Auckland eats by precinct

Why Auckland's food scene confuses visitors

Most cities give you a main restaurant street. Auckland does not. What it has instead is a series of separate villages that were absorbed by the city and kept their character, each with its own strip, and none of them within comfortable walking distance of the others.

That is why visitors staying on Queen Street often conclude Auckland's food is mediocre. Queen Street is not where Auckland eats. It is where Auckland catches a bus.

The other thing to understand is the demographic one. Auckland is home to people from roughly 180 nationalities and has the largest Polynesian population of any city on earth. That shows up in the food more honestly in a South Auckland food court on a Saturday than in any restaurant with a harbour view.

What to actually eat: the New Zealand specifics

Australian visitors will find much of Auckland's food familiar, which makes it easy to miss the things that are genuinely different. A short list of what to look for.

• Green-lipped mussels. Endemic to New Zealand, farmed extensively in the Marlborough Sounds and the Coromandel, much larger than a blue mussel and sweeter. Steamed with wine and garlic is the standard treatment and it is hard to improve on.
• Bluff oysters, if you are here between roughly March and August. Dredged wild from Foveaux Strait at the bottom of the South Island, and among the best oysters in the world. Short season, high price, and worth it once.
• Crāyfish — the spiny rock lobster. Expensive everywhere, and a treat rather than a meal.
• Snapper. The default New Zealand table fish and the one the Hauraki Gulf is known for. Also look for tarakihi, gurnard, john dory and kahawai.
• Whitebait fritters in spring — a patty of tiny translucent fish bound with egg. Extremely expensive, culturally significant, and honestly an acquired taste.
• Kūmara. Sweet potato, brought by Māori from Polynesia, and a staple. The orange, gold and red varieties all behave differently. Roasted or as chips.
• Hāngi — meat and vegetables steamed in an earth oven. Mostly encountered at cultural experiences in Rotorua rather than in Auckland restaurants.
• Pacific food. Palusāmi (taro leaves in coconut cream), lu pulu, oka (raw fish in coconut and lime), and umu-cooked food. Otara Market on a Saturday morning and the South Auckland strips are where to find it.
• Manuka honey, which you will be sold at every airport. The graded, high-UMF product is genuinely different and genuinely expensive; the cheap jars are ordinary honey with a good label.
• Hokey pokey ice cream and pavlova, the latter of which New Zealand and Australia will never stop arguing about.

One practical thing: New Zealand's biosecurity rules on departure and arrival are strict and enforced. Honey, fresh produce and anything wooden or containing seeds needs declaring. Do not put an apple in your bag on the way to the airport.

Ponsonby: the dinner one

Ponsonby Road runs along a ridge about two kilometres west of the CBD, and it is Auckland's most consistently good eating strip. Villas, verandahs, and a mile of restaurants, wine bars and small shops.

What it is good at: dinner, and long weekend brunches. The strip covers most cuisines, the wine lists are the best in the city on average, and the atmosphere on a summer evening — tables out on the footpath, the light going gold — is the closest Auckland gets to feeling Mediterranean.

Ponsonby Central, a converted warehouse block just off the main road, is the practical answer for a group that cannot agree. Multiple kitchens under one roof, shared seating, no bookings needed for most of it.

Adjacent and worth the extra ten minutes' walk: Grey Lynn to the west, quieter and more residential, and Herne Bay down the hill toward the water.

Practicalities: it is about a 25-minute walk or a short ride from the CBD, and it is uphill on the way out. Book for Friday and Saturday nights. Parking is difficult.

Britomart: the lunch and after-work one

Britomart is the block of restored heritage warehouses immediately behind the ferry terminal, and it is the most successful piece of urban regeneration in the city. Twenty years ago it was a bus depot and car parks. Now it is laneways, brick, and a dense cluster of good restaurants and bars.

What it is good at: lunch, coffee, and the hour between five and seven. It is where people who work in the city eat, which means it is busy on weekdays and noticeably quieter on Sundays — the opposite pattern to Ponsonby.

The advantage for visitors is position. Britomart is the transport hub — trains underneath, buses outside, ferries a two-minute walk away. If you are catching a Waiheke or Devonport ferry, this is where you eat before or after, and it is genuinely good rather than merely convenient.

Commercial Bay, the retail and dining complex next door, adds a large food hall with harbour views. It is more of a shopping-centre experience but the quality is decent and it solves the group-with-children problem.

Coffee, which Auckland takes seriously

Australians arriving in Auckland can relax on this front. New Zealand's coffee culture developed alongside Australia's and to broadly the same standard, and the vocabulary is identical — flat white, long black, piccolo. Order a flat white almost anywhere in central Auckland and you will get a competent one.

