The chocolate brownie on the menu at Happy Boy. Photo / Babiche Martens
The chocolate brownie on the menu at Happy Boy. Photo / Babiche Martens
Address: 705A Manukau Rd, Royal Oak Phone: (09) 320 5238 Website:happyboyeatery.com Cost: Burgers $13.90-$14.50; sides $6.50-$14.50; desserts $11
"In about an hour," Max said, "there will be a queue out the door." In the bare, echoing room, our party were the only diners. I must have looked sceptical, but he'd been here before.
"It's in our hood," he explained, "and there's nowhere else to eat around here."
I forbore to mention the excellent Filipino, Nanam, over the other side of the roundabout, or the South Indian gem Kairali across the street. He may not know much about dining in Royal Oak, but when it comes to burgers, he's an authority.
I had hoped to improve my street cred with my kids (and grandkids, whose presence explained the 4.30pm dinnertime) by introducing them to this very hot, very cool and new(ish) place. Then Max started recommending a modus operandi and I realised I was on a fool's errand.
Walking into Happy Boy is like entering one of those futuristic game arcades in Tokyo that the Professor and I peered into in gormless wonder, never daring to cross the threshold for fear of getting lost in a sci-fi dystopia. The iconography - and the menu text, which a younger, hipper diner at our table told me is called 8-bit - recalls the video games we played before there were personal computers and when somebody, probably not Bill Gates, said "640Kb ought to be enough for anybody."
The blue-tinged light evoked some nasty hallucinogenic experiences I thought I'd forgotten but I took the cue from the grandchildren, perched side by side in high chairs and looking as happy as they do at Playcentre. I decided it was safe.
Happy Boy, which opened in July, is from the team of Jasper and Ludo Maignot and Celeste Thornley, who gave us Balmoral's Kiss Kiss and Mt Albert's Chinoiserie, so they don't have much to prove about feeling the pulse.
We were seated near an apocalyptically violent video game, the buttons and levers of which the little ones enjoyed smearing with grease and tomato sauce whenever they had a break from eating, but if the beefy, bearded waiter, who was kept busy wiping it down, minded, he certainly never let it show.
I know what you're thinking: what about the food? Well, you try writing 600 words about a burger. My limit is 130 and they follow.
A selection of burgers on the menu at Happy Boy. Photo / Babiche Martens
Mine was of pulled lamb in Xian style (the menu wording requires you to know that the "Xian" bit means packed with mouth-numbing Sichuan pepper, which I love, but No. 2 grandchild made it wailingly plain that it's not for toddlers; serves him right for nicking my food). In fact, all the burgers (there are six, including a tofu option) got the thumbs up from the party of six: the accoutrements, which sang with Asian grace notes, such as coriander, five spice, daikon and kimchi, were burstingly fresh, perhaps because we were the day's first customers.
All the meats are free-range, although, disappointingly, the pork in the pork burger is actually just bacon, which seems a shame. But the blindingly white buns, pale and steamed, like the Chinese variety, made a perfect base, light and unobtrusive.
A side of a minty Vietnamese slaw was tartly magnificent and the grandchildren enjoyed hoovering up edamame beans and fries even more than greasing the buttons in Streetfighter 2.
After all that, the desserts - a very, very chocolate brownie and XXL churros called Chinese doughnuts - were really a test of the robustness of our digestive systems. The young ones, who pronounced them "In. Sane", made it plain that we just can't keep up.
