EGGS AND MORE
Cuisine: Indian vegetarian
Address: 572 Sandringham Rd, Sandringham
Reservations: Accepted
Website: Eggsandmore.co.nz
Phone: (09) 845 5500
Drinks: Not licensed
From the menu: Dahi puri $9; vada pav $9; samosa chaat $9; Chef’s Special egg curry $21; tandoori momos $16
If you don’t think “Eggs and
Okay, so a fair few of the main dishes do feature eggs. It’s one of the lesser-considered meat-free proteins in Indian cooking — you would have to be all out of paneer, and lentils, and green peas and garbanzos before you even considered making an egg curry, but it comprises a whole vegetarian genre in India and those in the know are celebrating the arrival of an Auckland restaurant that makes it a proud specialty.
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I discovered Eggs and More via Perzen Patel, a typically enterprising Parsi-New Zealander who hosts eating tours of Sandringham for anybody willing to consider a world beyond butter chicken.
Indian is currently my favourite cuisine but even I get a bit intimidated wandering through this beautiful Auckland restaurant district — which are the good restaurants, who are the pretenders? Who does the best biryani, and who puts it on the menu just for people who don’t know any better?
I’ve been thinking about Sandringham a bit lately after using this column to shout about great Indian restaurants in the city (Times of India, 1947, Mumbaiwala, and, of course, Cassia).
One of the things those restaurants do well is make Indian food approachable for those of us who didn’t grow up with it. But I think there is room in this column for both — the brilliant Cassia, where pani puri (crispy shell filled with delights) cost $4 each, or Eggs and More, where you can get 20 of them for $20.
They will taste as delicious as each other but at Cassia that $4 buys you a lot — attentive staff, delicious cocktails, beautiful dinnerware and sparkling toilets. Eggs and More has none of these things which is why this week I’ve avoided giving it a score and decided to tell you about the good bits. There are loads of those.
We went for the dahi puri (same idea as the pani puri but the flavours are more intense — ours were so bulging they were actually heavy to lift off the plate). They’re a street food traditionally — the restaurant does a bunch of them alongside the egg curries and a section of Indian-Nepalese fusion dishes — but they are more than just snacks: six big flavour bombs the size of mandarins, for a total of $9.
The only way to manage them is by putting the whole thing in your mouth, crunching down and hoping you can manage the party — tamarind, green chutney, yoghurt, chickpea/potato puree and shards of crispy flatbread shell fighting for attention in a mouthful of pure delight.
Some of those same flavours are found in the samosa chaat — where the chefs smash up a vege samosa then pour over a combination of sauces and scattered sev, like a plate of loaded fries.
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They sell hot samosas at an Indian supermarket just down from my work and it’s almost impossible not to go grab one if you’re feeling peckish in the mid-afternoon — Eggs and More’s indulgent version has all the stuff I love about that pie-warmer favourite and layers it with even more flavour and texture. The pieces of raw onion play a particularly nice role, adding some biting freshness to each forkful.
The Nepalese influence is most obvious in the momos, the national dumpling.
We ordered ours tandoori-style and, though I don’t think the kitchen has a tandoor oven, the distinctive pink yoghurty batter added a lovely Indian character to the flavour and appearance of the dish. They’re steamed then battered then finished in a fry pan and have just the right sort of chewy stodginess by the time they arrive at your lips.
I’ve sort of arranged this review as “More and Eggs” but the Chef’s Special curry was a great centrepiece for the night — a gravy deeply flavoured with onions and masala, with pieces of boiled egg stirred through it and an extra egg cut in two and placed in the centre of the dish.
If you’re still struggling to get your head around this combo I’m pleased to remind you that there is some precedent: the 80s lunch platter, where someone’s mum would inevitably stir curry powder through a cooked yolk and then stuff it back inside the white, serving it up chilled next to asparagus rolls and, if you were lucky, a party hedgehog.
The spice blend is obviously a lot more sophisticated here but it’s the same winning flavour combo, and is served not with rice but with lightly toasted soft bread rolls which you dip into the gravy and, oh man, this is good stuff.
They bake those rolls fresh in the kitchen each day and also use them in the vada pav, my new favourite spiced-potato-pattie-in-a-bun which comes with a tamarind-date dipping sauce and is, in Perzen’s opinion, the closest Aucklanders can get to the pav they make in India.
Is that enough to get you started? Don’t all go at once — it’s a small room and already pretty busy.
But if you want to eat great Indian and don’t want to get dressed up, put this one on your list of places to visit.
