SIDART
Cuisine: Fine dining
Address: 283 Ponsonby Rd
Phone: 09 360 2122
From the menu: Five courses $160pp
Drinks: Fully licensed
Reservations: Accepted
Auckland doesn’t have many ways to spend $500 in two hours an Elton John concert, an unlucky night at Sky City but you can do it at
There must still be a few people with money to lavish on restaurants like this, because reservations at normal eating times were full and the only opening was at 5.30pm, with the table to be returned by 7.30pm.
I make fun of my mum for getting back home from a restaurant dinner in time to watch the news but here I was, biking down Ponsonby Rd in my number ones in the late Saturday afternoon sun, looking forward to Sidart’s food and drink, yes, but mostly its air conditioning.
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I can make a good claim to having “discovered” this restaurant back in 2009, when I enjoyed a meal so much that a couple of weeks later I put on a little wine tasting event here, inviting along all the most influential Aucklanders I could find (this was pre-Instagram so my list of influencers included “the guy at my local wine shop” and “a girl who works in PR, I think”).
Sid Sahrawat was the chef/owner back then and though it’s hard to imagine now, he was barely brave enough to pop out and say hello. “And this is Sid!” I announced to the group as he scurried back into the kitchen after delivering canapes. He was already a star chef, but enjoyed the chef part more than the stardom.
Sidart is now under new ownership and I think the new guy, Lesley Chandra, might be going through a similar period of diffidence. “This is from the owner,” the waiter said as he poured us two cold, foaming flutes of Champagne, and we couldn’t wait to meet Lesley and say thank you. But late in the meal we realised we had met him he’d brought several dishes to our table but hadn’t introduced himself.
There’s been no drop in quality with the new guy in charge, though Sahrawat Stans will notice subtle differences in style. It’s still fine dining with flecks of Lesley’s Fiji-Indian heritage, but not the full-on (wonderful) curry flavours we got used to enjoying at the end of Sid’s reign.
And the dishes are equally beautiful but less experimental the chef still occasionally pushing molecular boundaries, as with a sheet of coconut gel he lays over kingfish kokoda to evoke memories of fresh Fijian coconut flesh, but there’s none of the “carrot for dessert” stuff that made Sid sometimes seem like a surrealist as much as a chef.
That’s not a criticism of either man, just a note that there are many ways to do fine dining, and what’s the point of replicating what some other guy is doing?
The steep ticket price gets you great service as well as great food, and I encourage you to lean on the sommelier if you don’t order the full wine match like I did. My wife Victoria, while picking a white wine, gave him a seemingly impossible list of things that she was looking for, including “I really like red wine”, but he was up to the challenge, returning with a glass of Australian something to suit an oaky chardonnay lover in the mood for some acidity.
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Advertise with NZME.Our meal was five courses with extras (you can do seven if you’re up for it, plus cheese) and my favourite dish of all was the quail, which had been deboned and wrapped up with chicken mousse into beautiful discs of roasted, indulgent flavour. Two teardrops of pistachio puree added further richness, with a little spiced kasundi cutting through every mouthful.
It’s fun to look out for the Indian flourishes like this on the menu, including the tiny brittle chickpea flour cake the first bite of food you will eat here and as good as the last, an equally frangible fragment of dehydrated honey which doesn’t stick in your teeth as you expect but shatters and disappears in your mouth, the flavour coating the compressed peach and elderflower icecream it comes with. This was my favourite dessert for ages light and cold and seasonal and interesting, with tiny meringue cigarettes balanced on top for fun.
The beef was a grand dish sirloin and brisket together on the plate, with black garlic puree and a surprisingly hot and spicy oyster mushroom which the chef had painted in Korean gochujang sauce though I will say that both of those cuts took some cutting and eating due to a slight toughness which, from a chef of this quality, must surely be intentional, though I think it might disappoint the eye fillet crowd.
Still it was a room of young teeth, probably the most Gen X/Y crowd I’ve seen at Sidart in the dozen or so times I’ve eaten here over the years. That’s a great sign for Sidart’s future, and you should visit as regularly as you can afford, to watch a brilliant emerging chef become a household name.
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