The encyclopaedically well-informed Auckland music writer Graham Reid once reviewed a new album by the crooner Kamahl (ask your mum) as follows (I quote the review in full): "If there is a better Kamahl album than this, I haven't heard it." You can see what he did there, which was something much more subtle than faint praise. The initiated would doubtless have been queuing at the record store doors the next morning, and it was scrupulously fair to Kamahl.
Scrupulous fairness is nothing less than they deserve at Rumi, which I am sure is a very good Persian restaurant if judged by what it is trying to achieve. But it should be said that what it is trying to achieve will not spin a foodie's wheels.
"You can't review the place," the Professor told me. "It wouldn't be fair." And she got me thinking. Only once have I been to a restaurant with the intention of reviewing it and written nothing. A "Vietnamese" place in Otahuhu, it was about as Vietnamese as egg foo yong and it seemed pointless to file 600 words castigating a Chinese restaurant for calling itself Vietnam Cafe.
Rumi, by contrast, is what it says on the packet - or rather the streetfront sign, which says "Persian cuisine". Persia, in case you are wondering, is the old name for Iran (sort of; it's complicated) and the one often used by the Iranian diaspora, to reference the time before theocratic thugs took over the place.
