Aug 7, 2024 Restaurants
The opening of Bianca feels something like a karmic full circle. When I started at Metro, in 2019, Cotto — the pop-up-turned-real-restaurant by chefs Hayden Phiskie and John Pountney — was undeniably one of the city’s coolest restaurants. It was loud, lively, inexpensive, flavorful and fun. It was a real scene, and if you wanted in, that could mean milling around Karangahape Rd for a couple of hours waiting for a table. Cotto seemed to have cracked the recipe for a successful modern restaurant. Delicious food that was prep-intensive beforehand but quick to fire and deliver of an evening, so the food came fast, the wine flowed and the tables were turned. What could go wrong?
Five years later, Cotto is now Otto, after being brought back to life by Pountney (and others) from its initially mysterious early-summer closing stemming from alleged mismanagement by owner Craig Anderson; and Phiskie, after stints at Daphnes and then Ada , has recently opened Bianca, a new pasta shop and restaurant in Ellerslie.
After the disruptions of first Covid and then the cost-of-living crisis, many restaurateurs are looking to find new ways to make providing people with food a more sustainable business. For Phiskie that means combining casual neighbourhood dining with readymade retail in the form of Italian deli items and a fridge full of drinks, cheeses, and fresh pasta in a bag with a sauce, ready for you to heat up in your own home.
The deli is open all day offering these readymade items and (I assume) coffees, but when we visit in the early evening Bianca is definitely in full restaurant mode. The menu is short and seasonal, with focaccia always available, plus a handful of entrées and about four kinds of pasta, which change regularly depending on what’s available.
We started with the burrata — a cliché for any even slightly Italian restaurant at this point, but it was hard to resist on a sunny evening a few days away from the end of daylight savings. Here, the big ball of soft cheese was served on warm marsala-soaked peaches and slightly charred red pepper — a portrait of autumn. The pizzetta was small, thick, chewy, cheesy and a little spicy from the dose of ’nduja — hardly a lightning bolt of inspiration but well done, and appropriately sized as an entrée for sharing. But the beef tartare, on the other hand, was inventive and exciting, thanks to currants adding a sweet fruitiness and with anchovy mayonnaise in lieu of an egg. It was the dish I could easily have eaten a lot more of.
For the pasta course, we started with a slightly pink ricotta-filled ravioli, topped with lashings of beetroot purée, poppy-seed butter and a wonderfully thick aged balsamic. It was warm and savoury and subtle. The cappelletti (named for their round hat shape) were filled with delicate prawns, served with a saffron mascarpone sauce and sprinkled with a salty anchovy crumb. The pasta was thick and robust, keeping the upright integrity of the dish, and most definitely firm to the bite — probably, along with the tartare, the savoury highlight of the meal. The finale was a tortiglioni, with a thick, tender lamb shank ragù and just a hint of chilli. Less skillfully showy, it was as rusticly satisfying as the more immediately impressive dishes. Across the board, the pasta itself, in every instance, was excellent.
For dessert, we had a panna cotta with brown-butter caramel that was close to perfect — wonderfully smooth and jiggly. By the end, there was little evidence that there had ever been food on that plate. The tiramisu tart (recommended by the waiter), on the other hand, was left unfinished. It was too big, had too much crust and too little moisture. Once you got past the cream-dominant top, it became somewhat of a dry sponge with a thin layer of chocolate mousse. It sounds good on paper — a chocolate crust, chocolate mousse, tiramisu filling and cream on top (a throwback to the dessert-only restaurants of the 1990s, perhaps) — but instead it left us wishing we had a straight-up tiramisu rather than one with a format twist.
The drinks list is dominated by (or perhaps even exclusive to) the distributor Wine Diamonds and so has a short but well-chosen selection of mostly natural wines, some by tap. While this means Bianca’s wine list will generally contain some well-known favourites (including our head wine judge’s Halcyon Days), it does mean that there is the possibility of a diner’s over-familiarity with the wines and the list’s over-similarity with that of other Wine Diamonds-heavy restaurants, especially when it comes to the increasingly ubiquitous Still Life. This, of course, is not going to be an issue for many people, and the focus here is definitely on ease of enjoyment and pairability with the pasta — this isn’t a restaurant for bankers with expense accounts to go drink rare Barolos or anything like that.
The space is small but open and inviting, the open kitchen not so much a visual centrepiece as in modern fine-dining tasting restaurants, but there’s a casual conduit between chef and diners, with few waitstaff in between. In the fit-out and the menu, there is an overall feeling of experience, of having only what is needed and none of what is extraneous — all aspects of the restaurant are simple and well done. If you know Phiskie’s history, you can sense the lessons learnt from The Refreshment Room, from Cotto and from Ada. It is none of those restaurants but has a little of all of them.
As a neighbourhood restaurant, it makes food for a community that, by all accounts, loves it. It is not for nothing that most of the word-of-mouth that had reached me about Bianca was from people who live in nearby suburbs and are more than pleased about the addition to the neighbourhood. Sure, it’s not as ambitious as The Refreshment Room was, as cool as Cotto was, or as fancy as Ada is. And yes, a plate of pasta is $35, but this magazine runs enough notices of closing restaurants, enough articles about the troubling state of the hospitality industry, hears enough gossip about restaurants that aren’t paying their staff properly, to know that maybe a plate of pasta (skilfully made with high-quality/expensive ingredients) needs to be $35 for a certain business model to work long-term. Yes, there are other business models, but if the people you’re trying to serve are happy to pay $50 each for pasta and a glass of wine, or $120 or so for three courses and a shared bottle, hopefully we live in a world where that’s sustainable in the long run. If that means not having the coolest furniture in town, or not having a bunch of art on the walls that you probably ignore anyway, so be it. I’m totally fine with it. And Ellerslie seems fine with it, too.
Bianca ***
2 Robert St, Ellerslie
@bianca.akl
Hours
Tuesday–Saturday 11am–10pm
Dinner Bill
Breads, entrées and salads $6–$25
Mains $32–$35
Desserts $10–$18