A few things are worth knowing:

• The flat white's origin is disputed between Auckland, Wellington and Sydney, and everyone involved is certain they invented it. Do not adjudicate this in a café.
• Independent roasters dominate. Auckland has a substantial local roasting industry and most good cafés pour a local roast rather than a national chain's. If a place is proud of the beans, the board will tell you whose they are.
• Brunch is the main event. New Zealand's weekend brunch culture is closer to Melbourne's than to anywhere else — big menus, long sittings, and queues at the better places from about nine on a Saturday. Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, Kingsland and Mount Eden Village are the strongest brunch areas.
• Cafés close early. A lot of good Auckland cafés stop serving mid-afternoon and are shut by four. The city's coffee culture is a daytime one; evening coffee is a restaurant thing.
• Filter and single-origin are available but espresso is the default. Ask for a batch brew and you will get one in the specialty places and a puzzled look elsewhere.

Where to go depends on where you are. Britomart and Commercial Bay serve the office trade well from early. Ponsonby Road and the surrounding streets are the weekend heartland. Kingsland, on the train line, is a small strip that punches well above its size. Parnell suits a slower morning. And Karangahape Road has the most interesting coffee in the city, generally poured in the smallest rooms.

Karangahape Road: the late one

K' Road runs along the ridge at the top of Queen Street and has been Auckland's counterculture strip for decades — a mix of vintage shops, galleries, late bars, and some of the city's most interesting small restaurants.

What it is good at: dinner that turns into a night, and cheap, excellent food. The stretch has a strong South-East Asian and Middle Eastern presence, a lot of it in small rooms with paper menus. It is also where a good deal of Auckland's music happens.

It is scruffier than Ponsonby and that is the point. Some visitors love it immediately, some find it a bit much. If you have been to Newtown in Sydney or Fitzroy in Melbourne, you will know within a block whether it is for you.

The City Rail Link's Karanga-a-Hape station has changed the access considerably — it is no longer a climb up from the city.

The suburban strips worth the trip

Beyond the six main precincts, Auckland's food is scattered through a set of small suburban village strips, most of them a short train or bus ride from the CBD. They are where Aucklanders eat on a weeknight.

• Kingsland — one block of New North Road beside the train station, and a remarkable hit rate for its size. Good for dinner before or after something at Eden Park.
• Mount Eden Village — a genuine village strip at the foot of the maunga, strong on brunch and neighbourhood restaurants.
• Grey Lynn and Westmere — quieter than Ponsonby, ten minutes further, and often better value for the same quality.
• Point Chevalier — a small strip that has improved sharply, with a good beach at the end of it.
• Takapuna — across the bridge on the North Shore, with a beach, a Sunday market and a solid restaurant strip.
• Devonport — a twelve-minute ferry, and the eating is better than a village that size has any right to expect.
• Onehunga — the Dress Smart outlet centre draws the crowds, but the Onehunga Mall strip has become genuinely interesting.

The general rule in Auckland is that the further you get from a harbour view, the better the food-to-price ratio becomes. That is not a criticism of the waterfront — it is just how cities price outlook.

Parnell and Newmarket: the daytime ones

Parnell is the oldest suburb in Auckland and the prettiest of the strips — a gentle slope of restored colonial buildings, galleries and cafes, sitting between the Domain and the harbour. It is a lunch and brunch precinct rather than a dinner one. Pair it with the museum, the Domain, or the Parnell Rose Gardens, and go on a Saturday morning when the farmers' market is on.

Newmarket, one ridge over, is shopping first and food second, but the food has improved considerably. It is where Aucklanders go for retail, and the cafes are geared to that — efficient, good coffee, decent food, not somewhere you linger for three hours.

Both are on the train line, which makes them easy from the CBD without a car.

South Auckland and the Pacific side

This is the part most visitors never see and the part we would push hardest.

Otara Market runs on Saturday mornings from around 6am in the car park by the Manukau Institute of Technology, and it is the largest Polynesian market in the world. Taro, green bananas, umu-cooked food, Tongan and Samoan and Cook Islands stalls, a lot of noise, and prices that bear no relation to the central city. It winds up by midday, so this is an early start.

The night markets rotate through car parks across South and West Auckland on different nights of the week — Pakuranga, Papatoetoe, Henderson and others. They are predominantly Asian food, dozens of stalls, and cheap. Check which one runs on which night before you set out.

Dominion Road, closer in, is Auckland's Chinese food spine — several kilometres of regional Chinese restaurants, hand-pulled noodles and dumpling houses, and better value than anything you will find downtown.

You need a car or a rideshare for Otara and the night markets. It is worth it. This is where the claim that Auckland is a Pacific city stops being a tourism-board line and becomes obviously true.

Beer, bars and what to drink that isn't wine

New Zealand's craft beer scene is disproportionately large for the population and it leans hard on one thing: the country's hop varieties.

