

Essence: The food —fresh, inspired, perfectly cooked —is the star of an excellent, unpretentious restaurant that gets the wine, service and atmosphere spoton too

Smoking: No

Wine: All NZ, until the deeper reds

Noise: Classic soul, contemporary lounge

Cost: (mains for two) $46-$ 48

Vegetarian: Options on menu

Bottom line: Like Elvis says, don't be fooled. Behind the hardtofind exterior on a grubby suburban square, this restaurant dreams up exciting, ingenious takes on classic dishes from the Med and Asia, served in a stylish Pacific themed room.

* 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.