MADAME SOCIAL
Cuisine: Asian fusion
Address: Cnr West & Customs Quay, Ahuriri, Napier
Phone: (06) 650 2367
Reservations: Accepted
Drinks: Fully licensed
From the menu: “Trust the Chef” – $69pp
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,
It’s been a busy month for Jesse Inc, flying around the country trying to subsidise the new 7pm-sized gap in my income by hosting anything that moves.
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Advertise with NZME.“Will you need an MC for that?” I can be heard asking strangers, several times a day.
“Not really, it’s just a garage sale” was one recent reply, but occasionally the answer is ‘yes!’ and so I find myself again sitting under a heat pump in a Christchurch hotel, waiting for my time on the call sheet to roll around then heading to the venue and, eventually, bounding up on to stage to lend my dubious celebrity energy to the latest glittering event.
It’s a good way of meeting real people. At least, real people with enough drive and talent to win trophies. At the Hospitality Awards, I chatted to a certain Steve and Sarah, whose Market Street Bar and Eatery in Napier was that night named best bar in New Zealand.
“You should visit our restaurant in Napier,” reckoned Sarah.
And so the following week, in Hawke’s Bay on another corporate errand, that’s what I did.
Madame Social is a huge, modern waterfront restaurant, on a corner site, in a quiet part of Ahuriri. Well, it was quiet until these guys showed up and filled the place with grateful, tipsy carousers. We’d booked early but a high-powered local friend told me he couldn’t get a table that night for love nor money (he’s a resourceful man and I feel sure he offered large amounts of both).
We sat among a pleasantly mixed crowd – a blue-collar Tinder date on one side, a group of high school friends on the other. There were boomers a-plenty, of course (those generous term-deposit returns have to be spent somewhere) and a 50th birthday function which meant Gen X was there in some numbers too.
What sort of cuisine can draw in such a diverse demographic? Why, of course it’s Asian fusion, a genre that peaked in Auckland (sorry Napier) 10 years ago but is still the go-to for groups of people looking for crowd-pleasing grub. If the restaurant isn’t great it’ll likely still be good enough (who can stuff up fried rice?) but for an ambitious chef there is room to excel when you’re riffing on the combined cuisines of 2.7 billion people.
They have a very good chef here but before we get to her let’s celebrate the winelist. It was hard to find a glass of anything priced at more than $15 and everything was proudly regional – you felt as though you were truly in vineyard country and that’s a pretty good feeling; good on the owners for embracing and showcasing local producers. It was harder to spot Hawke’s Bay ingredients on the food menu but the area is a fruit bowl so I don’t doubt the fresh vegetables and fragrant herbs that featured throughout were grown a stone’s throw away.
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We got to try plenty by ordering the “trust the chef” option, though I reckon she makes some imperfect choices here. From a list of dumplings and bao she served us the deep-fried “wonton” filled with brisket; it was nice but very heavy, and there was steak to come. From the starter menu, the wings and the calamari looked good but we were served prawns two ways – first as crackers then in a Chinese-style toastie. The latter was admittedly fantastic – a spiced prawn cream between two pieces of toasted white bread, chopped into pickable pieces.
I’d seen fried rice on the menu and really hoped I’d get some – once you’ve thought about this dish it’s a sad injustice if you don’t get to eat it. In fact, we got more than enough to go around – three huge mountains of the stuff, with bacon, chilli and xo sauce combining irresistibly to keep you eating long after you were full.
A bang bang chicken salad was very spicy and very fresh: mint lifted up the whole thing up while a black vinegar dressing contributed a sweet acidity. Then that charred hangar steak arrived, sliced with seasonal Brussels sprouts and multi-sauces but I was a beaten man, collapsing against the back of the booth and praying there would be no dessert.
I’m going to pretend there was no dessert because it was a shocker – the first time I can remember seeing a dinner companion eject food from their mouth in a restaurant (weirdly, a couple of days later I had another companion do it at another restaurant; I’ve changed my brand of aftershave just in case I’m contributing to the problem). White chocolate, citrus syrup and loads of sesame oil – we’ll write that one off as a failed experiment.
Service is friendly but they’ll need a few weeks of training not to, say, look blankly when somebody asks for cutlery. The waiters have quite a tricky job of refilling wine and water bottles given the “C” shape of the booths but they’ll work it out; likewise the management of shared plates and how to subdivide limited tabletop real estate during a seven-course tasting menu.
Do the locals care about these quibbles? No, they do not. And nor should they.
“We moved down from Auckland and chose the quiet life and that’s fine,” a real person told me later in the weekend. “But when you actually want to do something that feels like you’re in a city, a place like this is brilliant.”
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Sage In Hamilton Serves Smashingly Good Food. And there’s no place like your hometown, argues Jesse Mulligan.
Alla Prossima Is The Auckland Restaurant Jesse Mulligan Has Been Waiting For. Serving regional Italian in a quirky room.
