Herald rating: * * ½
Address:The Hunting Lodge, Waikoukou Valley Rd, Waimauku RD2
Phone:(09) 411 8259
Open: Lunch and dinner Thursday-Saturday;
Sunday lunch
Ambience: Very little.
Vegetarians: Don't get me started.
Watch out for: The fire.
Bottom line: Overpriced and underwhelming.
I walked up the path with the 12-gauge broken in the crook of my arm and a brace of partridge in the shooting bag.
"Jeeves," I said, tossing the birds on the hall table, "tell Cook to dress these, will you, and pour me a large whisky, there's a good chap."
"Pull yourself together," said the Professor as she parked the Corolla outside The Hunting Lodge ("New Zealand's most-loved country restaurant," they call it, though they don't say how they know).
In the vineyard country north of Waimauku, it is in a house built in 1868 but to look at, it's the architectural equivalent of George Washington's axe, which has had a few heads and handles since the cherry-tree days.
The entrance hall, with the "roaring log fire" mentioned on the website, is of colonial vintage, but the hexagonal room we sat in is more 1990s than 1890s and is some chilly distance from the flames. Heaters struggled to warm the space and it wasn't until I persuaded them to pull the blinds down that I removed my beanie.
I suppose country people would say I am always in a hurry but I don't think it's unfair to describe the service that evening as languorous. Waitresses vanished for long stretches as if the delivery of a jug of water had tired them out.
That we might want to order some wine, and then that we might want to have it placed before us seemed to occur to them only in stages. If I'd known the intervals of inactivity would be so long I would have repaired to the fireside.
But it was with the menu that the problems really started. The website mentioned a "game" menu and the place is called a hunting lodge. Yet the entrees included a prawn and shrimp cocktail and a twice-baked goat-cheese souffle, neither of which have a conspicuous whiff of the chase about them.
A "game terrine" constituted an attempt I suppose, but the souffle had none of the tang you get from a good chevre, and some chargrilled calf's liver, cut too thick and cooked too long, was dry and chewy. A green-pea soup got the thumbs-up.
Worse was to come. The smart woman who'd picked the soup was delivered a quite fabulous piece of beef fillet (though I thought the accompanying smoked cauli mash obtrusive).
The rest varied from indifferent to disastrous. A venison osso bucco tasted as though the meat had been roasted and plunged in a gravy - certainly it lacked the melting integration of tastes one expects from that dish.
A lamb hotpot passed muster but none of us could find a shred of aubergine in the Professor's aubergine tart. It consisted of a single roasted portobello mushroom in a small pastry case, with shallot trimmings. It had been sauced so sweetly it tasted like a dessert. It cost $29.50. Restaurants routinely treat vegetarians offhandedly - fettuccine carbonara without the bacon - but I have yet to see one that treated them like idiots.
I'll skip the specifics of the single dessert we ordered to remark only that it was, like everything except the wine, surrealistically overpriced. Sad to say, we went hunting for fine country dining but we never found it.
