LOCAL TALENT TAVERNA
Cuisine: Mediterranean
Address: 99 Cameron St, Whangārei
Reservations: Accepted
Drinks: Fully licensed
Contact: Localtalenttav.com
From the menu: Asparagus and goat’s cheese $20; stuffed zucchini flower $8; filo haloumi $22; mezze platter $34; chicken souvlaki $34
Rating: 18/20
Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12 Disappointing, give it
You have two choices moving back to your hometown from the city: you can either complain about how lame everything is, or you can be part of the change. Matt Hawkes has taken the second option, bringing everything he learned at Rita, Wellington’s best restaurant, and Bar Mason, his solo venture in Newtown, to create the business Whangārei deserves.
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Advertise with NZME.If this restaurant was on Ponsonby Rd you wouldn’t be able to get a booking (in fact, as Bianca has proved, that would also be true if it was in Ellerslie Village). This isn’t just the best restaurant in Northland, it’s one of the best places I’ve visited all year.
Why does it work? I think, because of how it manages to be sophisticated without any pretentiousness. It’s casual and welcoming without ever dropping its standards. The menu is nominally Greek but they were doing a special on “eye fillet and chips” when I visited and I could see an old-timer eating that safe option gratefully, while younger family members chose more adventurous dishes.
I would bring my own family back here in a second – the bench-seat diner booths set the tone for communal eating, and the warm smiles and greetings that waitstaff offer every new arrival mean even nervous locals will feel glad they gave the place a go. The service team is headed up by Matt’s partner, marketing whizz and co-owner Sophie Evans, who is not a local but, based on the number of hugs she got from customers, seems to be fitting in fine.
Local Talent Taverna (not sure about the name, but you do you, guys) has a real “dream restaurant” feel – the sort of project that’s been planned over months, including little details like the cute slogans staff have on the backs of their T-shirts, the vintage merch you can add to your bill, the old-school pool table and the giant peg-letter menu board that dominates the back wall of the bar.
There is table service but you feel you can rock up to order a drink at any time if you get thirsty. Rotating craft beer taps, dominated by capital brewer Parrot Dog, are a rarity now that the cool kids have moved on to natural wine. But it’s a nice feature in Whangārei, a town I used to go out in a bit when I was younger (leaving the house in those days you had a binary choice: the Irish pub or Danger, Danger, a nightclub with a dancing cage).
The funny thing is I didn’t know anything about the owners before I visited. I had that precious experience where one thing after another was superb (reviewing restaurants is less about make-or-break moments and more about the gradual accumulation of dozens of tiny pieces of evidence, and when they all go in the right direction it’s a special thing). Sample: my dining partner wasn’t drinking alcohol so they offered her a choice of two house-made sodas: rhubarb and tangelo, or grapefruit with cinnamon. Both combinations were awesome.
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Advertise with NZME.Along with the steak special, they were also offering fried courgette flower, a seasonal treat of precious rarity. I had to find out more so looked up their suppliers and found Left Fields, a no-dig, no-till, no-spray market garden half an hour down the road. Northland’s producers have always been a well-kept secret - the Saturday morning grower’s market is the best in the country, and well picked over by 8am – and it’s incredibly exciting to find a restaurant where local ingredients are treated so carefully. Inside that courgette flower was goat’s ricotta, sourced from a small-batch village cheesemaker in Waipū. I would have paid $30 for this; it cost $8.
One thing that characterises the food here is generosity – there is always more on the plate than you expect. A mezze dish must have had a dozen different elements, each one – falafel, beetroot, feta, chickpeas – coaxed into maximum flavour. The signature dish on the menu is a souvlaki – my one a juicy chicken skewer but the prawns looked good too – which comes with Greek-spiced french fries and a green salad so big and varied there’s no chance you’d leave feeling guilty about the chips.
Haloumi was my favourite dish of the lot, a soft slab of Zany Zeus, wrapped in filo pastry and fried to crisp perfection. The squeakiness of the cheese was mirrored by the green beans and, actually, close your eyes and imagine biting all of these different textures at once: fried pastry, haloumi, bean and walnut, followed by an explosion of Mediterranean flavour, including a “preserved fig dressing” which contribute some welcome sweetness to the mouthful.
I left feeling so happy that we’d come. This is just the right sort of provincial eating – local ingredients, small-town prices and a brilliant couple returning home to build a life and lift the whole city up with what they can do.
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