Don’t know where to dine out on a Monday night? These Auckland restaurants are where to go when you want good food with good company — at a place that’s open.
Dinner out on a Monday is no materially different than any other night. The food is delicious and sustaining.
Amano
Amano is famously consistent. It is an unsung quality, the ability to deliver something great over and over again, but one that deserves its own kind of praise, especially when that restaurant is a place in the city that balances an impressive fit-out, laid-back disposition, Instagram friendliness, a separate but adjoining bakery, and enough space to serve several sports teams, perhaps better than anyone else. It doesn’t hurt that the cocktails are good too, and that the ingredients are so fresh they seem plucked from a farm you’d think exists on site. Order the chitarra (a type of long egg pasta) with scampi and flecks of chilli, which is something of a mainstay on its carefully edited menu.
Address: 66-68, Tyler Street, Britomart Place
Monday hours: 7am to 10pm
Darling on Drake
It’s sprawling and charged with an intimidating cool, but newcomer Darling on Drake is worth a visit. Al fresco, the art of making long summer days longer, is alive and well here, with an outdoor area that reaches out with the confidence of its maroon sofas and marble-like table tops. The bar and restaurant has nabbed one of the country’s top chefs, Ryan Moore, to devise its food, which makes itself felt in quietly bold choices like the chicken leg corn dog, zigzagged with mustard and tomato sauce, salmon tartare complete with chips, and a mushroom parfait our dining out editor says “is the star of the menu — silky, smooth and vegetarian-friendly, it’s served with pickled onions and sliced shiitakes, and a light sweet drizzle of something over the top”.
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Advertise with NZME.Address: 27 Drake Street, Auckland CBD
Monday hours: 3pm to 12am
Eggs and More
How good can eggs be? Well, at this casual Indian restaurant in Sandringham, the answer is very good. They are available in a tikka masala and a surti ghotala, where they come both boiled and sunny-side-up atop a bed of onions and tomatoes and spices. There’s a chef’s special omelette, egg chips, egg cheese rolls and a sundry of curries laden with the protein. Of course, as its name suggests, there are other menu options that don’t involve yolks too, from popular street snack dahi puri to generous rice dishes and plenty with paneer.
Address: 572 Sandringham Road, Sandringham
Monday hours: 5pm to 10pm
Depot
Al Brown’s Depot is like catching up with an old friend: comforting, consistent, generous. A recess of wood and black framing like a shelter from a storm that also happens to be fun. It is there for you any day of the week, and has inspired a certain loyalty that has meant it can meaningfully serve fish sliders, that snappy cluster of mini snapper burgers a reliable go-to. The skirt steak (the tender ribbons complemented with wisps of crispy onions and iceberg lettuce) and potato skins are eternally timely. The cookie skillet, a baked biscuit you’d think would buckle under all the icecream and Choc Wizz, is molten and capricious, regularly dropping on and off the menu. Order it if you can.
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Advertise with NZME.Address: 86 Federal Street, Auckland CBD
Monday hours: 7am to 9pm
Gilt Brasserie
Josh and Helen Emett’s latest venture Gilt opened with the fanfare you’d expect of a new Emett restaurant, and has since become the place to go when you can’t go to Europe. The food, inspired by the couple’s affection for and culinary nous from the continent, eschews any specific genre in favour of what is generally fancy brasserie fare, like triple-cheese souffles, baked oysters, roast duck frites, citrus-cured salmon and parmesan beignets. It all has a touch of ambition, in a Chancery building that is big and bygone but beautifully refurbished, with new windows that breathe in light and a dining room that feels like a well-chosen suit.
Address: 2 Chancery Street, Chambers
Monday hours: 11.30am to 10pm
Hotel Ponsonby
Hotel Ponsonby glides between being a bar, bistro and beer garden. The joy is in its stewardship of old-school glamour and unfussiness. A typical meal might include calamari and charcuterie, a hefty parmesan-coated chicken schnitzel with celeriac remoulade, a juicy burger that requires two hands, or grilled octopus, its tentacles coiled on a bed of green romesco. Save room (and your budget) for its drinks menu. There are cocktails but groovy, like pineapple mimosas, strawberry daiquiri slushies and coconut margaritas. Naturally, lingering is encouraged.
Address: 1 St Marys Road, St Marys Bay
Monday hours: 12pm to 11pm
Xie Xie
Xie Xie serves Cantonese cuisine cooked through the lens of French technique. The result at the Ponsonby newcomer, from the restaurateur behind Eden Noodles, Biang Biang Noodles and Lao Guangzhou Hot Pot, is fusion food that displays various signs of angling towards innovation. There’s a mapo tofu lasagna, layered like the Italian classic but with tofu bechamel; a pretty plate of Peking duck; and a fettuccine with tiger prawns, ginger and spring onion. The dumplings are a marriage of truffle and shiitake, and the fried chicken comes with yuzu mayo and plum. The whole experience is then dipped in orange, from the menu design to the banquettes and the slurpable sauces.
