EAT HERE NOW

We started Eat Here Now after years of being asked by friends and colleagues where to eat in Auckland. After a while, we realised that people were crying out for a new kind of restaurant reviewing: an online guide that gives it to you straight, with no fuss or faff.

We won’t tell you what the weather was like the night we visited a restaurant and we don’t give our dining partners nicknames like “the princess” or “the teacher”. That’s not going to help you decide where to take your Mum for lunch when she’s in town for a few days. You won’t find advertorial here, either: the restaurants featured on this site have all been visited anonymously, often several times, and have no prior knowledge that they’ve been reviewed.

You also won’t find unmoderated user-driven reviews in which the writer tells you their steak was “nice” – there’s more than enough of that already. And we firmly believe that the last thing you need to read is yet another biting review of some hapless restaurant – that’s self-serving and helps no one, so we only publish reviews of places that we really think are worth consideration. That’s not to say these are slavishly positive reviews: if we see faults, we’ll call ‘em.

What you will find are two experienced restaurant reviewers telling you where they think is good to eat in Auckland.

SIMON FARRELL-GREEN is a former food editor and senior writer for Metro magazine, where he reviewed bars and restaurants for five years after graduating from the University of Canterbury’s journalism school. After an eating tour that stretched from Ho Chi Minh City to Sansepolcro, Tuscany, he settled in London where he worked for Esquire and lived in a council flat two minutes’ walk from the Borough Market. Returning to Auckland in mid-2009, he now freelances for the likes of KiaOra (the Air New Zealand magazine), Monocle and Metro, where you’ll find columns on eating and drinking, as well as the occasional feature on topics as varied as bread and the politics of waste. You can hear him speaking to Charlotte Ryan every Friday morning at 9.40 about eating in Auckland.

Rainy Thursday night dinner Summer: cherry tomatoes, cooked ever so quickly until they melt, thrown over spaghetti with lots of basil. Winter: pork chops with fennel and chestnuts.
Takeout coffee Mine – very strong plunger in a thermos. I buy my beans from Good One.
My local restaurant Ella Cafe, an unfailingly good bistro on Ponsonby Road. Small, woodsy, candle-lit, reasonably priced, great food.
Food bible Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child.
Auckland secret The Shanghainese breakfast dumplings from Little Fatty (AKA Tasty Takeaways) on New North Road in Mt Albert: they’re half fried, half steamed and they have boiling stock inside.

NATALIE SMITH started writing for the online magazine Runway Reporter when she was still studying towards a post-graduate diploma of journalism at AUT. From there, she got her first taste reviewing at Metro magazine before moving to Sydney, where she worked for Russh and did a stint at an advertising agency. Since returning to Auckland, she has written for the likes of Metro, Canvas, US Nylon, Kia Ora and the Sunday Star-Times and is a partner in the boutique creative firm Smith & Sumner. When she’s not doing all that, you’ll find her blogging at Magic Surrounds.

Rainy Thursday night dinner Spring Pasta.
Takeout coffee A soy flat white from Mister Morning on K’Rd. With rapadura sugar.
My local restaurant Coco’s Cantina – cosy, close to home and full of happy memories.
Food bible Yotam Ottolenghi’s Ottolenghi, Ferran Adria’s The Family Meal.
Auckland secret Bulgarian feta at Khyber Spice in Sandringham.

DAVID STRAIGHT is Eat Here Now’s photographer. After studying at Massey University in Wellington, the Auckland photographer worked his way around the planet – he interned at Magnum Photographers in New York in 2006, then shifted to London where he lived and worked for three years assisting a celebrity photographer on shoots as varied as James Bond and Dior in such exotic locales as the Bahamas. David is obsessed with books. His first photography book, The End of London, was recently shortlisted for the Dummy Book Prize at the International Photo Book Festival in Kassel, Germany and has since self published, and is working on, several more. You can see his work at www.davidstraight.net