Auckland Restaurant Review: Otto Serves Seasonal & Redemptive Italian Food On Karangahape Road

OTTO

Cuisine: Italian

Phone: (09) 394 1555

Address: 375 Karangahape Rd, central city

Drinks: Fully licensed

Bookings: Accepted

From the menu: Zucchini fritti $8; burrata $18; vegetarian lasagne $28; lamb maltagliati $28

Rating: 18/20

Otto is the new name of Cotto, the restaurant we all fell in love with in 2017 when we learnt that, as a main-course ingredient, handmade pasta could be both delicious and cheap. Cotto was owned by a collective but one member of that group turned out, according to reporting in The Spinoff, to be a bad egg, leaving his partners with hefty debts and angry, unpaid employees. A few weeks later the remaining members of the group dusted themselves off and relaunched the restaurant as “Otto”. The C-word hasn’t been seen on K Rd since.

I’d eaten at Cotto plenty but was delighted to sit somewhere new this time – on a narrow balcony that faces west towards the motorway and some crumby apartment blocks. This view might sound bleak but it’s also the only place on K Rd to watch the sunset, and we really enjoyed our little spot. If you wanted to look at olive groves you could drive out to Bracu – I think it’s kind of thrilling to drink wine and watch other people fight rush-hour traffic.

There’ve been some minor changes on the menu but it is mostly the sort of stuff that made the restaurant famous in the first place: handmade pasta with seasonal ingredients. That meant a bit of corn and a lot of courgette when I was there, though the menu was due to change over to autumn flavours shortly afterwards (this is unavoidable sometimes, though it makes me sad to write about dishes you won’t get to eat for another nine months).

My wife, who usually avoids deep-fried food like a coeliac avoids Weet-Bix, seemed unusually interested in the zucchini fritti, which I’d pictured as heavy fritters but turned out to be the lightest of dishes. Long strips, tempura-fried and piled together – snakes on a plate – with a lemon wedge and nothing else. I love this confidence from the kitchen – no need for kimchi mayo or a chipotle creme fraiche when you want the produce to star.

I’m not excited by seeing burrata on the menu – the enjoyment never seems to pay for the indulgence, for me. But it must have been opposites day because we ordered it and it was great – the cheese perhaps a little colder than I would have wanted it but with plenty else to recommend this dish: a bright green, herby sauce along with fresh mint and basil leaves and just enough good capers that you’d occasionally get a hit of one in a mouthful.

Meanwhile, the drinks were going down well. I’ve recently connected my early morning dustiness to the vast quantities of gin I consumed the night before – a promising area of new research scientists should really look into – so I’ve been going a little easier on the cocktails lately and replaced them with virtually alcohol-free options, like wine. Whatever you’re in the mood for, Otto is rightly proud of its drinks list – we took some champagne (cold and bubbly) and then moved on to some European options by the glass. They’re so different to the New Zealand wines we’re used to, and it’s a nice way to make an Italian meal feel even more exotic.

The vegetarian lasagne works very well (this was our third zucchini-based dish so we were admittedly starting to feel a bit over it) but the best plate of all was lamb shoulder, with just enough meat in the ragu, which was tossed through a spinach maltagliati (pasta offcuts, mostly wide ribbons) and topped with my favourite specialty Italian ingredient: ricotta salata. A salted, intensified version of traditional ricotta, I think of it as a cross between feta and parmigiano – a snowy white, salty cheese grated over the top of pasta. In this dish the spicy lamb sauce is so intense, and the pasta so soft that a sharp hit of the ricotta is just perfect. There’s not too much of anything, and just enough of everything.

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