Where:215 Dominion Rd, Mt Eden. Ph (09) 630 6474.
Rating: * * * *
Wine list: Choice
Vegetarians: A risotto and a pasta, available as entrees or mains
Watch out for: The apple risotto - rice pudding with class.
Sound check: Conversation friendly
Bottom line: In the front rank of city and suburban bistros.
KEY POINTS:
There's a recipe for an oxtail ragu (pasta sauce) that I am fond of using - and not just because it calls for an entire bottle of good wine (and begins with the words, "Pour yourself a glass of the wine").
It tells you to keep cooking until the meat is falling off the bone. But go much beyond that and the collagen (yep, that stuff) released from the bone and cartilage makes the sauce sticky and glutinous.
For me, this lesson wasn't cheap, involving as it did several kilos of oxtail, a cut that butchers used to give away before it became bistro-chic. But if I needed a reminder of just how good oxtail is when it's done just right, Jeremy Schmid was the man for the job.
The long and winding road that leads to his door has passed through the kitchens at Euro, Vinnies, Red, and the sky-high Orbit to name a few. Schmid was also the brains behind the Little Boys sausages which are almost as nice as the sausages at Westmere Butchery.
Anyway, Schmid's oxtail arrived at the table as a spoonful of excellently rich ragu in a delicate pastry case. The meat was still firm - if it were pasta it would have been al dente - but melt-in-the-mouth and bursting with flavour.
Alongside it was a thin slice of chargrilled veal liver (so tender that for a moment I mistook it for a tiny minute steak) and a spoonful of onion jam. It may have seemed a slightly wintry choice for the season but it fit perfectly with the establishment's mission statement: good helpings of honest food of intelligent design with the emphasis on bold flavours.
We'd barely got started and I was impressed.
Two Fifteen occupies a double frontage on Dominion Rd a few doors up from the Valley Rd corner, which is still disfigured by the hideous paint job on a (now-closed) stereo store.
It's a cool, airy space, with mud-brown walls only slightly marred by some inexplicable fabric art and a lighting system that includes enough pendent globes to grace a theatre foyer. And most of the service is slick and polished (I could complain about staff who keep interrupting a meal you're enjoying to ask whether you're enjoying your meal, but I've done it so often now that I'm getting sick of myself and obviously no one else is listening).
Suffice to say that almost all the food we had was quite superb: lashings of house-smoked salmon with two potato blini (think pikelets made from the air from an angel's sigh) and creme fraiche; cannelloni - the big pasta tubes - filled with spinach and pine nuts; a whacking great fillet of juicy snapper atop a prawn and green herb risotto. The pastry on my lemon tart was egregiously undercooked but the apple risotto was one of the best desserts the Professor has ever had, she swears.
It's early days for Two Fifteen, which may explain our very long wait for food, which seemed odd since the place was almost empty when we arrived. It was pumping when we left though, with good reason. I hope the kitchen coped.
