Auckland Restaurant Review: Wine Bar Beau Serves Fantastic Food That Is Better Than It Needs To Be

BEAU

Cuisine: Bistro and wine bar

Phone: (09) 218 5137

Address: 265 Ponsonby Rd, Three Lamps

Reservations: For large groups accepted

Drinks: Fully licensed

From the menu: Oyster mushroom po boy $14; tomato salad $30; roast cabbage $34; beef tartarem $29; prawn mole $42

Rating: 18/20

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.

“I now have 30 people working for me!” the bemused owner Diva Giles told me when I visited recently. She launched the adjoining deli in May partly as a way to give more hours to the staff she already had and the new business model seems to be working for everyone. There were all sorts of customers in that night but on a second visit – late afternoon wines in the sun – I was the odd one out in a narrow demographic of well-spoken women in their seventh decade. As an RNZ presenter these are my people of course, but they’re an interesting contrast with the staff, who tend to be very hip (I’m sure they’d use a different word) women in their mid-twenties.

So there you are sitting in what could be the front row of a Writer’s Festival event but you’re bathing in sunshine (they have heaters outside for when the temperature drops) and there’s a great winelist in front of you and a skilled waitress at your side who knows that list inside out. This would be a good enough place to recommend even if the food wasn’t great, but it is.

I’ve said some hurtful things in this column about the flavourlessness of heirloom tomatoes and I still don’t think many people would choose to eat one like an apple but I am forced, after eating Beau’s version, to conclude that there are ways of extracting flavour out of this fruit (it has seeds, look it up). A sprinkle of salt and pepper, some balsamic vinegar, a lash of olive oil and the taste of summer really comes through, helped by some picked basil leaves (their scent contributing even more than their flavour) and stracciatella, the thinking man’s burrata, adding creamy richness to each bite.

Chef and co-owner Logan Birch offers a fairly classic version of steak tartare, though in his one the egg yolk is broken and mixed through before being sent out, meaning the beef is already saucy when it arrives at your table, accompanied by what look like house-fried kettle chips to help you transport the lush chopped meat into your mouth.

It would also be completely possible to eat well here as a vegetarian and, the ultimate compliment, possible to eat a vegetarian meal here and not even notice that you had. You’d be hard-pressed to find a tastier version of a slider than Beau’s Po Boy, in which a battered oyster mushroom is the star ingredient, seasoned with a Japanese spice mix and served fairly simply with lettuce, pickle and a “sherry miso mayo”.

The cabbage dish was my favourite of them all. Pan-roasted and finished with butter (“treated almost like a piece of meat”, according to the chef), it was soft to the bite but maintained enough of its structure to be interesting, aside from being a great base for some other really exciting ingredients. The most impressive was a tonnato, mostly used in Italy alongside veal but working particularly well in this vegetable – well, okay, pescatarian – dish. To make it they confit-cook offcuts from the restaurant’s popular tuna ceviche and, as with all the best kitchen sustainability stories, it tastes so wonderful you can scarcely believe it’s been created as a waste-saving measure.

What else is in this beautiful dish? It’s difficult to isolate individual ingredients when you’re eating them but there’s a dark crumb scattered over the cabbage apparently made from pickled walnuts and pangrattato (it reminded me of a walnut/breadcrumb tarator I learnt to make at a cooking school in London and for the next five years heaped over almost everything) and finished with some bright shavings of cured egg yolk.

Don’t let that put you off asking questions yourself, particularly about the drinks. There are so many good restaurants where the winelist feels like an obligation or afterthought – where you see the same half-dozen wineries and varietals you’ll find anywhere else. At Beau, their wines – from Aotearoa and around the world – are a real point of pride; take the opportunity to let them introduce you to something beautiful you might otherwise have never discovered.

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