The same aesthetic has presumably driven the decision to have a kitchen so open that the dishwashing station is in plain view: if watching cooks fill dressing bottles is your idea of fun, good luck to you, but sometimes style ideas can be pursued to a fault.
Style supplanted substance in much of the food we tried, too. A "surf and turf" carpaccio paired octopus with what was called "cured beef". The latter, a cross between silverside and biltong, was the kind of meat you would expect to eat while crossing Antarctica on foot, but at least I could detect it; finding the octopus meant picking through what the menu called bitter leaves but looked very like shredded red cabbage. It was an exquisitely awful dish, a visual mess on the plate and lacking any coherent explanation for having paired two such ill-matched meats.
The Professor's scallop entree was just odd: a panna cotta - distastefully reminiscent of the junket we were given as invalid children - wobbled alongside the fat scallops. The menu said it was cauliflower-flavoured (which may be a contradiction in terms) and I think I detected cauli on the third taste. The kitchen had forgotten the promised black pudding, which at least spared us being bored to death by a combination now as original as vinegar on chips.
Excessive cleverness likewise marred the bouillabaisse, the iconic Provencal fish stew. It's often said that there are as many bouillabaisses as there are kitchens, but I had never come across one that dispensed with the broth in favour of a thick bisque, that barely covers the bottom of the bowl, making the provided spoon quite redundant. Of the artfully arranged seafood, only the baked salmon (hard to cock up) was not dreadful; fat grilled prawns and a chunk of bony monkfish were egregiously overcooked. No rouille; no bread; they would, presumably, have been too old hat.
Overcooking likewise ruined the Professor's roasted flounder (yes, I recoiled at the use of those two words together, too) but the waitress insisted that the fish was fresh, not frozen as it had seemed to us, so its flaws must be entirely ascribed to incompetence in the kitchen.
And if those really were heirloom tomatoes with the grilled cos lettuce hearts (a dish that was much worse than it sounds), they should have been treated with more respect than being roasted until they puckered and curled.
Under the circumstances, we lacked the nerve for dessert. I have to say the fish'n'chips'n'mushy peas at the adjoining table looked smashing. But fish and chips mostly are.
• Entrees $16.90-$22.90; salads $19.50; mains $22.90-$34.50; sides $7.90-$8.50
Verdict: Too clever to pay attention to the kitchen basics.
Cheers
By Joelle Thomson, joellethomson.com
Great southern whites
Ever wondered what wine people do for three days at a "conference"? Apart from discussing degraded schist soils and their effect on wine flavour, a hot topic at this year's Central Otago Pinot Noir Celebration was the region's cool whites. About 80 per cent of Otago's grapes are pinot noir. It is the world's most pinot-dominant region, so it was ironic to taste its untapped white wine potential. The bone dry 2013 Amisfield Chenin Blanc and off dry 2013 Mt Difficulty Chenin Blanc were one thing; the 2014 Carrick Josephine Riesling is quite another. Born and bred as a pirate bottling for winemakers to drink, it now sells for $28 a bottle. If cider has grabbed your taste buds, this white will do likewise. As will the dry chardonnay and rieslings from Gibbston Valley Winery, whose winemaker Christopher Keys opened chardonnay and riesling back to 2000; great southern whites. carrick.co.nz and gibbstonvalley.com
New Zealand wine exports have reached a new high at $1.37 billion; up 8.2 per cent on the previous year and now the country's sixth biggest export good.
