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It doesn’t matter what time of the day we find ourselves here — morning, noon or night — we can’t seem to forgo the all-day breakfast menu. For those who want to stick with mealtime conventions, there’s a whole menu of perfectly delightful lunch and dinner options — rice, noodles, soups and so forth — but we need to emphasise that it’s among the breakfast options that this place shines. There are golden batons of youtiao to be eaten with congee and soy milk, steamed buns with fillings to suit any preference, plates of the distinct, open-ended fried dumplings, and plump wontons in Sichuan spiced soup. Best of all, every dish on this menu (except one) is sub $10.

Looming above the front of this Morningside takeaway joint (note: they have an outlet in Onehunga too) is a sign with “Chic’en Eats” written ever-so-slightly-too-small in Curlz MT typeface, alongside an affable-looking chicken. Depending on your personality, you’ll either be thoroughly deterred or totally charmed by this unorthodox logo — but either way, we implore you to go in and order something. Here, they do fiery chicken breast and skin-on thigh meat, battered and fried so that its crust is consistently craggy and deep red, but never oily. Choose from four spice levels (we like “cluckin’ hot”). This fried chicken is served, as in Nashville, alongside biscuits or waffles, or between fluffy brioche buns with pickles and tangy comeback sauce. All of which is sensational and impressively affordable — portions are tremendous and yet nothing costs more than $18.  

Gojo Ethiopian Eatery has all the staples of that cuisine — stews, curries and fried dishes — spiced and cooked to sublimity. Injira, the vividly sour staple flatbread which plays the role of both plate and utensil appears across almost all of these dishes and should guide the way you engage with whatever you’re eating. The idea is to rip off a portion, use it to scoop morsels of meat and vegetables into your mouth and then, at the end of the meal, mop up any of the spicy, savoury sauces left over. This is even more fun when undertaken as a collaborative effort, with the prospect of a wider variety of things to scoop and mop. It also means you can opt to partake in the buna — a traditional coffee ceremony — to conclude.

Food courts, in the hawker-style so beloved by Aucklanders, are a dwindling eating format in this city. Amid this landscape of dining-hall demise, and its own past of ups and downs, Northcote’s Food City is not just persisting, it’s thriving — in its own quiet, slightly dishevelled way. The food court hosts a solid place for pad thai called Thai Noodle; a Filipino joint called Kanto which we believe makes the best halo-halo in the city; and also Kolombo, a Sri Lankan food stall on the ground floor of the building. Here you will find an array of fiercely spiced wok-fried noodles and rice, portable parcels of crispy gothamba rotti stuffed with numerous aromatic fillings, and the highlight of it all, a list of 12 variations of kottu — scrappy bits of rotti stir-fried with spring onion, chillies, egg, spices and more — which each ring in under $25. All as divine as the next. If you happen to have more change to spare, there is also an option with a whole mud crab perched atop, ready to be devoured messily and uninhibitedly with your fingers. Stock up on napkins.

Our visit to Krishna Foods felt like a reset. The food here is the kind that reminds you of simple, honest, homey pleasures. Between a laundromat and a dairy, the shop itself is small and tidy, almost austere, but for a smattering of tables to seat groups of twos or fours, a small sink to wash your hands and a cabinet housing handmade sweets. The menu is suitably concise to match, with chaat like spongy khaman dhokla, pani puri and a vada pav that’s a symphony of textures — squishy, crunchy, smooth, dry, moist. Three kinds of thali are composed of stacks of papad, dainty bowls of curries, pickles, and a sweet to finish, served on big round silver platters. And those curries? They’re exceptional. Impressively, there’s none of the usual shortcuts to flavour either — their heartiness is the product of the earthiness and complexity of layered spices, fresh ingredients and, presumably, a whole lot of time and care.