Address: 130 Ponsonby Road, Grey Lynn
Monday hours: 11am to 10pm
Metita
Culinarians in the know will be familiar with Metita, the new brainchild of chef Michael Meredith, whose other sibling restaurant, Mr Morris, took home the title of Supreme Winner in our 2021 Restaurant Awards. Metita is inside SkyCity, an oasis of calm and extremely good Pasifika cuisine that Meredith is treating with as much reverence and care as his Britomart outpost, which angles towards “modern” more than anything topographical. Dishes have ranged on his seasonal menu from pāua with taro gnocchi; to salmon melded with pickled mango; and slow-roasted lamb shanks with fried baby green bananas called misiluki.
Address: 90 Federal Street, Auckland CBD
Monday hours: 5pm to 9pm
Origine
Not only is Ben Bayly’s Origine loyal to French cuisine — a purveyor of steak hache, vol-au-vent, and, at one point, ravioles d’escargot (yes, snails) — it is a testament to the city’s enduring love for something unfamiliar. The tasting menu invites you on a culinary tour from Pyrénées to Paris. The seats wouldn’t be out of place in a corner cafe in a corner of Normandy. What is familiar, however, is the ambience — warm and open and impressive. Light smoulders through chandeliers and great swathes of windows. Here, you get a real sense of provenance — and a nice saumon poele, the delicate fish served with confit tomatoes and dotted with salty green olives.
Address: Commercial Bay, Level 2/172 Quay Street, Auckland CBD
Monday hours: 12pm to 10pm
Pici
Down Karangahape Road you’ll find a gem: Pici, a small operation with a small menu. It is here, in this cosy alcove of St Kevin’s Arcade, that Aucklanders intensely and intently cultivate weekend vibes on weekdays, the walls humming and alive over all matter of dishes ending with -tini (spaghettini, bucatini) and a singular -toni (rigatoni). Start with a round of focaccia, the bread pillowy and fragrant thanks to rosemary and a drizzle of olive oil, then order the housemade cacio e pepe, the squiggles of pasta in a sauce you could never make nearly so perfect. Dessert gets the olive oil treatment too; the cheesecake — a hefty, dense slab punctuated with sea salt and that versatile liquid — has garnered something of a following.
Address: Shop 22, St Kevin’s Arcade, 183 Karangahape Road
Monday hours: 5.30pm to 10.30pm
Ahi
This venerable establishment won Supreme Winner for our 2023 Auckland Restaurant Awards. It is an extravagant way to start your week, but it is worth it when you want is something special. In many ways, Ahi is a jewel box that defies expectations. Its calibre — “in a different class — maxing out on points for service, atmosphere, innovation and, of course, food,” said our dining out editor Jesse Mulligan during judging last year — is not what you think of when you think of a shopping precinct (the restaurant is perched stage right of the second-floor food court in Commercial Bay). The waitstaff are friendly and knowledgable, and work with the efficiency and surreptitiousness of agents on a mission. Anything you order will be good, from the wood-fired duck breast to the deer. For dessert, try the banana course served with custard, icecream, and a spiced rum so hot and so strong it sputters when poured over the sticky toffee cake cradled in a coconut shell.
Address: Commercial Bay, Level 2/7, Queen Street
Monday hours: 12pm to 10pm
Prego
The magic of Ponsonby institution Prego is two-fold. First is the atmosphere, a mise en scene of eaters who come for the prestige of legacy Italian and stay for the canopied courtyard. Second is the food itself, so faithful it is to the classics (a section of the menu is devoted to them). Traditionalists can stick to a robust selection of pasta such as linguine alla bolognese and fettuccine alfredo, or commit to a deep-dish calzone with the muscular flavours of ham, pepperoni and chicken. And don’t forget the creme brulee. It isn’t revolutionary stuff, but it is in its own class of comforting.
Address: 226 Ponsonby Road, Ponsonby
Monday hours: 12pm to 10.30pm
Tacoteca
Tacoteca was the talk of the town for a while, mostly because it seemed exciting to suddenly have a place where you could get authentic Mexican food in the central city, nay Auckland. The taqueria, cantina and tortilleria has carved this position in City Work Depot, in the former Food Truck Garage, with the help of Lola, an affectionately named tortilla machine. The tacos, which are affordable flavour bombs, range from Lamb Barbacoa that’s been slow-cooked for 12 hours, to grilled fish with a chile de pasilla rub, and charred, smoky cabbage. Believe the hype about the margarita menu, it goes well beyond the basics.
Address: City Works Depot 1/90 Wellesley Street West
Monday hours: 11.30am to 9pm
Soul Bar & Bistro
Soul Bar is as much about cultural capital — to see, to be seen, the flex — as it is about food. But the food is like the people-watching — just as good, by turns dazzling and expensive. There’s the macaroni cheese, the closest thing you had to the version you loved as a kid, only more adult thanks to the addition of ham and truffle and parmesan made into a crust that’s been dusted over like icing sugar. Or the green goddess salad, which skews earthy: peas, avocado, edamame, broccolini, crispy quinoa furikake. The strawberry meringue, towering with matcha white chocolate crémeux and dotted with three bits of fruit, is a thing of architecture and gastronomy. It’s impossible to leave unsatisfied.
Address: Corner of Lower Hobson Street, Customs Street West
Monday hours: 11am to 11pm
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