Auckland Restaurant Review: Trivet, At The JW Marriot, Is Ready To Step Into The Spotlight

TRIVET

Cuisine: Modern bistro

Address: 22 Albert St, central city

Phone: (09) 912 3020

Website: Trivetdining.co.nz

Drinks: Fully licensed

Bookings: Accepted

From the menu: Pāua vol au vent $25; greenshell mussels $22; flatbread $12; salmon oka $23; steak frite $42; kūmara chips $34; oyster mushrooms $23

Rating: 18/20

I’m never embarrassed eating alone, but perhaps I should be. Free of social guardrails I lose my bearings when ordering food and drink and end up with way too much of each. Mid-meal I can be seen chatting loudly and chummily to the poor waiter about this and that then asking him to box it all up so I can take the substantial leftovers home with me. There is no greater contrast between the Jesse who walks in, sober and cock-a-hoop, and the Jesse who leaves, emotional and defeated. Sitting at the table next to me must have been like watching that Mike Tyson fight.

“Ah … so you’re ordering all of those things and then you would also like two main courses?” asked my waiter at Trivet. There was no trace of judgment in his voice, he just wanted to be sure of what he thought he’d heard.

“And a fino sherry please,” I said, gulping the last of the vermouth as he repeated my order back to me.

It is a good menu: long and interesting if perhaps running out of a little steam by the time you reach the “grilled chicken breast” at the end. Many of the small plates seem too good not to order, and the cocktails are pretty irresistible too.

Found on an unexpected corner up Albert St, Trivet is the sort of place you’re unlikely to stumble upon unless you work at ANZ or have a room at the JW Marriot (Trivet is on the ground floor), or the other hotels or apartment blocks that are springing up in the area. At some point, the City Rail Link will open and this intersection will presumably turn into Piccadilly Circus.

Until then the Trivet team are holding on optimistically, waiting for the Christmas rush.

“We had 100 in on Friday,” the restaurant manager said to me. “We were like ‘yes, this is more like it’.”

“In most restaurants, the Christmas season seems to come up too quickly,” said chef Uelese (Wallace) Mua. “But here we can’t wait for it to get started.”

A lot of places are slow right now but it’s perhaps more obvious here in this sparkly-new dining room which must be almost the size of Amano. But the diners who have made it are happy. The service team is highly polished, and the only feedback I have about that is when you walk in you’re obscured from the restaurant by a partition wall, so it’s possible nobody will see you for some time. That’s what happened with me (is it weird that I thought about grabbing the iPad from the front counter and running for it?) but perhaps there is a system and I just got unlucky. I returned to that lobby area to pay my bill at the end but it turns out they’re starting a new trend and bringing it to your table. Shout out to the guy who emailed my Q and A column recently to ask why this doesn’t happen more often.

“Chef Wallace” cooks bistro food informed by his career in France but influenced by his roots in the Pacific. The pāua vol au vent is great! Beautiful curls of pāua on a vehicle of puff pastry which, when you bite into it, oozes dark green palusami – cooked down taro leaves with coconut cream and one of the many ways Samoa is represented on the menu.

Coconut cream features a lot but not annoyingly so. Micro-coriander features a lot, sometimes annoyingly so. I had it in three different dishes and thought I was being punked when it showed up on my dessert but I forgave them when they brought out a young guy who’d designed the dish based on something he once ate that was so good it made him decide to become a chef. His version is just beautiful, liquorice ice cream black and impossibly smooth with passionfruit-mango puree and shards of macadamia nut adding dry texture to the cold and silky main event.

That ice cream was a preview of the summer menu and – sorry, it happens – some of what I ate won’t be available by the time you eat here. But look out for the beautiful bavette steak – thin, rare and juicy and pre-cut American style before it gets to your table. The vegetarian choices – wedges of kūmara in a butter chicken-style gravy and a heap of beautiful truffled, garlicked mushrooms – make meat-free eating easy and I loved the old-school bowl of greenshell mussels, steamed open and heaped with spicy chorizo and loads of saffron butter with a little aniseed pastis in the mix. They made me order the flatbread and I didn’t regret it – puffy, light and beautiful, it comes with Uelese’s toasty coconut butter which would take another 800 words to properly describe, but it’s unmissable.

If you’re still not sure, start with lunch. The seats in the window are just lovely, with a glass ceiling creating a conservatory effect and a surprising amount of greenery dominating the view. Trivet’s staff may not yet feel like they’re in the middle of it all, but momentum is shifting in their direction.

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