Change is both a part of life and freakily terrifying. And learning that an eatery you adore has changed hands can cause nerve-wracking alarm. This is how we felt when we heard that this Avondale eatery, renowned for its sought-after wok-hei-imbued dishes and infamous for its lack of Eftpos machine, had been taken over by new owners. We entered with trepidation and found that some things had changed: you can now pay by Eftpos. Fortunately, other things hadn’t: the food is still wonderful and permeated with wok hei flavour. We can happily recommend exactly what we always have here: something cooked in a wok. Namely, the char kway teow or the Hokkien noodles. We also find ourselves regularly daydreaming about the wat tan hor (which they call “Egg gravy rice noodles” on the menu), which is a pleasingly sloppy, umami-heavy dish served with a dish of chilli soy sauce on the side for you to douse it with — adding even more umami. You can choose to dine in or take away here, but we reckon true sublimity is eating al fresco at the one solitary table out the front of the shop. 

You don’t come across many Burmese eateries in this country. In fact, until Moe Palae’ opened late last year, Tāmaki Makaurau had spent eight years without a single representation of the cuisine in restaurant form. If any pressure comes with being the only place flying the flag (literally, there’s one out the front) for the cuisine in this city, Moe Palae’ does it with a kind of self-assured cool. In the spotless, sparsely adorned modern room, head chef Hein Htet Aung (who won MasterChef Myanmar in 2023) presides over a menu full of cornerstone Burmese dishes. The nan gyi thoke (chunky rice noodles tossed in toasted chickpea powder and chilli oil) is sublime in its chewiness. The a kyaw sone is presented as a composition of crisp vegetable- and prawn-filled fritters alongside a piquant sauce for dipping. The fermented tea leaf salad called laphet thoke, probably the most quintessential of Burmese dishes, is earthy, funky, briny, tangy and (in our opinion) obligatory. The ingredients for this salad are served on a single plate, each in neat little mounds: dark-green tea leaves, chickpeas, sliced green tomato, dry shrimps, whole garlic cloves, green chillies, roasted cashews. Toss them together like moodily-coloured confetti, then devour. And do wrap things up with one of the restaurant’s eye-catching traditional desserts. 

Here, find bowls of Lanzhou-style beef ramen; immense plates of very, very long house-made noodles strewn with capsicum, black fungus and hunks of lamb; and juicy spiked meat swept with cumin and chilli and charcoal. For the gluten-inclined, rounds of plump, spiced naan. And for the rice-obsessed, piles of pilaf. All of which are wonderful representations of the unique and varied deliciousness of Uyghur cuisine. Fantastic food aside, we’re also very fond of the cutlery station at the centre of it all, where you can help yourself to necessities like chopsticks, extra bowls, scissors (to cut those very, very long noodles to a manageable length), cloves of raw garlic (to nibble in between bites of skewers) and tea bags and paper cups (to make yourself an accompanying kaputī).

Heaven is a flame-kissed lump of skewered meat swiped through chilli-spiked vinegar. This is what you get at Noy’s, an inihaw (Filipino barbecue) joint in New Lynn. You’ll order on the screen at the counter. Opt for a barbecue meal — which comes with grilled chicken or pork, sliced fresh vegetables and yellow rice — as your foundational dish, to which you can add more of the sticky glazed skewers: pork belly, tero tero, pig ears, chicken feet or chicken liver, as well as the sometimes available eggplant, squid or shrimp. Fill a little ramekin with the spicy, vinegary sawsawan, then dip, eat and revel in the bliss of good barbecue. The skewers and rice can be rounded off nicely with a cup of Noy’s single dessert option: taho, a mildly-sweet Filipino dessert of silken tofu, sago and brown sugar syrup.

Eating here sparks plenty of joy, and for plenty of reasons. It’s the orange-topped tables, and the big bold “Kia Ora” sign which greets you at the front door. It’s the chock-a-block table composition and bare bones, but always perfectly lovely service. It’s that you can take both vegetarian friends and carnivorous pals here with very little dietary-requirement complexity. You can flick through the exhaustive menu and take a glance at the crowded daily specials on the chalkboard without worrying about taking a wrong turn — because it’s all beautiful eating. Word to the wise: be sure to order the podi idli. 

