Restaurant Review: Hamilton’s Sage Restaurant Serves Smashingly Good Food

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By Jesse Mulligan

Tuesday Jul. 23, 2024

Viva

The beef tartare at Hamilton's Sage restaurant. Photo / Jess Koretz

SAGE

Cuisine: Bistro

Address: Level 1/300 Grey St, Hamilton

Phone: (07) 949 6738

From the menu: “Eat Wisely” tasting menu, $83pp

Drinks: Fully licensed

Reservations: Accepted

Rating: 16/20

Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12 Disappointing, give it a miss. 13-15 Good, give it a go. 16-18 Great, plan a visit. 19-20 Outstanding, don’t delay.

There’s no place like your hometown. Everywhere I go in Hamilton, I’m struck by some random memory I haven’t had for years. As I climbed the staircase at Sage, I suddenly remembered coming to my first student job interview in the same building. The vacant position involved filing, and after a few minutes of awkward chat the boss told me “I’ll be honest, it’s more of a girl’s job”.

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So I wandered across the road to the Eastside Tavern where they were looking for a new quizmaster, and a career in entertainment was born. We had a $250 jackpot question each week that I was under significant emotional pressure from the publican not to give away more than once a year. “Exactly how many pages are there in the Hamilton phonebook?” I asked on one occasion, then the following week “What is my favourite colour?” (A: “Puce”).

Sage restaurant, Hamilton. Photo / Jess Koretz

My recent review of Mr Pickles was a local hit, and I’d been encouraged to come back down and try one of the city’s other great restaurants. Sage is in vibrant Hamilton East, just above Duck Island icecream parlour, and though there are a few signs of its former life as an open-plan office, it was cosy enough — the heat pump just keeping up on what would turn out to be the Waikato’s second coldest night of all time.

The first thing you notice is the cocktail list, featuring drinks named for TV characters. I really enjoyed my Dwight Schrute, a cold coconut tequila shaken up with lime, elderflower syrup and pickle juice (sounds odd but I loved it, and who needs another restaurant margarita?). Chris Warner and Judge Judy both looked good too, a sentence you probably didn’t expect to read.

The food menu is exciting by Hamilton’s standards — perhaps just middle of the road by Auckland’s. Hey look, I know that’s a patronising thing to say but every city is on its own journey — the next day I was on a cafe-crawl in Tauranga, a town where you can apparently order anything you want, so long as it is a panini.

Sage names its cocktails after TV stars. Photo / Jess Koretz

Service is quirky and kind. They really seem happy to have you, and proud of the work they’ve done to create this brick-and-mortar business from its origins as a pop-up food kitchen in a Hood Street bar. I thought three floor staff for a room of 30-odd diners was a little ambitious but nobody seemed to be waiting long, so what do I know?

There are four food sections: raw, small, large and sides. I chose a tasting menu curiously titled “Eat Wisely” which promised a selection of the four although in fact we weren’t served any small plates. On a hunch, I mentally added up the total cost of the tasting menu and it was the exact sum of the individual dishes we’d been served. So if there’s no economic benefit and you miss a whole section of the menu, is there any point in leaving things to the chef?

The gnocchi with blue cheese, mushrooms and walnuts at Sage. Photo / Alex Armstrong

Luckily the food was smashingly good. A whole flounder (admittedly something I might not have bothered with if I’d been choosing things myself) was perfectly cooked, the spine pulling away from the succulent flesh easily and, I’ll admit, satisfyingly. Fish and lentils is a rare and delicious combination, the braised pulses bringing earthy balance to the seafood though with their Indian-style, long-cook butteriness they would have been good enough in a bowl on their own.

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The raw salmon was a deconstructed lox bagel with big crunchy breadcrumbs scattered over a pile of salmon and cream cheese. You couldn’t complain about the flavours — this has been a winning combination for 100 years — though if you were being, well, an Auckland restaurant reviewer, you might point out that it got a bit unsubtle after several mouthfuls of the stuff.

The beef tartare is a great dish — the chopped steak mixed up with miso and pickled daikon for irresistible flavour and on top a great little innovation — leek shredded to matchstick width and fried until crunchy.

Sage's carrot cake mousse. Photo / Jess Koretz

But you won’t go wrong whatever you choose — the kitchen is skilled and assured and though the dishes are sometimes better to read than eat (“signature” dan dan broccoli was tasty but spice-free) you have to work pretty hard to find something to complain about.

Why am I working so hard on that? Because Hamilton is our third biggest city and its restaurants need to be as good as — better than — Auckland’s top eateries before anybody will take any notice of them. The mid-range is already well served, particularly in Ham East where there is an udon shop, a great Turkish and the new Made development devoted to great smash-and-grab dining.

As we left Sage, The Cook pub was empty and Duck Island had a queue out the door. Thursday nights have changed since I was a student here — I’m looking forward to seeing how good things can get.