Hunan Restaurant — EAT IT AUCKLAND

I am having a Chinese food renaissance. I’ve just started watching Blondie in China, a Youtube channel which follows a Mandarin-fluent Australian as she eats her way around China. It is the best channel if you’re into food, travel and trying new things. It has made me realise just how many different types of Chinese cuisines are out there and I’m now keen to start delving into the regional cuisines we have here in Auckland. We have Cantonese, Sichuan, Shanghainese and even Uyghur (and more than one place to eat it at may I add!) but did you know we have a Hunanese restaurant?

Hunan Restaurant on Dominion Road is a family-run place next door to a just as interesting Afghanistan goods importer. Whilst many of the Chinese restaurants along the same strip have flavour profiles many of you will be familiar with, Hunanese cuisine is definitely the edgier cousin. Chillies are a hallmark feature of this province’s flavour profile but with a focus more on its fruity fragrance than its blow-your-face-off qualities (although I’m sure if you wanted it that way you could ask for it). The other major flavour profile that is particularly unique to Hunanese cuisine is the smoky flavour lent by la rou, cured pork belly aka bacon that is found in many of their dishes.

We ordered the stir fried smoke pork with dried radish dish when we visited Hunan Restaurant and I can’t begin to describe how delicious and unique it was. I’ve never had something similar in any other Chinese restaurant before. When the dish arrived at the table, everyone commented on the smoky, bacon-y aroma that immediately hit us. I imagined inside their kitchen this dish starts with the slow rendering of fat off this cured pork belly to form the aromatic base into which Chinese leeks, chillies and crunchy dried radish is stir fried. If you’re familiar with guanciale, the cured pork jowl used to make carbonara, you now know what la rou smells and tastes like. The end result is a kaleidoscope of crunchy textures and mega-umami, smoky flavours. You will be eating more rice than usual when you come to eat at Hunan Restaurant because all the food tastes so dang good.

Perhaps Hunan is not the only province in China to make slow-cooked pork belly braised in dark soy sauce over preserved greens (the Hakka definitely excel at this as do the Cantonese) but the version we tried at Hunan Restaurant was excellent. The pork belly just fell apart, yielding to the pressure of a pair of chopsticks and again the complementary umami flavours of the preserved greens mui choy (or mei choi or mei cai depending on where you’re from) is a killer combo. Hats off to the house that this dish was not overly rich or sickeningly oily; this dish takes a lot of time and preparation to make and something I would never attempt at home unless I had a lot of time on my hands.

*Steam eggplant with salted egg and garlic*

Our final dish, again a first for everyone present, was the steamed eggplant with salted egg and garlic. Now the term ‘steamed’ may be a misnomer as this dish tastes too delicious for it to be just steamed, and my friend Sigourney highlighted (after her own recent foray into Chinese cooking techniques) that the steamed eggplant and finely minced aromatics often gets finished with a sizzling hot shower of oil that blooms the ingredients and gives the eggplant that unctuous, glossy finish. Well, I didn’t come to a restaurant expecting to be on the diet so I accept this. The finely minced garlic and salted egg yolks creates these nubbly little flavour bombs that top the dish and the skinned eggplant really does have that beautiful, fall apart unctuous texture. For me personally, it was a close tie between the smoke pork and dried radish dish and this once as to which was my favourite.

There are so many other interesting dishes on Hunan Restaurant’s menu I will be returning to try, like the steamed blue cod with red and green chilli (another Hunanese icon), the braised red pork with rice wine and the crushed pickle green chilli with pork.

710 Dominion Road
Mt Eden
Auckland 1041
Ph. (09) 630 9633