Estasi, Ponsonby

Come on, you knew this could never be a positive review. Look at the name of the place for Christ's sake - unless this place is knocking out pills of the decidedly dodgy type, it's never going to live up to it, is it? It doesn't end there - styling a restaurant like some low-rent Euro-disco circa 1992 just doesn't get the appetite going.

But where friends go, friends must follow, and thus I ended up spending part of my Saturday night perusing one of the most challenging menus I've seen in the last six months and wondering if it'd be rude of me to excuse myself to visit the Murder Burger down the road. Challenging in the wrong way, in case you wondered.

Let's start with the wine list, because that's what I did. Brands abound, with a double slap in the face in that not only did we recognise most of these from the middle shelves of most supermarkets, but that the enormous mark up was that much more obvious this way. I used to work in wine wholesale, so I get the economics at work here, but there's no way you can get me to shell out $40 for Oyster Bay, the one purest expression of how utterly pallid New Zealand wine can get. Forgive me for being mildly disappointed, but aren't we in a wine-producing country here? Pride in a national product, anyone? There's plenty of astounding wine being made here, much of it very reasonably priced, so there's no excuse for it not to turn up on restaurant lists.

So, disappointment so far. For some reason, we were taking our time to decide on the food order, despite several increasingly urgent requests from our waitress. Perhaps some sort of extra-sensory perception was holding us back - our brains warning us not to go any further. Or perhaps we were just desperately scouring the list looking for anything remotely edible.

Trust your instincts, mother always used to say, and on this occasion I sorely wished I had. With the kitchen having run out of lamb shanks (at 8pm on a Saturday night - nice ordering, guys), I went for the steak, opting for the simplest option on the menu for safety. Rare, came the done side of medium. A very poor piece of meat, which the kitchen had attempted to disguise with a slick coating of dense mushroom sauce. Piled precariously next to it were some leaden sauteed potatoes topped with 'mushy peas' - in reality some garden peas which a particularly venomous chef had cooked until dry and then squashed with a fork.

Lack of anything of interest in front of me led to me checking out the other plates. On the one opposite me, chicken. Doused in the same sauce that drowned my steak. On the one next to me, venison, with the same bizarre vegetable tower as on mine. The cynicism from the kitchen flavoured everything - when they constructed my meal, did they think carefully about every component or chuck together whatever they had in the fridge? The same accompaniment, the same sauce for multiple dishes doesn't really make you think there's a particularly discerning hand at work back there. The fact that both elements were extraordinarily badly cooked didn't help matters.

Funnily, given her earlier clinginess, our waitress disappeared completely shortly after the second bottle of wine (between five people) was ordered. We eventually managed to collar a colleague and terrorize them into bringing one over, but this continued. Dessert was skipped as firstly there was literally nothing on the menu worth the bother (a rarity in itself when dining with three women), and secondly as we seriously thought we might be there until Sunday evening.

Coffee then. Predictably awful. The price? At $30 a main dish on average, not horrendous, but not brilliant either. I'm not sure what's more offensive, the cynically constructed, badly cooked food, the frankly weird service, or the fact that at the end of all of this, they actually want you to pay for it.

Trust your instincts. Go anywhere else.

Estasi

222 Ponsonby Road

Auckland

+64 (0) 9 361 3222

http://www.estasi.co.nz