Sunday Painters

Highly Commended: Best Short Drinks List

Here’s another restaurant that’s not like any other in town. With beautiful green hand-painted walls, vintage stemmed water glasses and heavy patchwork curtains that spill across the floor, Esther Lamb and James Kirkwood have created a kind of old-fashioned fantasy drawing room, not so much snubbing the Ponsonby cool all around them as offering a delightful counterpoint to it. If New Zealand had places like this a hundred years ago, one feels, Katherine Mansfield would surely not have fled the country. The wine is chosen with fastidious care, while the food is based on French bistro classics with delectable modern twists: Scotch fillet with “bone marrow potatoes”, roast garlic and watercress; crab and saffron tart with tomato sorbet and shaved fennel; sardines in a beer batter; Clevedon buffalo mozzarella stuffed into a courgette flower with fried corn and tomato confit… Now open every night, and we love them for it. $$$$

4 Spoons

A favourite dish: Duck-neck sausage with lentils.

Free-range chicken and/or pork / Takes large groups / Good for kids