FIRST MATES, LAST LAUGH
Cuisine: Bistro
Address: 121 Westhaven Drive, Westhaven
Drinks: Fully licensed
Reservations: Accepted
From the menu: Tuna taquitos $18; prawn taquitos $18; kingfish ceviche $22; eggplant $14; lamb chops $49.50; spicy salmon $38
Rating: 18/20
Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12 Disappointing, give it a miss. 13-15 Good,
Auckland’s coastline measures at least 3000km (look it up) but how many seaside restaurants do we have? Well, I guess it depends on your definition of “seaside,” but you get my drift. There’s something special about eating a fish right next to the briny deep from which it was plucked, and I don’t feel we have nearly enough opportunities to do so.
Enter First Mates, Last Laugh, which is not an improv comedy troupe trained by pirates but a new restaurant so close to the sea you can almost smell it. You park your car somewhere nearby or, in my case, your Uber drops you off somewhere not at all nearby, then enjoy a moonlit stroll along an only slightly murdery boardwalk to a glowing house of fun, warmed by the love and laughter of people who’ve been drinking there since lunchtime.
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The restaurant — both cosy and stylishly decorated — has been opened by Judith Tabron, surely the best and most experienced restaurateur in the city. There is nothing she doesn’t know about this game, and probably nothing I can tell her about her restaurant that she doesn’t already know. Even the very best owners get nervous when a reviewer shows up, but I get the impression that for her it is just a bit of sport.
“I was thinking about perhaps getting the fish burger,” I offered.
“You’re not getting the fish burger!” she informed me, then nodded toward a woman at another table. “She got the fish burger. Was it good?!”
Yes, the poor woman confirmed uncertainly.
“It’s good. So order something else.”
Fine with me. A burger’s not a dish that tells you a lot about a kitchen, was, I think, her point, and I already knew this, but it’s really hard not to order one when you’re hungry. Like a naughty child, a restaurant critic is always secretly pleased to have somebody setting boundaries.
My wife was sitting by herself when I arrived. She’d been there alone for about 15 minutes (long story, not worth it) and had sadly been mostly ignored, but as you can imagine, that changed pretty quickly when I showed up.
In FM,LL’s defence, they were hugely busy and we had really pressed them for a table, so Victoria’s experience might not reflect their usual level of commitment to the lone diner. I can confirm that the (mostly) women running the floor were for the rest of the night supremely competent, charming, and in control of everything. In fact, with Judith in the mix, I think it’s the best service team I’ve come across outside of fine dining.
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Advertise with NZME.Judith wasn’t on the floor for much longer. “These days I’m too old to go longer than 12 hours,” said the woman whose CV goes back to Newmarket’s Ramses in the 1980s, though she looks as young as ever. She departed home through the kitchen, but life went on smoothly in the dining room. This is a sparklingly good restaurant, and I’m not surprised it’s so busy.
The menu has plenty of seafood, plus a few red meat dishes and some lovely vegetarian sides, including a smashing half eggplant. These days you can’t eat out without being offered ceviche or a close variant, and they’ve doubled down here with a sashimi menu and five other dishes centred around raw or cured fish.
They’re all great, and you should order a couple of the “taquitos”: deep-fried wonton pastries, puffy and crunchy, wrapped around some sublimely good fillings. Cold prawn with jalapeno/avocado and chopped tuna flavoured with a Japanese-style dressing plus mayo and caviar are both brilliant orders. The kingfish ceviche is also wonderful.
But we loved our mains, too. A restaurateur told me recently he’d stopped doing lamb cutlets because he couldn’t make them work at less than $50 a dish — a threshold he was not willing to cross. Here they cost $49.50 and are fantastic — tender and just unbelievably juicy. They’re served with a green herby aji verde sauce and roast carrots, and I never order lamb but was glad I did. Interestingly they’re listed as “lamb chops” on the menu which might be underselling them somewhat.
The star of the show, though, was the salmon, which is very spicy but incredibly moreish too. They’re familiar Thai flavours — coconut, red chilli, and makrut lime — but for some reason it just really did it for me, partly I think because it will blow the socks off many of the restaurant’s regulars, and I totally respect the chef for going there. It’s a beautiful thing even to look at — a bright Thai curry sauce carpeting the salmon fillet, and creating vivid splashes of red in the coconut cream that surrounds the dish.
After dinner, our server, a fantastic character with the look and comic timing of a young Jane Lynch, toured us past the icecream bar (it’ll make more sense in summer) and a curtained selfie booth which wasn’t operating but has apparently been a huge hit. Why not? Who said restaurants can’t be a bit of fun? And to be honest, looking around the room, it’d be a shame if these outfits and faces weren’t shared as widely as possible.
From dining out editor Jesse Mulligan.
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