Restaurant review: Levant, Auckland CBD

12 Jellicoe St, Wynyard Quarter
Ph: (09) 379 3579
levant.co.nz

When I lived in Sydney, there was a Turkish bakery just round the corner. Its speciality was dough (baked plain, it was flatbread) spread with a mixture of finely ground lamb, mint, paprika, chilli and egg.

Blistered until pillow-puffy in a fierce oven, it was sprinkled with coriander and wrapped, with lemon wedges, in clean, white paper. It was hard to not eat any on the 100m walk home.

Imagine my excitement, then, when I saw a section headed "flat breads" in the menu on the very beautiful website of this new place in Wynyard Quarter. Toppings mentioned include shredded lamb, figs and walnut, anchovy and pomegranate molasses.

Imagine my disappointment at the Alibaba (should the witless name have sounded a warning?): a small, stodgy and characterless pizza-style base, topped with a tomato sauce with none of the spiciness mentioned on the menu. My companions and I picked through the mess in search of the beef strips and even found a few. This abomination cost $24.50.

The Levant is a term applied to the countries at the eastern end of the Mediterranean - usually Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. The menu here interprets its remit more widely: Turkish and Persian influences are also in evidence, though no one who has travelled in the former Ottoman Empire would recognise much of the food, which has been strained through a kind of pan-ethnic sieve into a characterless mush.

On paper, much of it sounds delicious. The lamb shashlik purports to be made of "slow-cooked marinated lamb leg", but the cubes that arrived on skewers were dense, dry and virtually flavourless. A feta and melon salad, which filled a small lettuce leaf, presumably cost $15 because melons are not in season. It consisted of about 10 marble-sized balls of cantaloupe and watermelon (the latter soaked in pomegranate juice) offhandedly sprinkled with a (very good) goat feta, a large crumb for each of our quartet.

Grilled halloumi with a caponata no Sicilian would recognise was nice enough. It would be churlish of me to add there were three bits of cheese for four of us, because almost no place in town offers to adjust serving sizes in these situations, so I won't.

Are we there yet? A dish of pickled octopus was dominated by discs of tepid potato and the baklava we foolishly finished with was soggy. But I highly recommend menu item number one: crumbed aubergine, deep-fried like chips. It would be an exaggeration to say they are worth the trip. If you are dining at Levant, you should not miss them.

Verdict: Overpriced and characterless bar food

Share plates $13-$23.50; Salads $9.50-$15.50; flatbreads $22.50-$25.50; desserts $15.50.