Auckland Restaurant Review: Sidart’s Casual Italian Pivot Isn’t So Casual

SIDART

Cuisine: Bistro

Address: 283 Ponsonby Rd, Ponsonby, Auckland

Phone: (09) 360 2122

From the menu: Five courses $150pp

Drinks: Fully licensed

Rating: 17/20

Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12 Disappointing, give it a miss. 13-15 Good, give it a go. 16-18 Great, plan a visit. 19-20 Outstanding, don’t delay.

When I received a press release announcing that my beloved Sidart was converting from fine dining to “casual Italian”, I felt a little sad. My wife and I fell in love (again) over dinners in that beautiful Three Lamps restaurant — it was one of the few places in Auckland that put the “special” into special occasion. It was also — even after Sid Sahrawat sold the place to his protege Lesley Chandra — a restaurant that gave you a glimpse of the future. It pushed the limits of ingredients so hard you were almost watching a show — like WoW, but you could eat the garments.

I needn’t have worried. Sidart has barely changed. The white tablecloths are gone, but I looked really hard and found little sign of the “simplicity, warmth and communal spirit” the recent announcement promised. The tasting menu, surely the best way to enjoy a chef’s vision, features dishes that are complex, playful and definitely not for sharing — all the stuff we loved about Sidart in the first place.

I think most of us read “casual” as “cheaper”, but I’m afraid that isn’t the case here. Our menu cost $150 a head — I can’t think of many places where you drop $300 before even picking up the wine list — and took just 59 minutes from start to finish (it’s possible the chef, a dad, was moving things along because I was eating with my young daughter, but this was never mentioned).

The wait staff are strong, though perhaps a slight step down from the long line of waiters and sommeliers that made this restaurant famous. Nobody opens the sliding door for you anymore, we were accidentally given a food menu instead of a wine list and they were a little slow to offer drinks. They were nice, with some pretty good training, but not threatening to win any service awards this year.

The food, though, is out-of-control good. It begins with three incredible “snacks” — a savoury nduja-flavoured madeleine with gorgonzola cream and tomato oil, the world’s fanciest lasagne toppa and a macaron, also savoury and also delicious: with mozzarella-basil cream and tomato water meringue, it is Sidart’s tribute to a Caprese salad (my only problem was the macaron’s dimensions: about 7cm from top to bottom while the average human mouth, when open, gets to only 5.5cm).

Next came crudo — Italian in theory, though every restaurant in town does a version. This is a pretty precise one — I saw a chef carefully lifting off a ring mould to create a colourful circle of fish (tarakihi, unusually, but it worked) cured in salt and mandarin oil and served up with other bright flavours like mandarin granita and tartare sauce.

The ravioli — the night’s most Italian dish — was a beautiful construction, filled with confit duck meat, sweetened with date, textured with walnut and topped with a lovely disc of compressed butternut pumpkin. A grana padano foam supplied the elusive “fifth taste”.

One mildly critical observation is that the menu wasn’t exactly bursting with spring. We visited in late September — when even Woolworths was selling asparagus — but aside from a wonderful courgette dish there wasn’t much green on the plate. Pumpkin, walnut, celeriac, leek — this stuff is all pretty wintry. There were those flavours of basil and tomato in one dish — but no sign of the raw ingredients that provided them.

Looking over the website for some info I see it has now — four weeks after the relaunch — removed the word “casual” from its description of what Sidart is, so maybe that was always a bone of contention. With the press release now out of date, what can you expect from the new Sidart? One of Auckland’s best chefs, creating very elevated bistro food in an upmarket dining room with stunning views of the city. A chipper team of staff serving great drinks to happy customers. And a final bill more suited to someone with a term deposit than a mortgage.

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