Apr 9, 2019 Cheap Eats
New Flavour is back and as good as ever, with a newly truncated menu to help diners avoid becoming overwhelmed by choice.
With repainted walls, new wooden tables, wooden floors, slick lighting and new kitchen equipment, the unembellished New Flavour is the same as always, but with an eye to conscious simplicity.
The decor update is subtle but if you look closely, everything has been made a little tidier and the new shorter version of the menu is a stroke of genius and exactly what we didn’t know we needed.
Everything that was available before (all 200 or so dishes) can still be found on a long copy of the menu (so all your old favourites are still there). But a new single-page menu of 30 dishes recommends the restaurants specialties, saving you from becoming overwhelmed or overlooking a section you might have loved.
The short menu samples the most popular dishes from each section of the long menu. It includes jellyfish and cucumber salad, served in a soy and vinegar sauce (give it a try if you’re a ceviche fan), Laobian dumplings (this style of dumplings infuses the stir-fried meat with soup or stock before wrapping to increase the flavour), and a few other fried, saucy or pancake dishes make an appearance. Only the best-loved dishes New Flavour wants to showcase make the cut onto the short menu – so you can’t go wrong.
The drinks menu is short and sweet, with only 3 or 4 wines to choose from and even fewer beers. But if the constant stream of patrons arriving with bottles of wine is anything to go by, the BYO option is well-loved enough that few people are looking at the drinks list. The customers bustling in an out might be enough to draw you in – but even so, try to book ahead. That or risk being one of the groups turned away.
We first announced New Flavour’s relaunch in our April food guide for Auckland.