New Zealand grows hops in the Nelson region at the top of the South Island, and the varieties bred there — Nelson Sauvin, Motueka, Riwaka, Wai-iti among them — produce aromatics you do not get from American or European hops. Nelson Sauvin in particular gives a distinctly white-wine, gooseberry character that is now sought after by brewers worldwide. If you drink beer at all, drinking a New Zealand-hopped pale ale in New Zealand is one of the more genuinely local things available.

Where to find it in Auckland:

• Ponsonby and Grey Lynn — several good beer-focused bars along and just off Ponsonby Road.
• Karangahape Road — the best density of interesting bars in the city, beer and otherwise, and where the night runs latest.
• Britomart — polished cocktail bars and after-work drinking, busiest Thursday and Friday.
• The Viaduct and North Wharf — outdoor tables and a view, which is what you are paying for.
• Brewery taprooms across the inner suburbs — a number of Auckland breweries run their own bars, generally in industrial buildings in places like Kingsland, Morningside and Onehunga.

On the non-alcoholic side, New Zealand does very good soft drinks and the low-and-no beer category is well developed. L&P — Lemon & Paeroa, a lemon soft drink originally made with mineral water from the Waikato town of Paeroa — is the national one, and trying it is a rite of passage even though most New Zealanders will tell you it is too sweet.

Licensing note: bars and restaurants generally serve until late in the central city, but supermarket and bottle-shop alcohol sales stop at 11pm and, for supermarkets, do not start before 7am. Sunday trading is unrestricted.

The wine, which is closer than you think

Two wine regions sit within an hour of the Sky Tower, and they are completely different.

Waiheke is the famous one — a 40-minute ferry, more than thirty wineries, Bordeaux-style reds and syrah, and cellar doors with Hauraki Gulf views. It is a whole day. We have written about how to spend it separately.

Kumeu and the north-west is the older one and the one Aucklanders actually use. Twenty-five minutes' drive from the CBD, settled by Croatian families from the early 1900s, and known above all for chardonnay of genuinely international standing. It is unglamorous, working, and much cheaper than Waiheke. It also pairs neatly with a Muriwai gannet-colony morning, since they are on the same side of the city.

If you have one day for wine and want the view, take Waiheke. If you have one day and want the wine, take Kumeu.

Kumeu and Matakana, in more detail

Waiheke gets the attention. The two mainland wine districts within an hour of the city are less glamorous, considerably cheaper, and in one case make better wine.

Kumeu and the north-west is Auckland's original wine country, twenty-five minutes out on the motorway. It was settled from the early 1900s largely by Croatian families, many from Dalmatia, who came to New Zealand to dig kauri gum in Northland and moved south to plant vines. Several of the founding families are still making wine on the same land four generations on.

The region's reputation rests on chardonnay, and it is a serious reputation — the best Kumeu chardonnays are routinely rated alongside Burgundy in international blind tastings, which is not a claim New Zealand makes lightly about anything other than sauvignon blanc. There is also good pinot gris, some genuinely interesting merlot and cabernet franc from the warmer sites, and increasing plantings of albariño.

It is flat, semi-rural and being steadily encircled by Auckland's northwestern growth, so go for the wine rather than the view. Tasting fees are low or waived, cellar doors are minutes apart, and it pairs perfectly with a Muriwai morning.

Matakana is an hour north, past Warkworth, and is the prettier proposition. A small district of boutique wineries working with syrah, pinot gris and Mediterranean varieties in a warm coastal pocket, alongside olive groves, an art trail, and a Saturday farmers' market that is one of the best in the region.

Matakana works as a full day rather than a stop: market in the morning, a winery or two, lunch in the village, and then either Tawharanui Regional Park — an open sanctuary with predator-proof fencing and an excellent surf beach — or Goat Island Marine Reserve, New Zealand's first, where you can snorkel among large snapper that have never been fished.

Choosing: Kumeu for the best wine and the shortest drive. Matakana for the best day out. Waiheke for the view and the reputation. If you have one wine day and a car, we would send you to Matakana; if you have half a day, Kumeu.

Practical notes

• Book Friday and Saturday. Auckland's good restaurants are small and the city eats out heavily on weekends.
• Sunday and Monday are quiet. A number of the better kitchens close. Britomart in particular thins out at the weekend.
• Tipping is not expected. Not in restaurants, not in taxis. Staff are paid a proper wage. Round up if you want to.
• Coffee is taken seriously, as in Australia. Order a flat white and it will be good almost anywhere.
• Getting between precincts: Britomart, Parnell and Newmarket are on the train. Ponsonby and K' Road are walkable from the CBD if you do not mind hills. The night markets and Otara need a car.
• Cash is useful at the markets and almost nowhere else.