TAPSI
Cuisine: Iraqi
Address: 985 Dominion Rd, Mt Roskill
Reservations: Accepted
Phone: (09) 600 1807
Drinks: Not licensed
From the menu: Bread and dips $18; Iraqi salad $20; lamb soup $12; qozi chicken $35.
Rating: 17/20
Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12 Disappointing, give it a miss.
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Advertise with NZME.The other day, on the long drive home from my 9-year-old daughter’s gymnastics class, we decided to count every restaurant open for dinner on Dominion Rd. There were 93 of them. Now you know.
If you were to number them all, beginning at the south end, Tapsi would be number one — literally as far as you can drive from the city to get a feed on that beautifully diverse strip of eateries (full disclosure: number two is Burger King). And Tapsi is worth the journey — it is a busy, cosy restaurant full of happy people eating food unlike anything else I’ve come across in Auckland.
The meat (lamb and chicken, mostly) is sourced from a halal butcher just across the road, making it particularly appealing to Auckland’s Muslim community who comprised most of the clientele when we visited.
Though subtly different to other Middle Eastern cuisine, Iraqi food has the same juicy-grilled meats, fragrant rice and savoury dips you’ll be familiar with.
I haven’t visited this part of the world so I can’t tell you if they customarily include a knife with their cutlery sets but at Tapsi there wasn’t one — just a fork and a spoon.
I was wondering how we were going to get on playing forky-spoony on a bone-in chicken (I know it’s sometimes acceptable in Arabic countries to forego cutlery altogether, but it takes a lot of confidence to start pulling a cooked bird apart with your bare hands). Fortunately, this didn’t end up being a problem — the chicken was marinated and grilled to a condition of such tenderness you could dish it out with a spoon almost like it was a casserole.
We’d started with a platter of Turkish bread served with some of those dips — a silky fine hummus loaded with garlic, a beautifully sweet beetroot-forward hummus and a surprisingly rustic eggplant that didn’t have that usual blended creaminess but was still moreish enough to make me feel like a “pampered daddy” — the literal translation of the dish’s title.
The menu has photos on it which is sometimes a red flag but I have to say serves a pretty useful purpose when you’re basically ordering in a foreign land. Daisy had her eye on the lamb soup which — while it wouldn’t have leapt out to me as the first thing to order — ended up being one of the hits of the night, a deeply spiced, thin broth with various tasty treats — meat, potato, legumes — in each mouthful. As a reference point, think of the dahl you get with an order of roti chennai.
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Advertise with NZME.I’m about to tell you about our main course and I’m writing this as if they came in the usual sequence but in fact all the food arrives at once, so if you want more of a staged meal you should either order and eat the dishes one by one, or have a good talk to your server beforehand (there are plenty of them, and they’re friendly in an efficient sort of way).
The mains are already big but there is a special section in the menu for families — where for somewhere north of $100 you can order enough food to feed anyone lucky enough to show up. As someone who will takeaway half a tiramisu, I was very happy to see a culture here of packaging up leftovers to go — just about every table finished their meal by loading the remaining food into a plastic container, presumably for lunch the next day.
I thought we would do the same but the food was too good to stop eating. Our “qozi” chicken, one of Iraq’s national dishes, was half a flame-roasted bird dripping its incredible hot juices over a bed of rice. The rice was a masterpiece itself, studded with raisins, slivered almonds and, the menu tells me, vermicelli — it all combined to create a spicy, textural staple that was perfect with the poultry centrepiece.
A feast in itself, the qozi came with a bowl of yoghurt sauce and your choice of vege stew — our selection, bean and tomato, was a nice match though if I’d been less flustered when ordering I would have got the Tapsi special: layers of fried eggplant, potato, onion and capsicum.
This chicken was just one of a dozen incredible menu options, and I’m sorry I can’t give you more of a guide to the others — you’ll just have to trust the chefs, who make a very appealing tableau, working hard behind the glass in their spacious kitchen.
Most Dominion Rd restaurants suffer a little bit in the decor department but Tapsi shines here too, with the architectural advantage of being in an old ASB bank combined with the owner’s taste and care: the painting, tiles, lighting and trinkets combine to make this feel like somebody’s beautiful lounge, and the chairs are comfy enough to settle in for a feast.
What a find! There is a no wine list here — we shared a can of Sprite — so visit on a night you’re happy to go booze-free. And my final recommendation is to make a reservation or visit early in the week — while Tapsi is new to me, it’s a well-established favourite in the community, so getting a table can be tricky on the weekend.
