Restaurant Reviewer On Tour: Jesse Mulligan Samples The Best of New Plymouth

A trip to Taranaki introduces Jesse Mulligan to a cast of lively locals and a menu of excellent casual eateries.

I met some real characters in New Plymouth, and most of them were Terry, the guy who owned my hotel. I’d heard great things about Table, his hotel restaurant, and I thought I might pop in to review it. But I reconsidered after he recognised me at check-in.

“The last Aucklander who reviewed this place was a c***,” he reported. “He said it looked like my restaurant had been decorated by someone with ADHD. Well I got him back. I called my friend whose son has ADHD and we reported him to the Human Rights Commission.”

“Um, could I have some milk for my room?” I asked.

I was in town to MC a conference, a job requiring sustained periods of intellectual concentration alongside long sessions when the delegates went off and did delegate things, leaving me to explore the city. In your service I took this time to eat at around half a dozen local restaurants, and found some great food. And at the end of each day, I returned to my room at the Nice Hotel (its actual name), usually via the lobby bar.

“I offer two-for-one drinks to members of the Chamber of Commerce,” said Terry, “though maybe I shouldn’t.”

He was referring to the increasingly chaotic sounds coming from the outdoor area, where the Chamber had kicked off a function around five hours earlier. At that moment an older gentleman stumbled into the lobby, his face covered in blood, a distressed young woman by his side.

“He fell into the garden!” she said.

My first dinner was at Snug Lounge Bar, a Japanese-inspired restaurant that has its own dining room but shares a modern courtyard space with a few other eateries in the same stable. I’d called a few minutes earlier to tell them I was running late and the woman on the phone had been great – reassuring me that they’d keep the kitchen open until I got there. At some point picking up the landline fell out of fashion in the main centres so I was pretty delighted to make contact with a human being, and when I arrived things got even better: she showed me to a seat by the fire and made me a cocktail while I chose a few dishes from the menu: shiitake dumplings, tempura prawns, grilled chicken balls and spicy miso-glazed carrots. I’d love to tell you this stuff was great but it was all just okay – the prawns salty and oily, the chicken not piping hot and the carrots served with a yoghurt that didn’t quite work with the Asian flavours.

“Everything we ate was incredible!” reported a group I chatted with on the way out. So maybe a restaurant critic sitting alone with nothing to think about but criticisms is not the ideal market here. “Food is better with friends!” insisted a slogan emblazoned multiple times across the menu. Maybe I should have invited Terry.

“A few years ago Elton John came to town,” he told me at one point. “You know when Princess Diana died, he rewrote Candle in the Wind?”

I nodded.

“Then six weeks later Mother Teresa died,” Terry continued with a straight face. “And Elton released another one: Sandals in the Bin!”

I’m sharing some of our more repeatable interactions but I encourage you to stay at the Nice Hotel and have your own conversational adventures. Terry is not the mayor of New Plymouth but he seems to be the mayor of good times, and has a decent heart too. One morning on the way to work I mentioned that all was good at the conference but that the venue was a little chilly; a couple of hours later while onstage I was told that a delivery woman was at the theatre door holding a fan heater with instructions from my hotelier to find me and plug it in nearby.

And make time in your itinerary for a visit to House Wine, a fantastic bar and bottle shop that acts as a cellar door for Known Unknown – an urban winery doing exciting things. A flight of five wines costs $20 and chances are you’ll like one of them enough to take a bottle home. But I had other priorities: three more restaurants to visit for a plate and a drink at each.

Around the corner at The Hour Glass they do a huge list of tapas in another casual bar environment (in general, casual is where New Plymouth excels – there’s still a lot of room to grow at the top end and not much to compete with the very best of Auckland or even Hawke’s Bay, yet). I just loved their prawn tacos – with tortillas still warm from the grill and some fresh, easy fillings, it reminded me of what a pain in the neck prawns can be to eat when served in their shells. Ripping off the exoskeleton, spitting out the legs – sometimes it’s nice to have a chef do the hard stuff for you.

I was in the mood for something substantial but Hour Glass only had one main: the fish of the day, for $50. “Why does the snapper cost $50?” I asked in what I hoped was a non-confrontational way. But the owner just shrugged, like he didn’t understand the question.

At Social Kitchen the prices were even higher. Their fish dish was $59, and so was the Cajun chicken. Eggplant parmigiano was $51! What is going on? Admittedly the portions were large, but I wonder how many people they must be scaring away with those prices (I met a couple at Shining Peak who’d had a look online and decided Social Kitchen was out of their budget). I’m not here to offer business advice, but surely at a sharing restaurant you could rearrange the plate a bit and find a way to offer sausages for less than $49.90?

But I had a great time. At the conference we talked about Taranaki’s transition from fossil to renewable fuels, and I think New Plymouth is in a transition of its own. At one end of Devon St the beautiful galleries and new developments show the city it will become; at the other end, that brilliant wine bar operates in a bleak strip of shops alongside Clegg’s Furniture Court and Juicy Vapes. Still, at least the city has personality.

When I checked out of the hotel I asked Terry if I could share some of our interactions with Viva readers. I would keep him anonymous, I promised.

“Nah, put my f****** name on it,” he replied. “It’s more fun that way.”

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