Café Bastille
Consider this. Our judges ate at Café Bastille in Wellington on Guy Fawkes night, with a big public fireworks display scheduled to coincide with their visit. It was also just a few days after the Melbourne Cup. Unbeknown to the judges at the time, these two events had conspired to remove not only the owner from the premises, but the chef and the maître d’ as well. If anything could go wrong, this would be the night.
And yet our judges – and, it seemed to them, everyone else in the restaurant – enjoyed an outstanding meal and outstanding service.They were enchanted. Innovation and excellence can get you near the top in the restaurant game, but consistency and reliability will clinch it.
So what is it that makes Café Bastille so reliably good? It is easy enough to explain, although not to achieve – this is a restaurant that looks and feels like a friendly neighbourhood café, but which serves outstandingly good food. This food is cooked by chefs who love what they are doing, presented by wait staff who share the chefs’ enthusiasm and see to your needs with a warm and polished efficiency, and backed by an astutely chosen wine list.
It is not fine dining. Indeed, owner Mark Limacher also operates the nextdoor Roxburgh Bistro, where fine dining is the thing. Café Bastille is, rather, the younger sibling who would rather not wear a tie. You can go early and feed the kids – assuming that your children are old enough to enjoy a French-inspired meal, of course. You can go regularly and enjoy the ever-changing specials (or the same astonishingly good French onion soup or coq au vin each time – which is exactly what many customers do).
Or maybe you will go straight for the Provençal fish soup. Reviewing Café Bastille in Cuisine last year, restaurant critic David Burton declared that this dish “smells and tastes better than any bouillabaisse I’ve encountered”. And he should know; he has written an awardwinning book on French food.
Café Bastille describes its vision as “a marriage of French provincial recipes using the wonderful ingredients New Zealand has to offer. Why should our customers not experience classic rillettes of hare and rabbit in a country where these creatures abound... or a fish soup intensely flavoured with crustaceans that travel the world, garnished with rouille infused with precious strands of Greytown saffron? Should we attempt to produce a crème caramel that differs from the one perfected in the hallowed kitchen of Auguste Escoffier so long ago? We don’t think so and our customers seem to agree.”
It is this unabashed enthusiasm for a specific cuisine which makes for deeply pleasurable dining. Limacher and his head chef Peter Collins allow you to play it safe (with, say, a sirloin Café de Paris butter and pommes frites) and have a simple, perfectly cooked meal. Or you can really explore those French provincial byways – the rustic salad of rabbit kidneys, pigs’ ears, lardons, Bleu d’Auvergne and toasted walnuts, for example, is a staple on the menu, and quite possibly unique to a restaurant in this part of the world.
Some 70 percent of the wine is French, chosen carefully by sommelier Peter De Punt to match the food, with the balance being from Australia and New Zealand. The wine menu presents it all according to the French categories (local Pinot Noirs are listed under ‘Burgundy Style’, for instance), complete with valuable tasting notes. More than 20 wines are available by the glass, including Veuve Clicquot at one extreme and a selection of ‘Bordeaux du Jour’ at the other.There is a cellar selection available on request.
Service is in the hands of one of the best in the business – the redoubtable manager/maître d’ Ian Hornblow. As he told Cuisine last year, he believes that the skills of waiting are a gift. You can teach the mechanics of taking and delivering orders efficiently in half an hour, he says, but what really counts is the ability to tailor your service to the values of each customer 
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