Jesse Mulligan’s Auckland Restaurant Review: At Birkenhead Bistro Moxie, Book Your Table & Then Book Your Beef

MOXIE

Cuisine: Bistro

Address: 82 Hinemoa St, Birkenhead

Reservations: Accepted

Phone: (09) 419 9802

Website: Moxierestaurant.co.nz

Drinks: Fully licensed

From the menu: Beef Wellington $79; fried chicken $27; chef’s special snacks $20; beetroot carpaccio $21

Rating: 16/20

I find myself in the unfamiliar position of being well ahead with my restaurant reviews, a refreshing change from the usual weekly scramble to eat dinner, commission photos and write it up in time for Viva’s Monday deadline.

Now I have a different problem: trying to hold the details and sensations of four dozen different plates and drinks in my head, so that I might faithfully report each back to you when the time comes.

Thank goodness for Moxie’s Beef Wellington, a dish of such topographical singularity that I can’t forget it. We don’t have many restaurants whose reputation is built on a single dish but that’s how things are becoming here — they’ve had to put up a note on their website warning people to order ahead and avoid disappointment.

“It’s gone crazy,” said our waitress. “When we first put it on the menu we were selling maybe a dozen a week. Now we’re doing 20 a night.”

I love it. I love the dish and I love that you might go to this restaurant to order one particular thing — a thing that, as far as I’m aware, isn’t available at any other restaurant in the country.

Gosh, they do a good job of it too. Beef fillet cooked in a shell of puff pastry, with a thin layer of mushrooms between the two; it’s a sort of posh steak and mushroom pie. Josh Emett’s cookbook The Recipe contains the full instructions — they are detailed, but only moderately complex, the main trick being the preparation of four savoury crepes that create a moisture barrier between the pastry and the goodies inside. Still, by the time you’ve refrigerated the thing for four hours and brushed it with egg wash and cooked it and rested it and somehow tried to slice it, well, why wouldn’t you just drink a cocktail at Moxie while the chefs do it for you instead?

Josh’s version is borrowed from London’s “King of Pies”, Calum Franklin, and there are a few variations at Moxie that add to the theatre of the dish — the Madeira that Calum stirs into the mushrooms is used to form a jus here, which you pour over the dish yourself. There’s also a parsley puree which gives the dish some welcome brightness, and an indulgent truffle and potato foam in case you were worried the thing wouldn’t be rich enough.

READ: Jervois Steak House Is Exactly As You Remember It

Aside from the Wellington there are various things they do at Moxie that might come off as gimmickry or, worse, desperation at a less popular restaurant but here just seem fun. Like, each Thursday the two chefs hold a “Snack War” — each creating the most delicious small dish in the theme of an agreed cuisine. You pay $20 to taste both, then vote. What sort of monster wouldn’t want to play along with that? And if the quality of said snacks falters a little through missing out on the trial and error that goes into the regular menu, it’s made up for by the energy of what’s on the plate and the theatre that comes with choosing a winner.

There’s that word again: theatre. The way Sean Connolly made a steak tartare tableside at The Grill; the way The Grove’s Cory Campbell gives you a wooden pestle of herbs and edible flowers then freezes them with dry ice; even the Barbie Gaga — a child’s doll draped in sirloin — at Hotpot Duke. Chefs don’t just create food, they create moments.

To sell this stuff you need great staff and Moxie is blessed with those. The restaurant manager had the assured sparkle of someone who’s worked at some of the city’s busiest restaurants but has chosen the comparative serenity of a Birkenhead bistro. She seems to love her job — at one point I turned around and she was behind the bar, alone, shaking a cocktail with a huge smile on her face — and though seeming to love your job can feel like the sort of employment requirement service workers often aren’t paid enough to fully embrace, the joy does appear to be real here.

The okonomiyaki pancake beat the pork katsu in the snack wars — and while neither will have the city’s top Japanese chefs quaking in their boots, they were both pretty tasty. The fried buttermilk chicken was good too, plated with a modestly titled “BBQ sauce” which turned out to be an incredible, spicy AF concoction whose heat I think I recognised as the distinctly searing habanero pepper.

I also loved the beetroot carpaccio which we’d ordered for freshness without realising it came with a generous fist of goat’s cheese, crumbed and deep-fried (yes, that vat of oil seems to get a bit of action). It was actually delicious — indulgent, yes, but a nice, bold rebuff to the fiddly beet and chevre dishes that populate Auckland’s restaurant menus.

Fantastic cocktails, an extensive winelist... unsurprisingly Moxie is busy, almost all the time. You will need to book your table and then book your beef. If that sounds like too much commitment then wait until summer, when an appealing outdoor area will come into play and form a fresh-air oasis away from the city smog.