Jesse Mulligan Reviews Mr Lobster In Henderson, Where Yum Cha Becomes A Work Of Art

The food here is as beautiful to eat as it is to look at.

I love taking my family to yum cha but it can feel like the blind leading the blind. Am I ordering the right thing? Am I allowed to eat with my hands? Is the owner angry with me or are they always like that? All of these questions run through my head and inevitably take some shine off the experience.

So, to my daughters’ dismay, I left them at home for this meal and went to lunch with Connie Clarkson, Auckland’s doyenne of Asian cooking and founder of The Kitchen Project, a council incubator that helps small-scale food producers become thriving businesses. A few weeks earlier, I’d asked Connie to suggest an artsy Chinese restaurant and she reminded me about “Meat Barbie”, a beautiful/grotesque dish involving a plastic doll draped in beef, Lady Gaga style, created by West Auckland restaurant Mr Lobster to celebrate the Margot Robbie film. I just knew she’d come through.

Everything about Mr Lobster is maximally efficient. The first thing they do when you get there is key in your licence plate number to make sure you don’t get towed. Then you’re shown to a table and handed a menu with a QR code so that you can get things underway without waiting for a waiter to take your order. Your food begins arriving approximately six seconds after you press “ORDER”. There’s no such thing as staggering the cooking here, so if you’d like to avoid having six different dishes arrive at once, you’d be well advised to order as you need them. Trust me, you will never find yourself tapping your foot and waiting for the kitchen to catch up.

Thanks to Connie and a helpful waiter (everyone here is warm and friendly, even as they hurry around), we ended up with a selection of Mr Lobster classics, including a dim sum platter which would almost be enough for one person on its own.

“You have to get the classics right,” reckoned Connie, “before you can do the wacky stuff.”

They definitely do that, with some steamed prawn dumplings that are so tightly packed they look like they could bounce. I ordered some tripe (not for everyone I know but irresistible to me), which was chopped up well enough that its gastric origins were mostly hidden except for the honeycomb texture. It was braised in something spicy and served with some equally enjoyable beef tendons.

My favourite yum cha order is always the turnip cake, for its subtle flavour but also its starchy yet variable texture. I think of it somewhere between tofu and potato, but at Mr Lobster they make a special effort, offering a first glimpse at the theatrical elements of their menu. The turnip cake was placed in front of us, already looking exciting with orange caviar and a squiggle of wasabi mayo, then a waiter stepped forward with a pretty grunty blowtorch, proceeding to scorch and caramelise the toppings right in front of us.

It got better. One dish – “deep-fried savoury bread fritter with sesame” – was the size of a rugby ball, and needed a waiter with a big pair of snips to cut it up into manageable portions. Even a pretty standard dish like battered spring rolls – here more like a cigar-shaped tempura – was cut on the diagonal and served vertically, in a ramekin lined with parchment.

As we moved into sweet courses, the kitchen’s sense of fun became even more apparent. One of the fried goodies in the supreme platter came with little stick-on eyeballs, making it look something like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. And the masterpiece was the durian, a polarising delicacy that arrives coated in jet-black pastry, with an edible white neck and head stuck into it so that it looks like swans a-swimming (this is one of those picture-paints-1000-words moments, so I’m counting on Babiche to do a better job than I have).

All of this is as beautiful to eat as it is to look at (my note for the durian reads: “it tastes of dark dreams”), and so long as you balance your selections between the deep-fryer and the steamer, with a little wok action on the side, you’re unlikely to leave disappointed. Throw a Portuguese Custard Tart into the final round – it is a classic and, Connie tells me, prohibitively complicated to make at home. You can always take away what you can’t eat, and even the prawn dumplings tasted very good cold out of the fridge for dinner that night.

The giant lobster tanks won’t be for everyone but add a certain intrigue to the backdrop. Prices are scrawled on the glass, and go as high as $780 for one big specimen, making a full lobster tank almost as expensive as a full petrol tank in the current economic environment.

Mr Lobster Private Kitchen

Cuisine: Yum Cha

Address: 4/301 Lincoln Rd, Henderson

Contact: (09) 218 8180, mrlobsterprivatekitchen.co.nz

Opening hours: Weekdays 10.30am-2.30pm, 5.30-9pm; weekends 10.30am-3pm, 5.30-9pm

Reservations: Accepted (and strongly recommended)

Drinks: Fully licensed

From the menu: Turnip cake $18, supreme dim sum platter $48, tripe and tendon $20, deep fried bread fritter $18, prawn spring roll $13, cumin lamb dumplings $24, Durian $16

Rating: 17/20

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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