NUUNA
Cuisine: Asian fusion
Address: 12 Jellicoe St, Wynyard Quarter
Phone: (09) 969 6986
Website: Nuuna.co.nz
Drinks: Fully licensed
Reservations: Accepted
From the menu: Scallop leaf wrap $9, papaya salad $23, salmon taco $20, summer spring roll $16, shaking beef $27
Rating: 15/20
Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12
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Advertise with NZME.It took longer to find a car park than it did to eat dinner at this Asian fusion restaurant, found a couple of doors down from Baduzzi in Wynyard Quarter. The staff are nice but they deliver your food at such a rate you can barely take a breath. That must be helpful if you have tickets to the theatre but we’d booked a babysitter and dinner at Nuuna was the evening’s sole planned entertainment. We arrived at 7pm and left at 7.30, having enjoyed five courses but not finished our first drink.
That drink was a glass of bubbles – a good way of testing how seriously a casual restaurant takes its wine service. I hadn’t come across the Hunter’s Miru Miru Brut before but it sits in a unique price bracket halfway between Deutz and more premium local brands like Quartz Reef. Sadly it arrived at our table warm enough that there wasn’t even condensation on the side of the glass, so of course it tasted terrible.
We brought this to the attention of our server who found a new bottle from the back of the fridge and promised to try again. Unfortunately while removing the full champagne flutes she tilted one of them, which spilled over the table and into my wife’s lap. She made no attempt to clean this up so we did it ourselves with the few paper napkins we had available, and shortly afterwards the cold bubbles arrived, with no apology or further attention to the now sticky table surface.
This probably won’t happen to you, but it should give you a good indication of the priorities here. She wasn’t rude, this waitress, it just seemed like she was here to focus on the food (she waited at attention while we looked at the menu and didn’t approach the table until we signalled her, for example). That’s fine in suburban speciality restaurants I suppose but Jellicoe St is a bit of a shopfront for Auckland and even if you aren’t serving cutting-edge cuisine I think you still need to remember that your diners are either here on holiday or pretending they’re here on holiday. That’s all I’ll say about the service except that a sign on the wall says they welcome dogs, so fill your boots.
We loved the scallops, served plump and hot on a perilla leaf with fried shallot and a pretty wicked jammy fish sauce called kho quet. Shaking beef featured big chunks of tender meat, glazed in dark sauce and served with capsicums and greens. The summer spring rolls were big cylinders two inches thick, cut into segments and stuffed with rice noodles, fresh greens and allegedly some pork and prawn though these were hard to spot. All of the dishes were heaped with herbs – mint and Vietnamese basil in particular – creating a light freshness that is rare and welcome in any restaurant.
Less successful were the salmon tacos – deep-fried and filled with pretty anonymous fish and an avocado puree – and the green papaya salad, sliced so thick it was almost julienned and with not enough dressing of any kind for us to maintain interest in eating it.
I would never have known Nuuna existed if it weren’t for an Instagram post by Peter Gordon, who apparently eats there all the time (I love it when chefs plug restaurants – Al Brown is particularly generous in promoting places he likes). The room is light and beautifully decorated and could be a real destination restaurant I think, especially as the food is mostly good. There’s a bar and all sorts of food and drink specials and plenty of tables to fit people in, including some out on the street (it was cold with those big doors open when we visited but with the last cold snap of spring now hopefully gone that’s unlikely to affect you for the next few months). The playlist is a bit dire – The Pina Colada song, that sort of thing – but, with a few tweaks, every night could feel like a party.
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I wasn’t ready to call it a night so we strolled over to Onemata, the glassy and beautiful restaurant on the ground floor of the Park Hyatt hotel. If you haven’t been in you should treat yourself just to enjoy the incredible interiors and views over the water towards the city. We shared a glass of wine from a list created by Suraj GC, New Zealand’s sommelier of the year, alongside a pistachio cake which was good enough to justify the visit (if not challenging Gareth Stewart’s champion version of the same at Advieh). This part of Auckland is looking very good, with some perfect dining options as long as you choose the right one for the right occasion.
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