Auckland has a new obsession: British food. Within 200 metres of the Louis Vuitton store on Queen Street, two restaurants now serve eggs wrapped in sausage meat, pickled onions and piccalilli – and they're part of a wider wave of Brit-themed openings across the city.
The most prominent is Lottie's, from chef Josh Emett and his wife Helen, tucked up a marble staircase inside Faradays, the premium downtown department store. The dining room nods to the grand London stores Helen grew up visiting – she took lunch with her grandmother at Selfridges – with embroidered napkins and properly weighted cutlery. The menu so far includes quail Scotch eggs with housemade brown sauce, crab cakes, smoked eel salad, ploughman's lunches and an Earl Grey soft serve, with a high tea on the way. It has been full since opening.
Across the road, in a 1928 building named for the Duke of Windsor, Fable Auckland has launched The Windsor Room, a self-styled "chophouse of yesteryear" with white tablecloths and real candles. Expect Yorkshire pudding, deconstructed Eton Mess, cauliflower cheese croquettes, sherry trifle and a personal roast lamb with spuds, carrots and peas – a deliberate move away from shared plates towards big, comforting meals for one. Its signature Scotch egg is wrapped in black pudding with a piccalilli gel. Area general manager Sean Slattery is candid about the economics: bone marrow and parsley carry better margins than fillet steak at a time when, in his words, fine dining is struggling.
Out in Point Chevalier, Wilko's, a new "supper house", joined the trend on opening weekend with lamb sweetbreads and a burnt pickled onion and potato pizza – not strictly British, but firmly in comfort-food territory.
Auckland loves a bandwagon – last summer was tacos, this winter was bathing in pasta sauce – but this one is global. American outlets have tracked the rise of the traditional English pub stateside, from Beef Wellington in Fort Worth to Guinness-gravy lamb shanks in Seattle, with sticky toffee pudding seemingly everywhere.
The appeal, per Emett, is simplicity done properly. He spent 12 years cooking in the UK – "hard, hard, hard" years that included running London's Savoy Grill – and learned that straightforward dishes demand precise execution. When a British newspaper once asked famous chefs how to boil an egg, his answer won: five minutes, no fuss.
For travellers, this is a reason to add a long lunch to any Auckland itinerary. The two Queen Street spots are steps from the waterfront and each other, making an easy chophouse-versus-department-store crawl. Just don't wear the $1269 feathered cotton sweatshirt from the shop downstairs while eating a crumbly Scotch egg.
