Antoines Reviewed By Metro

Reprinted with permission from Metro magazine and Metrolive

ANTOINES
Three Stars

There’s congee on the menu now at Antoines. It’s a gluggy rice porridge, but in other respects it doesn’t resemble anything you might buy from a Cantonese foodstall. This is a rich man’s congee: the rice plays second fiddle to the flavourings, and the flavourings include snails.

The dish attests to owner and chef Tony Astle’s ability to push boundaries, to his pleasure at delighting his customers and to the complexity of his food. The congee is sweet and savoury, sticky and slippery, and delicious, which is what really counts. It also reveals a sly sense of humour: in this quintessentially French restaurant, is snail congee a fusion dish or a joke about fusion?

The fame of Astle’s food rests largely on his “nostalgia” menu, comprising popular dishes through the ages (hat tip to a man who’s still behind the stoves every day, after 35 years). A caesar salad, lots of offal and slow-cooked casseroles. You can also choose from a regular menu and the specials.
The nostalgia food is for treasuring. Tripe with onions, livers with bacon, an unctuous oxtail stew. My mother made these dishes and, for me, to eat them here is to revisit childhood tastes made a hundred times fonder by Astle’s skill. Nostalgia indeed.

Surprisingly, the other parts of the menu are little different. The very lovely lambs’ brains are a “special” but works the same memorable taste trick. The fish of the day is on the mains menu but is served with a classic lemon-and-caper sauce. The dessert menu is also full of old favourites, with jelly and ice cream, pavlova, soufflé and a bread-and-butter pudding whose plump, juicy fruit, tangy peel and gorgeous mellow custard completely won me over. The servings are big at Antoines but, whatever you do, save room for pudding.

Astle has a supremely controlled, consistent style. It’s orthodox French: the soul of almost every dish oozes from its sauce, invariably a smooth and subtle reduction, very often based on liquor. Fillet steak comes in a brandy sauce, oxtail in red wine, duck in Grand Marnier.

If food can be compared to music, Astle makes a pretty good Mozart. That duck, with its liquor, oranges, spices and herbs, is his Don Giovanni; each dish of offal, each pudding, is a quietly rapturous concerto. There may even be, somewhere on the lengthy menu, a Requiem Mass.

Is Mozart enough? Is there too much cleverness and not enough life? Too many notes? This is a question of personal taste.

The service at Antoines is personable and impeccable. The wine list is long and strong. The restaurant is housed in one of Parnell’s ubiquitous brick-pathed villas, where the ambience of fine dining in the 1970s is preserved, complete with heavy drapes. It feels, in fact, just like the Wellington restaurants La Normandie and The Coachman where Astle learned his trade.

Not surprisingly, the fashionable do not come here. But the powerful do. Antoines is a club dining room for the polished class, and more: it’s a stake in the ground for a golden age conjured from childhood, classic cuisine, the sensibility of a much-faded Mozartian Vienna and the enthusiasm of the 1980s. Even the credit-card transactions are done with a zip zap. That congee doesn’t spell modernisation; rather, it’s another classic dish for the repertoire.
Tony Astle lives in this fabled age still, and every night invites happy customers to join him there.     SIMON WILSON

ANTOINES
Address: 333 Parnell Rd, Parnell, ph 379-8756.
Hours:  Lunch: Wednesday to Friday, 12pm to 2pm. Dinner: Monday to Saturday, from 6pm. Supper: Monday to Saturday, until late.
Bill: Entrées $20-$30; mains $38-$48; desserts $20-$25.
Stand-out dish: Antoines’ designer bread-and-butter pudding.
Noise: Conversationally comfortable.
Chef: Tony Astle.

How Metro reviews:
Metro is the only publication in New Zealand that visits restaurants anonymously at least twice. We pay in full and sample at least two courses on our visits.
One star:  very good but some weaknesses
Two stars: extremely good
Three stars: excellent

Check out more Metro restaurant reviews on www.metrolive.co.nz and in every issue of Metro magazine.

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