Restaurant review: Culprit, Auckland CBD

Culprit, 12 Wyndham St, CBD with chef Kyle Street, right, and Jordan MacDonald. Photo / Getty Images

Address: Level 1, 12 Wyndham St, Auckland CBD
Phone: (09) 377 5992
Online: culprit.co.nz

I've been around so long that I can remember when tapas were Spanish. Nowadays, you can find Indian and Japanese restaurants that serve tapas. I was offered them in a place that purported to offer the cuisine of Brittany, although there was not a single distinctively Breton dish on the menu.

I don't know why restaurants would betray their own distinguished roots by expropriating the terminology of another cuisine, but perhaps they think it gives them an international cachet.

Slowly, tapas morphed into small plates, which are now routine. Irritatingly, in some places, the waitstaff explain their "shared dining concept" as though announcing that they have discovered a second Turin shroud. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before we were offered yum cha at a place that is not Chinese.

Culprit is that place. In the upstairs space that was home to The Black Hoof, which served tapas (the Spanish kind), Kyle Street and Jordan Macdonald, who were the beating hearts of the kitchens at Depot and Federal Delicatessen respectively, have set up on their own account. They're serving what they call "Yum Cha Our Way" (the capital letters are theirs), which is not their take on pork siu mai, sticky rice and chicken feet but a selection (nine the night we went) of tasty bites, brought to the table, on trays on a trolley. They cost between $3 and $12, and you say "yes" or "no" according to your inclination, leaving room, if you have any sense, for something from the more conventional entree/main/dessert selection on the menu proper.

So far, so manageable, but when we visited, a couple of weeks after opening, there were a few details to iron out. The first, and most annoying, was they ran out of stuff when they had barely started. Heeding the warning that trolley service started at 6pm, 7pm and 8pm, we took our seats early but we never got a look at the steak tartare because there was none left. The maitre d' apologised for the "mix-up" and comped us dessert, but in a place that was so heavily booked, I would have been more inclined to call it a cock-up than a mix-up.

A kokoda (raw fish) came without the "hot sauce jelly" listed as a key ingredient, because there was none of that left either. The lovely waitress offered to "make some up specially" for us but I felt that it would have been better to have made some up specially for the dish.

Worse, the kitchen seemed unable to deliver the dishes across the 2m gap to the tables in a palatably warm state. In the case of a sensational sashimi of marinated salmon served with umeboshi (pickled) plum, that was no problem, of course. But I am sure I would have enjoyed the delicately flavoured veal cutlets (baba ganoush, green tomato) or the smoked kahawai pancakes with spicy mayo if they had not been tepid.

Quite what balls of bone marrow taste like at ambient temperature, I leave to your imagination, because a precise description would be distasteful. The truly inspired duck tortellini were so much less than they might have been if the bone broth poured over them at the tableside had had a blast on the flame.

The grilled lamb's tongue was really an endive and walnut salad, and not meaty enough to answer its description, and I am far from sure that the pork sausage meat stuffing in the "Peking" duck was an improvement on the original idea, though the duck meat was superbly, pinkly succulent.

In all, it was a procession of dishes better described as contrived than cooked, although there were some treasures to be found. But if the trolley-pushers at Grand Park can ferry still-steaming prawn dumplings to the tables in a huge room, it is not too much to suggest Culprit give the service system a hurry-up.

Yum cha $3-$12; dishes $12-$38; sides $5-$7; sweets $5-$9.
VERDICT: Gimmicky concept, sometimes wonderful (but often tepid) food.