Jesse Mulligan’s Auckland Restaurant Review: The Food at Bakery-Turned-Restaurant Alpha Is 20/20 Poetry

ALPHA

Cuisine: Modern

Address: 235 Parnell Rd, Parnell

Contact: Alpha-akl.com

Reservations: Accepted

Drinks: Fully licensed

From the menu: Langoustines $11ea; choy sum $10; bruleed grapefruit $10; woodfire grilled cheese and caviar $45; wagyu tartare $25; pasta $28; duck schnitzel $40; firebrick potato $20; spring puff $20.

Rating: 20/20

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.

She didn’t need to say that it was the restaurant Alpha she was still thinking about, because it had been a regular topic of conversation since our visit, on a quiet Wednesday evening in Parnell. Everything we ate there was almost puzzling in its perfection — the sort of thing you have to unpack in your head afterwards. Like a good poem, each dish communicated some of its meaning before it was understood.

Alpha is the third restaurant in a building that also houses Pasture, the original, and Boxer, an almost science fictional bar with food. If there was a problem with these two (both are Viva Top 50 restaurants), it was that going to one of them could be considered a bit of a faff. Pasture offers tasting menus of 17-23 courses for seven people in each sitting. At Boxer, you have to text somebody to let you in. There is something lovely to the occasion of each, but neither is the sort of joint you’d think of at 6.30pm and say “oh, let’s pop in there”.

But Alpha is just that sort of concept. Nominally a bakery, it literally opens at 9.30am, when every door and window is thrown wide and locals begin drifting in, even if they didn’t plan to. Others treat it as a low-commitment luxury: one couple shows up each Wednesday, takes a table outside and orders one potato each (well, it’s more than just a potato — more on that in a moment).

This third restaurant seems to work well for the business, too.

“Suddenly, it’s all just sort of clicked into place,” says owner Ed Verner, of what is doubtless quite a complicated machine (he faced questions about his business model and working conditions a couple of years ago and seems to have responded proactively — switching to a four-day working week for kitchen staff and appointing an HR manager to oversee employment culture). Chefs and servers work across all three venues, sometimes simultaneously. Dishes are delivered by multiple people, including kitchen staff. Though you can’t see the kitchen from Alpha, it never feels very far away.

On the night we visited we were served by Hillary Eaton, an international food writer and culinary whizzkid who visited the restaurant on a job and decided to stay (it’s apparently catching — the kitchen currently features a two-star Michelin chef from Northern California who’s elected to make Pasture his new home). She served us at our last visit to Boxer, too, and is one of the most talented people I have ever seen in this role.

“I want to be friends with her,” Victoria whispered at one point. “Do you think she has any openings?”

Eaton oversees the drinks list, and though you have access to the entire Pasture cellar at Alpha, there are only a handful of options on the hard copy menu. It doesn’t matter. Just as you don’t expect to be offered 100 different wine options at a friend’s house, it is both exciting and comforting to know that the two or three wines she’s pouring are her favourites (but you should start with a cocktail, which thanks to an expensive evaporator and some creative magic will taste unlike anything you’ve ever known).

It’s a surprisingly fulsome food menu, beginning with light baking and snacks and progressing toward intense, meaty mouthfuls. Highlights include the grilled cheese: Japanese milk bread flattened and stacked with “plastic cheese” and carpeted with honeyed balsamic and black caviar (“nothing melts as well as the plastic cheese so we thought ‘why not spend the money on extra caviar?’”); half a pink grapefruit, sugared and scorched like a creme brulee; a potato is grilled in its jacket then flattened and blackened by a scorching hot brick and layered in rich flavours and textures: brown butter, roasted yeast, salmon roe and vinegar.

Most extraordinary of all is the spring puff — an impossibly light, eclair-like structure filled with yoghurt and vanilla mousse then glazed with parsley and white chocolate icing and topped with cut green herbs. You might wonder how it’s possible to garnish a dessert with fresh herbs but it works — Verner’s culinary imagination once again proving it is unmatched in New Zealand, possibly in the world.

Even the in-between stuff is surprising, beautiful and memorable. A little drink of smoked apple, dashi and walnut oil to begin; a pre-dessert of mead-compressed cucumber that you pick up and dip into a bowl of tarragon sugar before eating with rock melon and grapefruit soft serve.

Some of the decor is fancy (“when I see something I want for my house, I buy it for the restaurant”, says Eaton) and some of it is almost comically nostalgic — including a beige floral dinner plate I used to eat off as a child (wow, plates were smaller then).

As at Pasture and Boxer, this is ultimately an experience as much as a meal — but one that is, happily and finally, much more accessible than before. You’d be on the phone for hours for the chance to eat this sort of food in California. At Alpha, just rock on up.