Metro — Cheap Eats 2014: The Top 100

Oct 9, 2014 Cheap Eats

Metro Cheap Eats 2014: Men Tatz, Auckland

We like to think our judges are experts: food writers, bloggers, restaurant critics. People who analyse what they eat for a living, who have a special interest in street food, takeaway stalls and other types of cheap eating. Who know their dumplings and their donburi, their poppadoms and their pizza.

To start, we shut ourselves in a room with a long list: more than 250 Auckland eateries we thought would make good candidates for the Top 100. For three hours, we wrestled with what we knew and didn’t know, what we agreed on and what we needed to check again. That process cut the list to 142.

Then we went out and started eating. Restaurants and takeaway bars were visited anonymously, and we always paid for the meals. It’s pretty common in this part of the hospitality industry for restaurant owners to assume you want something free, or even that you expect them to pay you. We don’t do that. No favours, no payments, no advertisements in exchange for a good mention.

A few weeks later, we met again. The 142 had grown, because we kept discovering new places, but the job was to get that list down. It was a big debate, and front of mind, we kept asking ourselves: would we recommend it?

That question helped us to identify many places that don’t do much wrong, whose food we don’t mind eating — but we set the bar higher than that.

We had to. There are 45 new places on our list compared with last year. A few of those are established places that we think have got better. In the case of Barilla Dumpling, it’s back after missing out last year because of a D health certificate (now, it has an A).

Several of our new places are in food halls. Last year, we excluded food halls completely, but we’ve reviewed that decision. Take Mekong Vietnamese in the Ponsonby International Food Court and Marigold Thai at Food Alley: they are among the very best places to eat Vietnamese and Thai food in Auckland, and they fully deserve their slots.

We have also relaxed our price criteria a little: now, it’s dinner for less than $20 or thereabouts. That means you should expect to find a range of menu options in that price bracket, not just one or two dishes, and that a main dish, with rice and roti or miso or whatever other sides you would normally order, might edge the bill past $20 but will not get to $25. This has allowed us to add a few more Malaysian and Japanese restaurants to the Top 100.

Most of the pressure on the list, however, has come from an explosion of new places. In Dominion Rd and Sandringham, in Ponsonby and the central city, Northcote and Birkenhead, Howick and Botany — all over town — Auckland is host to a great flowering of cuisines.

Satya has been joined by perhaps a dozen other exciting Indian restaurants. Northern Chinese dumpling and noodle bars have burst out of Balmoral to open in many corners of the city, while the owners of the pioneering New Flavour and Barilla have both expanded with additional outlets themselves. Gourmet burgers used to be defined by two or three franchise operations, but the rise of Burger Burger, Better Burger and others has meant those franchises don’t even get a look in this year.

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And yet, some big names are missing. Mexico is not on our list: we thought it would be a shoo-in, but it has become a franchise operation and we realised it has shifted the focus from restaurant to bar. We’ll be reporting on Auckland’s best bars later in the year, but we did not include them in the Cheap Eats list. This list is for places where the focus is clearly on the food.

Basque Kitchen, Bedford Soda and Liquor and Dida’s are missing for the same reason.

Other places are missing because they don’t fit under the price ceiling. Among them: the Canton in Kingsland, iVillage in Victoria Park Market, Panmure’s splendid Beijing Duck restaurant and the magnificent Cambodian restaurant Sopheara in Flat Bush. The Cheap Eats list is not a full guide to Auckland’s great ethnic eating.

And yet there are some big-name places that have missed out because they are simply not good enough. Chief among them is the Food Truck Garage. New to our list last year and even named in the Top 10, it has now, like Mexico, lost one of its key original owners, and the new kitchen crew are not working to anything like the same high flavour-bursting standards.

We were surprised. We were dismayed, too, because it’s one of our locals. So it got three judges’ visits.

Still, why fret for what’s gone when we can celebrate what’s come? The very popular Elliott Stables, an upmarket food hall right in the middle of town, now has a magnificent Cajun restaurant called Bonz. The splendid Cafe Abyssinia in Mt Roskill has been joined by several other excellent outlets, including Tandoori Hutt, a simple hole-in-the-wall joint that we think serves the best Indian food of any place on the list. Ponsonby Central has two exciting places in our Top 10: Chop Chop Noodle House and Burger Burger.

And yet, we confess, for all the splendour of the new, we still love the best of the old: Sri Pinang, the Middle East Cafe, the White Lady. And when we find ourselves in the vicinity of Browns Bay, we make sure we make time, and space in our tummies, for remarkably delicious ramen at Ramen Takara .

Auckland, eh. Such a good town.