Jesse Mulligan Restaurant Review: The Hospo Talent Runs Deep at Koji In Wellington

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By Jesse Mulligan

Tuesday Sep. 10, 2024

Viva

Koji's chicken and prawn dumplings with sesame, black vinegar, soy and chilli.

KOJI

Cuisine: Asian fusion

Address: 12 Marjoribanks St, Wellington

Phone: (04) 213 7331

Drinks: Fully licensed

Reservations: Accepted

Food: “Just Feed Me” $85pp

Rating: 19/20

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.

This is the sort of Wellington restaurant I’ve been longing for. A beautiful, glowing room offering respite from the rain outside, Koji is at the bottom of Marjoribanks St (technically pronounced “Marshbanks” but only a psychopath would do so with a straight face) in what has become a great little row of restaurants – even better if you include the fantastic Capitol on the corner.

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While my visit to one of the eateries further up was a mixed bag earlier this year, at Koji things were perfect from the get-go (well, almost perfect – I called twice to tell them we’d be late but the phone rang out both times). The service is as good as anywhere I’ve visited in New Zealand, our waiter deflecting the inevitable banter of a group dinner with grace and confidence. It’s a delicate skill, having the self-assurance to assert yourself when necessary but being able to swallow your ego when a diner wants the talking stick – you probably can’t train for it but the owners are obviously good at spotting it in an interview.

The bar at Koji, Wellington. Photo / Luke Owen Smith

There were six of us and, with the waiter strongly suggesting we choose the “just feed me” option, we were happy to take his advice. He upsold us some oysters but not gratuitously so – one per person took the total food spend to just under $100 a head. That’s an entree, main and side in any upmarket restaurant but at Koji it gets you 10 different dishes, every one of them uniquely delicious.

I mean unless you’re doing a Bluff-and-Moet marathon at Soul Bar, who needs more than one oyster anyway? It is the original degustation-size plate, offered raw or tempura or “roasted” here. I chose the latter and it was wonderful: it was hot for sure but still delicate (i.e. it hadn’t turned into that sort of chickeny consistency you can get when you overdo the baking). With a little cold kimchi juice, it was a perfect appetite-whetter ahead of the main event.

Doughnuts with a yellow curry sauce. Photo / Luke Owen Smith

Who owns the big yuzu tree in Wellington? There is enough of this special Japanese fruit on the menu that they must have a very reliable supplier. My cocktail was cold and perfectly balanced – the citrus providing great balance to the off-dry sake, with a couple of extra ingredients for interest.

There is pure sake on the menu too, including a local producer I’ll have to look up, but the food is less strictly Japanese than you might expect. A couple of dishes feature distinctly Chinese elements for example, and what I loved most about Koji was that they’re doing – I try not to use this word every week but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid – fusion in a controlled and visionary way. Every dish has been taste-tested and experimented on until the flavours could not possibly be any bigger. There isn’t a dud on the menu – and it’s just as hard to find a favourite.

Kingfish sashimi from Koji. Photo / Amber-Jayne Bain

Holy smoke. Little puffy doughnuts filled with braised beef on a “yellow curry” sauce infused with Kewpie mayo. Perfectly steamed dumplings filled with chicken and prawn and served with a little emulsification of sesame, black vinegar, soy and chilli. Kingfish sashimi, of course, but this time dressed with truffle oil. Eggplant halved and spread with miso paste then grilled; blanketed and blackened with hundreds of tiny nori strands.

A lamb neck – neck! – was so good, all that bobbing up and down to eat grass creating the sort of muscle fibre that breaks down beautifully with slow cooking. I could have used a knife to cut it up but a spoon eventually did the trick, scooping out a big piece of Hibachi-scorched (but still medium rare) meat rubbed with a Szechuan paste I haven’t come across before, and cooled with a dollop of cumin yoghurt. Okay, this was my favourite.

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It feels like they have made a real choice to do things differently here. Take a look at their website, which breaks the mould in a beautifully unexpected way. The front page has no close-up shots of food – none of the usually compulsory pics of wine glasses and dark wood panelling. Almost every other restaurant’s online presence is moody (or features no photography at all, just design work) but Koji’s photography is all taken outside, in the sunshine. On one page three happy staff members pose in front of vines, sea and sky, celebrating where their produce has come from.

It’s obviously the restaurant’s biggest stars who got the website modelling jobs but the fact that I couldn’t spot any of them on the floor when we visited, and that things were still largely perfect, suggests that as with any truly great team, the talent runs deep here.