Review: Masu, Auckland – a reawakening of taste buds

It’s pleasing to arrive at an ethnic specialty restaurant and see every other person in attendance is the ethnicity the restaurant specialises in.

This is a bit of a confusing way to say that when I had dinner at Masu, the Japanese restaurant from Nic Watt, my “date” and I were the only white faces. Everyone else dining there seemed Japanese, though this broadened out as the night wore on. 

Masu is a robata restaurant that serves barbecue-like cooking. 

The room is light, bright, and large, but cleverly, you don’t notice. Mostly, solo diners populate a long bar in front of the kitchen. 

I’m a big fan of solo dining in restaurants, and Masu does this particularly well. 

Diners are not bunched together but seated at a respectable distance from each other so they can eat their food and peruse their phones in peace. 

Soft-shell crab sliders. (Image: Jason Oxenham, NZME)

We choose the Shomi menu ($99), which is six of the venue’s signature dishes. 

We also choose saki, which I’ve always been a little suspect about, rather than the $65 wine match. 

First up, sashimi of salmon, big-eye tuna and kahawai clears the palate with incredible freshness.

At about the same time, a sashimi and spicy miso taco arrives. (Tacos and seafood are having a moment in Auckland’s fine diners. The crayfish taco I had recently at Kingi is possibly the best thing I’ve eaten all year at that stage.)

The taco here is more like a rice cracker and its flavour disappears to nothing to allow the sashimi to star. A traditional corn taco would have ruined this dish. Instead, the dish is a pleasing morsel with just enough spice to create a complete package. 

But any expectation of subtle flavours is blown to smithereens by the next dish, a chirashi maki flavour bomb with spicy tuna sashimi, sesame leaf, ginger gel, jalapeño mayo and takuwan (pickled radish). 

This dish would reawaken the taste buds of even the most hardened smoker. Just excellent. 

We add in karaage chicken as an extra and it is the only disappointing dish – almost like the restaurant suggesting it is only reluctantly on the menu. The chicken is cooked meatball-style and it is accompanied with a dipping sauce that lacks spice. 

Tempura seasonal vegetables are next, which are fine, but it is like Masu excels when it stretches beyond the type of Japanese food that is easily found elsewhere in Auckland.

At this stage, we have six sauce dishes on our table, which becomes a bit of a taste playground that I suspect is culturally inappropriate. 

Gyoza are filled with wagyu beef and kimchi, which is a new dumpling texture to me, but is lovely. 

 The chefs are always fired up to produce the best dishes possible. (Image: Jason Oxenham, NZME)

Broccolini tastes like it has been both grilled and hangied. Sweet almond miso and shichimi is a perfect foil. Great dish. Best of the night so far, and that’s a high bar.

Lamb cutlets are a vessel for a powerful goma dressing. 

Then, it is grilled carrots with miso and sunflower crumble. No idea what that is but is looks like Japanese dried garlic. That’s not to say I don’t like it. I definitely do, and a dash of orange is a nice touch and adds freshness.

Finally, a shiromiso crème caramel acts as a vessel for a tart, delectable passionfruit coulis. It is pleasingly lacking in sugar but a long way from bland. It is accompanied by a sesame cracker. My advice if you come to Masu, order this dessert. 

And then there’s saki. It is a drink I’ve never really loved. It seems a little bland, and the taste was so weird to the American soldiers after World War II that they even heated it up to make it drinkable. 

But our waiter gave us a sample (a very big sample) of a glass of cloudy liquid that smelt a little like the sake I’ve had before. It is the Masu x Zenkuro collaboration sake that is unpasteurised and unfiltered. Zenkuro is New Zealand’s only sake brewery and is based in Queenstown. 

I liked it so much I’ve ordered a bottle from their website. 

All up, I’m really impressed by Masu and look forward to eating there again – possibly just at the bar on the way home from work if I get the urge.