Andiamo
Squid ink pappardelle with crayfish ragu and gremolata
Heirloom tomatoes, peaches, basil, pomegranate and buffalo mozzarella
I should start by saying that I had high hopes for Andiamo. A well-known suburban restaurant beloved by the residents of Jervois Road and beyond, it has had many iterations over the years. Its most recent form is as an Italian trattoria and is part of the Nourish Group, with a menu written by celebrity chef Gareth Stewart. It has been on my ‘to visit’ list forever and it remained a mystery why it took so long for me to come around to it. But by the end of dinner I knew why.
The menu reads well enough: pastas, a hefty selection of fresh seafood, antipasti if you are so inclined. It wasn’t hard to pick, Mitchell practically dove at the macaroni and cheese while I went straight for the words ‘squid ink’ and ‘octopus’. The overall experience was okay, but it wasn’t great. Let me preface my assessment with examples.
It is high summer and tis the season for tomatoes and peaches. What better way to enjoy them than both together in a salad with basil, pomegranate and milky buffalo mozzarella? Except the tomatoes were watery and bland, and the peaches anaemic and shrivelled. The peaches were clearly not ripe enough to pass the muster in a salad without cooking them to concentrate their flavour, but in the process they’d become wizened and sad. Lillian has done an absolutely stellar version of this in the past, though I note that peaches have been left off Lillian’s menu this year, a sign their chef is above putting subpar produce on their menu.
Andiamo’s macaroni and cheese is a dish of notoriety, Eat Lit Food’s Albert Cho having posted about no less than four times about it in the last 12 months. It features fontina, cheddar, parmesan, truffle, bacon and chilli, and it was still disappointing. Although my menu had been taken away from me, I hadn’t forgotten that truffle was meant to feature in this mac ‘n’ cheese yet I struggled to find this fragrant fungi. Rather than a gooey, slick sauce holding the dish together, it seemed the dish was just melted cheese on macaroni elbows, making it greasy and a little chalky in the way that unbound melted cheese gets. Mac ‘n’ cheese is as much about texture as it is about cheese and whilst cheesy it was, my mouth felt no joy.
Macaroni, fontina, cheddar, parmesan, truffle, bacon, chilli.
Octopus, black olives, golden raisins, kale
The charred octopus was the favourite thing I ate, toothsomely tender as it should be, with a tasty albeit not especially imaginative sauce with the umami saltiness of Kalamata olives, sweetness of golden raisins and slight bitterness of crispy kale. I adore squid ink, a flavour so hard to put your finger on that when you see it on a menu, you must order it to remind yourself of why it tastes so good. It has a subtle brininess to it and is spectacularly jet black. Andiamo served their delicate black noodles of squid ink pappardelle in a crayfish ragu. It does seem rather blasphemous to serve seafood of any kind, let alone crayfish, as a ragu but it worked, the sauce reminiscent of a tomatoey crayfish bisque, only there was too much salt in it. Like, hand me a jug of water that is way too much salt salty. The splodges of lemony gremolata were not enough to flush all the salt of Neptune’s ocean from my mouth.
Tiramisu
Wanting to end dinner on a more positive note I insisted we stay for the tiramisu. Because who can mess up a tiramisu? They didn’t, but they did make us wait half an hour before the tiramisu finally arrived. Our main courses arrived in shorter time than that. The presentation was also a little interesting, the distribution of cocoa looked like someone had sneezed it on. But aside from that the tiramisu was exemplary and I particularly liked the addition of crushed amaretti biscuits on top which added another textural element and sweet, almondy scent. element and sweet, almondy scent.
I’m sorry if I sound like a negative Nancy. As I said, dinner was mostly tasty but there were too many flaws to leave unmentioned, from a restaurant that by reputation prides itself as one of Auckland’s best and makes you pay accordingly.
Andiamo
194 Jervois Road
Auckland
Ph. (09) 378 7811
@andiamoeatery
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