Jesse Mulligan: Northcote Point’s New Italian Restaurant Sfera Is Casual, Buzzy & Deliciously Good Value
Can the team behind a former Viva Top 50 Best Restaurant strike gold again?
After my evisceration of Kureta last week, a nice man from their PR team got in touch.
“Thank you for your honest review,” he wrote, convincingly. “Give us 30 days to work on your feedback then come back and see how we’ve improved.”
You need steely nerves to do this job, but even I will struggle to return and sit face to face for three hours with a knife-wielding chef I just slated in print. Perhaps I’ll eventually summon the courage but until then you should know that the restaurant (which has huge potential) is working hard on rapid improvement. I suspect there’d be no better time to visit.
It was slightly less awkward when I wandered past the Engine Room last week and ran into manager Natalia Schamroth enjoying the sun and chatting to some locals. “Thanks for the glowing review!” she waved, though when I slowed down to chat, she admitted that after a run on the ultra-value $49 steaks I’d raved about a couple of weeks ago, she’s now reluctantly had to raise them to $52. At that price they’re still among the best tasting and least expensive in town.
But I couldn’t stand there chewing the fat with Natalia all day. I had business across the road at Sfera, a new opening where the scotch fillet is $55 and pretty darn good too. It’s the new venture from the team behind Candela (Viva’s Best Auckland Restaurant of 2022 but now closed), in collaboration with the family who’ve run Clarence Road Eatery in this spot for a number of years.
I just re-read my 2017 review of that place, which was generally positive but did complain the room was “overlit, glassy and in need of some music”. They’ve certainly solved that last problem with a stereo system so loud that you must continually ask the person you’re eating with to repeat themselves. At one point, while browsing the menu, I said “this all looks good, do you have any favourites?” and after a few silent seconds looked up at the waiter who shouted “sorry, are you talking to me?”
I have a few of these sorts of complaints but I don’t want to list them all in a row because, actually, I enjoyed my meal at this great little restaurant. It’s casual, buzzy and deliciously good value. The main question they (and their customers) will need to work out is, what gap are they trying to fill? The menu is made up of dishes (pizza, pasta, Italian bistro favourites) that are already done well in lots of places. So why would you come here, in particular?
Probably because you live locally and the food is largely faultless. The ownership team took a month-long trip around Italy to inspire the menu, and though their accountant might wonder if it really required a four-person trip to the Northern hemisphere to come up with the idea of serving arancini, I’m happy to reassure them it’s the best arancini I’ve eaten, inspired by the fashionable cacio e pepe pasta, with splotches of dark mayo so fragrant and flavourful I’ve recategorised black pepper from “seasoning” to “spice” in my mental pantry.
I enjoyed the flavour of our next two dishes – melon/prosciutto and tomato/peach/stracciatella. These are pretty reliable combinations if your ingredients are good, but the design of each dish didn’t quite work for me. The first one arrives in a pretty stack, which you have to cut down the middle to share. I don’t know if you can imagine trying to cut through a thin piece of cured ham with only a chunk of melon and some soft cheese below it for resistance, but it’s pretty much impossible not to end up with a wet messy pile, and wet doesn’t really work with charcuterie. I thought the second dish would be sliced but the tomato came in chunks, and so did the peach. Again, nothing wrong with the flavours, but (I guess the opposite problem to the melon dish) I wanted it to be more integrated before I put it in my mouth. To reiterate, both dishes tasted great.
Mains all arrived at once, which surprised me. We feasted on a sliced steak, drenched in a lovely green peppercorn sauce and topped with fresh green herbs, and we really enjoyed our woodfired cabbage with goat’s cheese, almonds and a spicy chilli oil. Our third dish was a very solid rigatoni alla vodka, which may now have taken over cacio e pepe as Auckland’s trendy Italian dish of the mid-2020s.
We’d had three drinks each, including cocktails, and the bill was more than $100 cheaper than a similar-size meal at The Engine Room a couple of months earlier. Service was a step down, but sometimes that doesn’t matter if all you want is pizza and a glass of wine. Maybe they’ve slotted into a good gap after all.
Sfera
Cuisine: Italian bistro
Address: 124 Queen St, Northcote Point
Contact: 09 480 9600, sfera.co.nz
Drinks: Fully licensed
Reservations: Accepted
From the menu: arancini $17, prosciutto and melon $22, tomato and peach salad $26, scotch fillet $56, woodfired cabbage $24, rigatoni alla vodka $24
Rating: 16/20
Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12 Disappointing, give it a miss. 13-15 Good, give it a go. 16-18 Great, plan a visit. 19-20 Outstanding, don’t delay.
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