SCHAPIRO’S
Cuisine: American-style bar food
Address: 224 Symonds St, Eden Terrace
Bookings: Not accepted
Drinks: Fully licensed
Contact: Schapirossportsbar.co.nz
From the menu: Cheesesteak $18; pork burger $18; mushroom burger $18; gochujang chicken $14; popcorn prawns $15; iceberg salad $11
I can think of many reasons to visit Schapiro’s
“The ingredients of the burgers were so smooshed together you couldn’t tell one thing from another,” I reported to Kanoa Lloyd the next day.
She said, “To be honest that sounds perfect.”
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Advertise with NZME.But I think if she’d been there she’d have been less excited. Take the vegetarian burger, which looked like one of the more interesting things to order, promising to replace the usual animal protein with mushroom.
What are you picturing at this point? A flavour-packed patty of meaty fungi, bound with some umami-boosting sauces? Or perhaps one steak-sized mushroom, heavily seasoned and grilled to the point of juicy crispiness?
At Schapiro’s it was one slender oyster mushroom, battered like a piece of takeaway fish to obscure its texture, tucked into a sandwich full of ingredients that tasted pretty good but didn’t particularly make a star of anything. Nobody’s going to complain about fried batter between two soft buns with a decent sauce but it felt like an opportunity lost.
Schapiro’s is pitched as an American-style sports bar so it might seem churlish to be too hard on the food, but they take the menu seriously, so, I think we should as well. It’s a range of grilled and fried goodies, perfect accompaniments to beer served on tap.
But even the simple stuff is often messed up popcorn prawns should be nice enough, even if they are processed and battered to a point where they could have come out of the supermarket freezer. But they’re served with a citrus dipping sauce that is for some reason sweetened, so it has the taste profile of lemon slice.
Seafood and sugar are a pretty lethal combo, and given that the owner is a guy who knows his food, I can only guess that it was bungled by an emotional junior staffer.
The meat inside my pork burger was sliced thin, and tasted of not much. Incredibly, it was topped with globe artichoke, one of the few times I’ve seen this beautiful summery vegetable in the New Zealand wild and baffling that it was in a burger, in August, in a pub decorated with American sports memorabilia.
The menu had promised avocado, pork crackling and fermented chilli but if any of them were there they’d been atomised during the assembly.
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Advertise with NZME.You can order your food from one of the four identical men standing behind the bar, or use a laminated QR code on your table. The latter is about 15 times more complicated than the former but, if you’re shy of strangers or really focused on the game, you might appreciate it.
On the night I was there no games were in progress, and this will be quite a challenge to their business model I think: you can find a big pro sport match-up almost any night of the week in the US, but what do we have in New Zealand? Half-a-dozen decent rugby tests and a bit of road cycling. Apparently the NBA has gone pretty well for them, but with those games finishing in the late afternoon it’s not going to do much for their dinner business.
But it’s really a pretty solid bar in which to meet up for a drink. So many city bars are designed to be nice, an elegant sort of padded living room you wish you could afford. But to be honest sometimes people (I’m using the gender-inclusive term though the crowd was 95 per cent men) just want a brightly lit place to drink beer without fuss.
The booths are private and comfy so comfy they’d all been claimed by the time we arrived at 8pm the service is fast and friendly and they deliver beer by the jug, which encourages a sort of communal bonhomie you won’t get at a cocktail bar on Ponsonby Rd.
And if drinking IPA while staring at a flat-screen watching last night’s English Premier League goals doesn’t sound like much fun to you, well, I feel certain you’ll have a dad, boyfriend or workmate in your life who’d choose this over the Met Gala.
I tried almost everything here and if you’re going to eat, I’ll point you to the gochujang chicken (well cooked and messy in a good way), the iceberg wedge (served with pear and some sweet toasted walnuts) and the cheesesteak, which is the best of the burgers featuring beef, melted cheese, black pepper and a nice mystery sauce.
You can’t exactly close your eyes and imagine you’re in Philadelphia but you’ll at least feel like you’re experiencing something new for Auckland.
