Bouchon Creperie & Wine Café, Kingsland

After last night's appalling meal, we needed something to redress the balance. A bit of simplicity, a bit of basic good cooking. Having walked past Bouchon a fair bit in the past on the way to other places, we'd been meaning to actually walk in for a while. The promise of some decent crepes first thing in the morning was too much to resist on this occasion.

There's a fine line a venue has to tread between authenticity and pastiche, and Bouchon manages to fall on the right side of it, mainly through an authentic French don't-really-care attitude, which I personally love. Careworn walls, ancient adverts for various French things, everything in its right place. Sunny, charmingly unaffected service.

The missus opted for a sweet option - banana, honey and almonds. Pronounced it 'good', with the sort of look on her face that I only wish I could invoke more often. As for me, I went with the Classique - a buckwheat pancake filled with cheese, eggs, and in my case, lardons the size and intensity of which I've never seen before. So very, very good. Full-flavoured, generously portioned, and only about $12. Good coffee, too, actually slightly better than the one I had from Roasted Addiqtion the morning before.

The wine list looks interesting, too, although even though it was a French place and they probably wouldn't care, I couldn't stretch to a Bandol at 10:30am on a Sunday. We're definitely headed back there for dinner at some point though - if they can get a staple like a savoury crepe absolutely spot on, the omens look good for the evening service. There's stiff competition for food in Kingsland, and Bouchon holds its own with a particularly insouciant, effortless Gallic ease.

Bouchon Creperies & Wine Café

479 New North Road

Kingsland

Auckland

+64 (0) 9 845 1680

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

Mekong Neua, Kingsland

One of the many food-related things that London does pretty poorly is Thai food. For every Soho Thai or Busaba Eathai, there's a hundred local aberrations such as Ta Krai and the like. Seriously, London has a great rep and some terrific restaurants, but scratch the surface and there's some horrible crap there. Tough, overcooked meats; thin, spiteful sauces; cynical chillies; limp... everything. We had to leave, if only for the sake of our dinners.

Fortunately since coming to Auckland we've had some tremendous Thai meals, one such being a midweek sojourn at Mekong Neua - a comparatively understated little place quietly holding its own amid louder neighbours such as Canton Café. It's a curious little place, with a roaring fire in the front section comically lent a bit of heat by a strategically-placed electric heater. Odd little touches like this aside though, it's comfortably forgettable inside.

The food's the star in this one though, with the crispier appetisers showing a deft hand on the fryer handle and a typically simple yet effective dipping sauce setting the selection off perfectly. Curries were rich, flavoursome and powerfully chillied as requested, with everything in them perfectly cooked and still bursting with flavour and character.

I don't mean to be controversial, but I think there's only so far you can take some cuisines. Thai, certain Indian, Cantonese - all great foods but you wouldn't want any of them messed with, elevated to rarified heights like the finest French or Japanese dishes. Their charm lies in their substance, their earthiness, their unfussed simplicity. So-called 'Royal' Thai as practised at places like Fulham's Blue Elephant leaves me a bit cold (not to mention irritatingly poorer).

This is where it's at - fiery chillies, substantial sauces, experienced cooking and great service. All of these are in ample supply at Mekong Neua - worth braving Kingsland's notoriously appalling parking for.