Jesse Mulligan’s Auckland Restaurant Review: Esther Is A Bastion Of Old-School Confidence & New Flavours

ESTHER

Cuisine: Bistro

Address: 4 Viaduct Harbour Ave, CBD

Reservations: Accepted

Phone: (09) 379 9123

Website: Estherrestaurant.com

Drinks: Fully licensed

From the menu: Puff bread $10; green devilled eggs $24; baked saganaki cheese $30; scallops $38; pig head terrine $32; saffron linguine $29; retired dairy cow T-bone $170.

Rating: 19/20

It was always good, but Sean Connolly’s Esther is now among Auckland’s great restaurants.

It’s easy to forget about it here, in this QT Hotel lobby, in a part of the waterfront travelled only by apartment owners and employees of certain infrastructural heavyweights. It is not a cool part of town, unless you measure coolness by inverse proximity to the Genesis head office, and yet I was pleased to be surrounded by people who must only be coming here because they love the place. It is a big space, but it was full, in a lightning storm.

We’ll get to the food but a big part of Esther’s appeal is the people who work there. They have this old-school confidence that reminds you of our best restaurants past and present — Clooney, The Grove, The French Cafe — where the staff are both technically perfect but also personality plus.

It’s a difficult thing to get right, making yourself a memorable part of somebody’s evening without breaching the complex social boundary between employee and paying customer, but they manage it beautifully here while always getting the basics right (well, almost always — at one point they topped up our wine glasses with the wrong bottle but it was a more expensive wine, so can you really say we lost out on the deal?).

We were seated at the “rock star table”, a little two-seater tucked out of sight from the rest of the dining room. Given that my personal fan base is mostly old ladies who send me knitted gifts, the security precautions were perhaps unnecessary, but I appreciated being treated like somebody who just wanted to eat his dinner without continually being asked to sign fleshy parts of strangers’ bodies.

There was a reason I’d come in, which was that Esther has a new animal on the menu. I will spare you some of the detail here, as a breakdown of ethical meat eating sometimes forces us to confront dark parts of our consumptive choices, and nobody needs that in the middle of a restaurant review.

But put simply, there are two types of cow in New Zealand — those raised for beef and those raised for milk. Right now, when the latter’s milking days are over it is (I’m paraphrasing chef Sean here) thanked for its service then minced and sent to the USA for burgers.

And by the way you might think there’d be some financial advantages to ordering beef which would otherwise have been destined for American Big Macs but I am here to tell you that it’s not a cheap option. The T-bone is listed on the Esther menu for $17 per 100g and after showing me the steak (it’s crimson, beautifully marbled and the fat has a yellow tinge), Sean said, “It’s about a kilo, that okay?” and when I said yes my voice squeaked in an octave of which I didn’t know I was capable.

Well, it served two of us. And it was wonderful. Worth eating for bucket list reasons alone, it offers something different — not better necessarily, nor worse — to every other steak you’ve had in your life. The grain is a little tighter, and the flavour has a noticeable “beefiness” — something which is otherwise hard to find at this sort of intensity unless you’re tasting it in something like a heavily reduced stock.

The marbling doesn’t add as much juiciness as you might expect but it is there in the taste experience and while the two sides of the T-bone — sirloin and eye fillet — are famously hard to get exactly right, the dairy beef is forgiving enough that even the parts cooked through to well done taste like they’re meant to be that way.

READ: Jesse Mulligan: Jervois Steak House Is Exactly As You Remember It

Sean serves the beef as they do at Bar Nestor, the San Sebastian restaurant that inspired this dish — that is, with nothing but a lovely tomato salad.

There are a bunch of other dishes you should try while you’re here. I particularly enjoyed the ones influenced by Sean’s sometimes humble upbringing: a black pudding (salty and crunchy and textural) served with scallops (sweet and plump and pure); a treacle pudding cooked with suet, the cheaper fat found around the kidneys. This is Yorkshire cucina povera and we are lucky to have a chef who serves it proudly in a fancy (he corrected me on this word but I think it fits) restaurant.

Meanwhile there is freshly puffed bread with the most incredible baked cheese (topped with honey, mild chilli flakes and oregano), a wonderful fried pig head terrine with a tangy gribiche and a tempting pasta menu from which we couldn’t resist ordering a simple, delicious bowl of saffron linguine.

Are you getting the idea? Restaurant food doesn’t get better than this. I’d go back to Esther again and again and if you were looking to show a visitor the best of the city, this would be a perfect place to begin.

More Bistros

Saucy, busy, meaty and imaginative.

Westmere Has A Stunning, Buzzy, Mexican-Inspired Bistro. Every dish at this cosy neighbourhood restaurant is “better than the last.”

It’s A Big Drive But This Bistro Is One Of Auckland’s Best. The bistro is clever and imaginative, with a handsome courtyard and boldly hot crayfish.

At Moxie, Book Your Table And Then Book Your Beef. The Beef Wellington was a dish of such topographical singularity that I can’t forget it.

The Viaduct’s Oyster & Chop Has A Seafood Bistro Sibling. The Viaduct restaurant ranges from wagyu bavette to generous, bright slabs of sashimi.