RHU
Cuisine: Modern bistro
Address: 235 Parnell Rd, Parnell
Phone: 022 059 1967
Drinks: Fully licensed
Reservations: Accepted
From the menu: Kingfish $29; tuna $29; mushroom skewers $24; congee $29; salmon $45; beef sando $30; yoghurt ice cream $18; kiwifruit and fennel $18
Rating: 19/20
Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12
“This is the last of the season,” said our chef as he placed our starter in front of us.
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Advertise with NZME.But he wasn’t talking about some obscure winter vegetable on the verge of going to seed. He was talking about a plate of tuna.
“At this time of year, our guy goes out on his boat for seven or eight hours and comes back with just one fish,” he continued. “So enjoy it!”
In my life I’ve never heard a chef refer to the seasonality of fish. Oysters, sure, but tuna?
These moments of surprise and delight are common at Rhu, a Parnell space in what was Pasture’s test kitchen and bakery Alpha. As at the best fine-dining restaurants, every ingredient at this more casual eatery has a long story (of origin and of preparation), but it’s also the same story over and over again: they grabbed the best piece of produce they could find then set about expressing its unique flavour on a plate using whatever tools and techniques they could possibly access. In charge of it all is Tushar Grover, who honed his skills at Pasture, a boy genius who might be my chef of the year.
“Let me know if you ever want to come for breakfast - I can get you in,” he said at one point. I thought he was joking but apparently it’s been standing room only each morning since they opened, with such a huge response from locals they eventually decided to offer dinners too. Nobody can be sleeping much - even the sommelier shows up early to run coffee orders - and in between shifts they comb through local parks and reserves for forage-able ingredients. A recent windfall at the Domain saw them come home with bucketloads of pure fennel pollen: an ingredient that my quick research tells me would have cost them around $2000/kg to buy online.
The dining room is a glassy and sometimes chilly space - the crowd a mixture of Parnell couples and young people drawn in by TikTok on the night we visited. Sunday is Rhu’s busiest evening service, and though bookings are welcome on other nights I’d be surprised if they couldn’t find a table for a walk-in.
Once seated, you’ll be rewarded with one of the most delicious and imaginative meals you’ve ever eaten. Pasture left behind their Girovap - a $10,000 machine that takes liquid and transforms it in various molecular ways, creating an end product that is recognisable yet somehow magical. Kingfish is served with vanilla, a distinctively sweet flavour which, after girovapping, becomes more intense but less cloying (the machine is particularly good at this - I remember a “banana wine” Pasture chef Ed Verner used to do that retained the essence of banana but removed the overwhelming sweet pungency that makes it an enemy in desserts).
Salmon was served with a butter-based sauce and that combo should really have been a bit rich but it worked, helped with a little molecular citrus. I asked the chef about it.
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Advertise with NZME.“My finger lime guy said ‘I have some Rangpur limes, do you want them?’. I said ‘yeah!’. I hadn’t seen them since India. We created a fermented paste using the peels, then distilled the rest and used the juice as a base for the emulsification of our sauce.”
I nodded slowly and tasted it again. You could never guess at any of those techniques if you weren’t told, but you don’t need to know about them to enjoy the results: citrus on the tongue without the acidity, countering the fatty mouthfeel of the main ingredients. Good food is like good poetry - more information can help you decode it, but it communicates its beauty before it’s understood.
A comparatively simple mushroom dish was, I think, my favourite. I love the mushroom arms race in Auckland - in a few years it’s gone from a vegetable you’d barely find on a menu to a regular star player. It’s easy to make shiitakes meaty but there’s something particularly special about the common field variety, skewered here and roasted into savoury intensity, the skins and stalks used to flavour a stock that is whipped into a hollandaise-style sauce with egg and butter. This is a trick chef Tushar uses often - taking a component that would otherwise be heavy but whipping enough air into it that it tricks your senses through its actual physical lightness.
And then there is a beef “sando”, which is a dish of pure comfort and enjoyment. “I realised that the reason Chinese dumplings taste so good is that they use pork, even if they sometimes don’t tell you,” said Tushar. “So I’ve added pork to my beef, but here I am telling you about it.” It came in impossibly soft milk bun-style white bread, with a nasturtium slaw. We ate it with happy gusto.
Wine is the drink of choice here and there are some great options. I strongly recommend the unexpected Nero D’Avola bubbles from Australia they have on the list, and the French sauvignon blend is one the best food wines I’ve ever tasted. Drink it alongside the mushrooms and enjoy one of the best wine matches in Auckland eating history.
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