Jesse Mulligan’s Auckland Restaurant Review: Perch Serves Funky Cocktails & Lovely Dumplings In Britomart

PERCH

Cuisine: Dumplings

Address: 23 Galway St, Britomart

Reservations: Not accepted

Phone: (09) 309 5529

Website: Perchbritomart.co.nz

Drinks: Fully licensed

From the menu: Beef kimchi dumplings $17; Impossible Pork wontons $18; prawn dumplings $18; shao mai dumplings $18; spinach dumplings $16; duck spring rolls $18; garlic cucumber salad $12; Sichuan cold noodle salad $12.

Rating: 15/20

I ate this meal with Greg Bruce, a clever old sausage who writes across a number of NZ Herald publications. He has a lovely wife, Zanna, but I decided not to invite her lest the two of them decide to review me in their popular “He Said, She Said” column in Canvas. Being critically appraised by one person is bad enough but imagine having to sit there reading the two of them argue over your physical and emotional merits. I couldn’t take that risk.

I usually arrive at a restaurant quivering with optimism but I was a bit less excited this time round. I’d decided on dinner here after reading something online that suggested it was a brand-new restaurant but, looking at the website on the way in, I realised this was pretty much XuXu with a rebrand.

I visited that restaurant five years ago and suggested they needed more options on the menu, and asked why were they serving cocktails with dumplings anyhow? Well, they’ve partially addressed the first point and given that I know what I’m in for now I can’t really keep banging on about the second. But the biggest change to XuXu seems to be the name, which is now “Perch”.

“Easier to say, easier to spell, easier to search for online,” said the restaurant manager when I asked. Fair enough. The restaurant has been closed for a couple of years due to pandemic-related reasons and you can’t fault them for putting their best foot forward on re-opening (nobody said this but it’s possible, too, that the name change might make them less vulnerable to accusations of appropriation, a hot topic for anyone serving Asian food outside of its cultural context).

I’d been hoping for an improvement in XuXu’s service and I mostly got it. The staff here are really nice and eager to please, though the bar is very slow — our dumplings arrived before our first round of drinks, for example.

They have grand plans for a big outdoor dining space in the summer but I’m not sure how they’ll keep up when that happens, given the length of time we were waiting when it was us and one 18th birthday party in the room.

You should include a round of cocktails — I had a good sake martini and Greg ended up with some sort of bubble tea concoction that wasn’t right for him but would be for somebody. They also do a great range of wines by the glass.

That deep fryer does a great job on “wontons”, made vegan-friendly with Impossible Pork and cooked golden-crunchy in the classic New Zealand fish and chip shop style. They’re served with a little bright Sichuan oil and would go down a treat with a cold beer.

I didn’t get as much out of the deep-fried spring rolls — shredded duck, a little overwhelmed by the fried pastry and served with a lacklustre garlic-chilli dipping sauce. I think it needed something thick, dark and sweet.

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The steamed dumplings are all lovely — your choice of familiar fillings like pork, prawn and a really good vegetarian option, though I think I liked beef the best: filled with a braised stew spiked with kimchi and served with a spicy mayo.

There are some design considerations they may want to look at: the cold noodle salad tastes great but it’s served only with chopsticks, which makes the sharp soupy dressing and shattered peanuts pretty impossible to attack. Come to think of it, there is no serving cutlery of any kind, which is fine if you’re lifting a dumpling out but a bit weird when you’re repeatedly dipping the mouth end of your chopsticks into a shared bowl of wet cucumber salad.

Each table is given a cute little tray of toppings — soy, black vinegar and the special chilli sauce you seem to see only in dumpling restaurants — but given that all the dumpling dishes come with their own specific sauces it’s hard to see where these classic condiments fit in.

“Do they serve any food?” had been Greg’s typically dry riposte when I first sent him the menu.

Feeling a little defensive on the chefs’ behalf, I’d decided to break him on the night by pulling a Mulligan and ordering one of everything, but as our fifth basket of dumplings arrived his appetite continued to endure.

If anything, he broke me, and I am forced to conclude that this is not a place to go for dinner. It’s a place to go when food could be on the cards — a business designed for people who aren’t like me, who don’t wake up each morning and sketch a plan for the location and duration of each of the day’s meals.

I guess some people just leave work and want a funky cocktail and will perhaps order something to eat when they get hungry. This will be great for them.