Earlier this year, Sid at The French Café — which this icon of Auckland fine dining had been called since Sid and Chand Sahrawat bought it in 2018 — was cut in half. The main space of the restaurant was transformed into Anise, a more casual (the white tablecloths gone for good), Asian fusion restaurant of around 70 seats. The private dining room of Sid at The French was lightly modified to become, once again, The French Café.

One could be forgiven, on hearing the news of the transformation, for giving in to temptation and declaring (once again) the death of fine dining. After visiting the renewed restaurant, however, we came away thinking that rather than being shunted off to the side, The French Café has, in fact, found a perfectly-sized new home for this new chapter of its evolution. To give us a better perspective of the various eras of this storied restaurant, we dined there with Connie Clarkson — food evangelist, business mentor, manager of the Kitchen Project, founder of Metro’s Cheap Eats, and former owner of The French Café. 

Clarkson and two others bought the restaurant in 1995 from Annie Mantell and Barrington Salter, who had started it in 1981 (the same year this magazine was founded). Clarkson had no hospitality experience, but after three months she split with her business partners and began running it by herself. Thrown in the deep end, she learnt quickly, by trial and error. She remembers dropping an entire tray of wine glasses as she didn’t know how to carry it properly. When a guest ordered an old bottle of French wine from the cellar, she had to call a friend to ask how much to charge. 

In 1999, as preparations for the forthcoming America’s Cup began to suck the city’s life towards the waterfront, Clarkson sold the restaurant to husband-and-wife duo Creghan Molloy-Wright (front-of-house, sommelier) and Simon Wright (chef). Under their care, The French Café evolved in a modern fine-dining direction and expanded physically, too. In Clarkson’s day, the room which is now the entirety of the restaurant was the home of the guy who owned the bike shop on the corner of Symonds St and Khyber Pass Rd, and what is now the wine cellar and private dining room was a hair salon.

Dining with Clarkson, you’re constantly aware that you’re with a former restaurateur and current business mentor. She counts how many empty seats are in each room, knows how much the tablecloths cost to wash, and works out how many employees there are per diner. The night we dined, the room was full, and if the online booking system is to be believed, that was true for most of the week. Now that the restaurant is a dégustation-only restaurant again (in its later days as Sid at The French, the Sahrawats had experimented with different offerings), everyone is eating the same thing; we watched waves of the set menu rippling out from the kitchen. Most of the prep must be done in the main kitchen, shared with Anise, but the final dishes are executed at the prominent kitchen island just a few metres from the tables. The dining room is clean and welcoming — formal enough that it feels like a special occasion just being there, but not so formal that it’s stuffy or uncomfortable. All of which leads to the new, reduced French Café seeming very much at home in its more intimate space. 

Before dinner, we’d been concerned that the reborn restaurant might feel like just an afterthought — a slightly more formal one — next to the sparkling new Anise. Or, worse, like a restaurant shuffled off to a hospice bed, waiting for its plug to be pulled. On being seated, however, we were quickly relieved: it is a fully-realised, independent restaurant with its own ambience, identity (except when you order wine by the glass — having to do so from an Anise menu does burst the bubble a little), and, yes, white tablecloths. The food is uniformly excellent, the pan-Asian fusion evident in varying iterations across the Sahrawat stable effortlessly combining with the restaurant’s past DNA. The best dishes — like the duck with macadamia, prune, kombu, cacao — wear this heritage proudly, yet are completely contemporary in their flavour combinations and textural execution. They’re among the best dishes this city has to offer. 

When the Sahrawats announced the latest changes to The French Café, Sid was quoted as saying the couple felt like custodians of the restaurant and its important place in the country’s dining landscape. We’re glad to know that the restaurant has found a new, more sustainable size and shape without losing what’s made it so good for so long. We hope it continues. Long live The French Café!