Auckland Restaurant Review: Alla Prossima Specialises in Regionally Focussed Italian Food

By Jesse Mulligan

Monday Jul. 15, 2024

Viva

This new Italian restaurant in the city centre serves precise classics and explosive experimentations. Photo / Babiche Martens

ALLA PROSSIMA

Cuisine: Italian

Address: 8 Upper Queen St, CBD

Phone: (09) 320 1671

Reservations: Accepted

Drinks: Fully licensed

From the menu: Focaccia $18, “Mediterranean sandwich” $20, caponata $20, rigatone cacio e pepe $31, Balanzone bolognesi $36

Rating: 18/20

Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12 Disappointing, give it a miss. 13-15

Oh wow, this is the one.

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This is the restaurant I’ve been waiting for. A superb, regionally focused, handmade pasta joint where they do the old stuff incredibly well, and throw in some new stuff just for fun. I don’t think I’ve eaten better Italian food anywhere. This is gob-smackingly, heart-stoppingly, jaw-droppingly delicious. You must come here at once.

But first, you’ll need to find it. The restaurant opened a few weeks ago in a hotel that is itself pretty new. Called Hotel Abstract, it might sound like a duck-shaped building with a moat of milk where the receptionist is a 2m-high pixelated human foot, but the reality is a stylish high-rise on Upper Queen St, with the restaurant several steps down from street level into a cosy but very modern dining room.

Chef Gabriele Marangoni, formerly of Pasta & Cuore, specialises in Italian cuisine from the Emilia-Romagna region and works at an open station in one corner. It is a joy to watch him cook, emulsifying a little water with sauce in a steel bowl then pouring in the drained pasta and tossing to mix. In an adjoining room and out of sight a sous chef does some of the grunt work, leaving Gabriele to supply the finishing touches and plate it all up.

The "cosy and modern" dining room at Alla Prossima. Photo / Babiche Martens

Meanwhile, some nice waitstaff patrol the tables and convene behind the bar to discuss important matters. I’m not sure if it was training or gossip going on but at one point chef Gabriele had to ask loudly for “service please” so that one of the two people next to him would pick up and deliver a dish that had been waiting too long. They were also slow on wine service — I had to ask them for a second drink and they didn’t offer another.

I studied the food menu for some time, feeling confused and disoriented. Then it struck me: they weren’t offering raw fish. Ceviche, sashimi, crudo — whatever name you use, it has become practically illegal not to include it. I hadn’t realised how tiring it had become to see this dish at the beginning of every single restaurant menu. By leaving it off, Alla Prossima is in one stroke setting their menu and diners free.

It’s the most appealing list of food choices I’ve seen in years. Snacks, small bites, pastas, sides, and just two main courses; it’s a menu the chef has written with great confidence — not in himself but in his heritage (Italian cooking has always been more about the ingredients than the technical wizardry — for the latter, head northwest to France).

An open station within the restaurant shows chefs putting the final touches on dishes. Photo / Babiche Martens

Which isn’t to say he doesn’t experiment. His “Mediterranean sandwich” is a great sally into modern cuisine: a baby croissant filled with southern European treats like red prawn, saffron mayonnaise and a nduja, a spicy salami spread. This perfect croissant was soft and buttery with an exterior so brittle that when I tried to cut it with a knife, the whole thing exploded like the Death Star at the end of the first Star Wars movie.

The pasta is incredible. Rigatone is cooked so classically al dente I suspect he’ll get one sent back every night — but it is perfect. It sounds basic but I’ve never really noticed the pepper in this “cheese and pepper” dish before, but here it is so fragrant and consuming it’s like a new spice. He roasts it (I had to ask) in the pan then shocks it with cold water before adding pink peppercorns for “mintiness”. Cacio was already the pasta dish of the 2020s — this is the best version in Auckland.

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They encouraged me to order the Balonzoni Bolognesi and I’m so glad I did. A large ravioli style of spinach pasta wrapped around an intense mix of ricotta and two types of cured pork, it was finished with New Zealand truffles — my favourite local truffle use of the season.

The pasta parcels were works of art: “Each region in Italy has a different carnival mask, Bologna’s represents fat Doctor Balanzone because Bologna is home of the oldest university in the world …” says the chef in the press release. I can picture the baffled PR nodding and writing this all down, but to be honest I love it. When you can get sushi on every corner of every major city in the world, we should prize and protect the places that offer something as unique as this.

The twice-cooked panna cotta with raspberry coulis. Photo / Babiche Martens

“Tiramisu: you know the deal. Actually you don’t”, the dessert menu taunts. It is a wonderful tiramisu, though not a paradigm-breaking one for me. Let me know if you feel differently. But I bet we’ll both love the panna cotta (choose raspberry), a simple, beautiful way to end the meal.

In this unlikely spot we have a restaurant that will become one of Auckland’s most famous, though only if people are willing to find it. If Alla Prossima was in Remuera it would already be full every night, but the word will spread more slowly in this no man’s land just beyond Karangahape Road. Business will really start to hum when summer comes and people hear about the open courtyard out the back, but with food like this, I doubt it will take that long.