Restaurant review: Boy and Bird, Ponsonby

The whole chicken, salad and roasted carrots on the menu at Boy and Bird in Ponsonby. Photo / Babiche Martens.

Boy and Bird
222 Ponsonby Rd
Ponsonby
boyandbird.co.nz

Try as I might, I cannot shake the image of a rotisserie chicken I saw in a Greek joint in New York. Its breasts were drug-pumped so big that if you'd sprinkled it with glitter and stood it on end, in a dim light it could have passed for Dolly Parton.

The chicken they serve at Boy and Bird, the new venture of Michael (The Food Truck) Van de Elzen, is free-range and more demurely stacked than Ms Parton. It comes from the Waikato and it is soaked in a citrus brine for eight hours and steamed before being rotisseried.

Is your mouth watering yet? Mine was. But then I had some.

Bad mistake: the bird at Boy and Bird was barely second-rate. A tablespoonful of gravy, tan as a publican's Sunday suit, was so viscous it clung in a shiny toupe-like clump on the meat and - here's the kicker - the meat was really rather dry.

Not particle-board or ship's-biscuit dry. Not like my mother's turkey or the chicken on the Havana beachfront that gave me a notifiable disease. But if a TV-star chef opens a chicken joint, he needs to serve the best damn chook you ever tasted. This was a long way from that.

Some good points before I return to the bad ones: Boy and Bird is very affordable and family-friendly - and few sit-down places in Ponsonby Rd are either; the interior, which has the feel of a diner, is bright and inviting, with tartan-dressed school-hall forms making bench seats for bigger tables; the staff (women have "bird" on their T-shirts and the men have "boy") are relaxed and slick.

But the food made me want to weep. That chicken - did I mention the chicken? - came with roasted potato cubes called "chunkies" that had plainly been made long before and were barely tepid when they landed (a quick toss under the grill would have lent them some pizzazz). Also on the plate was a slaw of pickled white cabbage that was dreary to look at and characterless to taste.

We opened with what purported to be a tart of what purported to be charred broccoli. Forensic examination revealed a couple of dark spots on the steamed vegetables and the "tart" was two cool squares of ordinary flaky pastry topped with onion jam. The whole was swamped with a glutinously oily walnut pesto, which was pretty much all you could taste.

The "prawn cocktail" was a large plate of lettuce mixed with tasteless prawn meat, much of which had not been introduced to the bland dressing, so I had to toss it myself.

The Professor opted for a salad consisting of kale (it was at least sauteed, unlike the bitter raw stuff in the broccoli tart), which included fennel and quinoa but, more problematically, two thin slices of halloumi (which lacked the rubbery squeak to the bite that marks the good stuff) and a clump of shredded apple in the middle.

It was like food from a wake at an anarchist urban commune: virtuous, joyless, bloody awful. A side of carrots was visibly scattered with seeds, though the promised truffle was too subtle for me to detect.

And I have run out of space to tell you about the zabaglione that wanted to be a fruit crumble.

The proximity of KFC and the takeaway-chook place Bird on a Wire has prompted some to dub this a chicken precinct. Well, I haven't eaten KFC since the 1970s and I'm not giving up that habit now, but if I go back to Boy and Bird I might try the beef short rib.

• Starters $4-$11; Chicken $12 (quarter)-$29 (whole); Salads $14-$16; Desserts $7-$12

Verdict: Smart idea dismally executed

Cheers

Ponsonby Rd is bar-central. Near to Boy and Bird, you'll find Bonita Wine & Tapas on the corner of Ponsonby Rd and Summer St. The bar brings "the flavours of Spain to the heart of Ponsonby with a menu of classic Spanish tapas, wine and beer". Bonita sources wines from Spain, South America, Australia plus locally, and stocks Spanish and local craft beers. Bonita is open from 4pm Tuesdays-Sundays. Visit Thursday nights for live Flamenco guitar from 7pm.

• Bonita, 242 Ponsonby Rd, ph (09) 376 5670, bonitabar.co.nz

Head the other way down Ponsonby Rd to Poof Bar. It was called Pop for a while, but reverted to its original name once controversy subsided. However, the bar's Facebook name is Pop on Ponsonby.

• Poof Bar, 212 Ponsonby Rd, facebook.com/PoponPonsonby
- Penny Lewis