This is exactly the kind of calming, immaculate eating space you’ll want to slink into if you’ve been scouring the shops around town for a last-minute gift, or marching with a placard down Queen St, or watching an intellectually challenging film or theatre show nearby. On a recent visit, we noticed a diner at the neighbouring table grumpily lamenting the absence of comprehensive yum-cha-style dim sum dishes that they had expected. While their concerns seemed to dissipate upon the arrival of the many plates of food at their table, we feel we should caution you not to visit expecting an exhaustive range of dim sum. Instead the menu is short but totally sweet: xiao long bao, shao mai, a couple of steamed buns, a trio of wonton soups and a handful of noodle dishes — all made beautifully behind the front counter with a confident flourish. Tasty, delicate things across the board. That is essentially all there is to this place, and we love it for that.

There is a lot of justified love out there for restaurants that dedicate themselves to one specific dish and doing that dish to an exemplary standard. In this case, of Ten-hana, their singular focus on tempura bowls results in bouncy prawns, crescents of pumpkin and coins of zucchini crusted in light, shatteringly crunchy batter then arranged triumphantly atop beds of rice. This is not food that gets any better with time so you should eat it piping hot on site in their dining space at the top of the eerily quiet Atrium on Elliott, right outside the lobby of the Crowne Plaza hotel. And preferably in between sips of cold beer.

At their original site in the now-shuttered and much-missed central-city food court Food Alley, Thai E-Sarn had a fervent following for its Isaan (northeastern Thai) cuisine. After a short hiatus following the food court’s closure, they returned in 2021 with a standalone shop at the opposite end of Albert St. While we long for the $3.80 glasses of wine you could order from the neighbouring stall to accompany their food, and the general hum of the food court they once inhabited, we’re really just grateful to have them back at all. The noodles here are very good, as are the rice dishes like the khao khluk kapi — shrimp fried rice with additions like raw onion, chilli, sliced apple, braised pork and ribbons of egg omelette — which is hard to track down in Auckland. As it is their specialty, you should pay special attention to the “E-Sarn” section of the menu. More specifically you should look to the dedicated som tum menu, which features numerous renditions of the green-papaya-based salad — with mussels, or anchovies, or green banana, or pickled crab, or salted egg, and so on and forth. Sweet, sour, spicy, salty and thoroughly addictive.

This place is exceedingly popular with the denizens of Newmarket, its customer base made up mostly of shoppers and students and local office workers — essentially anyone looking for a quick, affordable feed. The main drawcard, noodles, are served speedily in soups, or with minced meat, or cold with a pile of shredded chicken and peanuts. You can adjust the noodles to your preference and heat level, which ranges from “tiny” to “extra hot”. There are also braised Sichuan-style nose-to-tails types of meats — for example, pig ears, chicken gizzards, ox tripe. Dumplings, too. And cauldron-like casserole dishes. We usually order a few of the snacks: sliced vegetables and meat which are cooked in a bubbling brew of oil, chillies and aromatics, and go for a dollar or two a pop. Almost everything here rings with the unmistakeable floral prickle of Sichuan peppers and livid chilli, which means you will probably get a fun, endorphin-fuelled rush — but you will also need something to dab your brow with.

On your first visit you might puzzle over the menu here — it’s extensive, roams over various culinary traditions and includes a fair number of terms which might cause intimidation if you’re unfamiliar. We usually skip right to the Nepali sections of the menu, where you will find quintessential dishes from a multitude of subsets of this diverse cuisine done to perfection: punchy, sometimes slightly fermented vegetarian curries, smoky sekewa and choila with its essential side of sonically crispy beaten rice. You will also encounter more than 30 kinds of laboriously pleated momo: filled with different things, cooked in different ways and paired with different sauces. So much to sample, so little time.