Where:13A Customs St West, Viaduct Basin. Ph: (09) 356 7080
Rating: * *
Wine list: Wide though not deep. Plenty of Italian.
Vegetarians: Heaps of choice.
Watch out for: Italian food.
Bottom line: McItalian, and quite bad.
I have not been to Portofino. The small Italian fishing port, I mean. But given its Riviera location and the fact that residents are outnumbered by tourists by about a gazillion to one, I'll give it a swerve if I'm ever back in il Bel Paese.
I had decided to give Portofino a swerve, too. The Italian restaurant chain, I mean. That's because three years ago the Professor and I were unfortunate enough to eat at the Mission Bay branch. It was among the most dismally bad meals of my life: tomatoes so unripe they were practically pink, overcooked and peppery scampi, cannelloni filled with what looked and tasted like baby food, vitello parmigiana devoid of parmesan and drowned with soapy mozzarella.
The hostess asked me whether I'd enjoyed everything and I told her it was vile. She smiled and pointed to the eftpos keypad.
So you might wonder why I found myself at the Viaduct branch. I would like to think it was a triumph of hope over experience, but I suspect it was a momentary lapse of reason.
It had been suggested as the venue for a small get-together by someone who spoke highly of a dish in which mussels are steamed in frascati wine, with garlic, onion and rosemary. So impressed was she with it that, she kept insisting that everybody else have a bit. Maybe I should have.
You know you're in trouble when your waiter starts bagging the bill of fare. I have avoided spelling out exactly what we ate so as to preserve his anonymity, but when my daughter asked which of the pasta dishes was the most authentically Italian, and he said "none of them", my heart sank a notch.
He had a point: the menu seems to have been compiled by someone with some command of Italian, since it keeps slipping into it: in otherwise English sentences, sauces are described as "pomodoro" or "panna" which may confuse diners who do not know that these are the Italian words for tomato and cream.
But some diners may also wonder, as I did, what ham (not prosciutto) and camembert (not exactly a classic Italian cheese) are doing in the white veal involtini. Why not include wiener schnitzel? Blinis? Crepes suzette? I'm not trying to be glib, but to confirm the waiter's assessment.
Portofino has an Italian name but it's hard to imagine any Italian eating here twice. Most of the staff, including one of the chefs, at the Viaduct the night we were there, seemed to be from Macedonia and the approach to the food seemed slapdash rather than ignorant.
Those mussels got the thumbs up from the enthusiast, but much of the rest was very disappointing. A steak (at $35.90, priced at the top end) was cooked well beyond the requested medium rare; the sauces on a pasta and a risotto were indistinguishable and, I suspect, identical; the Professor's "gourmet" pasta salad was mostly pasta and tasted like student-flat tucker; the desserts were barely better than what might be found at McDonald's.
It's worth mentioning that the place was busy, which proves that you can fool some of the people quite a lot of the time.
However, I fancy that if any of Portofino's regulars ate at one of Auckland many excellent Italian restaurants, they wouldn't be Portofino regulars any more.
