Fine-dining finance

STEVE KILGALLON

At those restaurants where the napkins are of finest linen, the waiters multilingual and the menus littered with foams, sea spray and snail porridge, the ticket price for a main course is now nudging that once-insurpassable $50 tag.

Fifty dollars for dinner? It may seem unconscionable to some, but ah, say the restaurateurs, we really should be charging at least 10 bucks more.

So the Star-Times repaired to the distressed-brick surrounds of the Roxy, the most recent of a wave of new fine-dining establishments in downtown Auckland to tot up why restaurant meals cost so much.

Executive chef Sean Marshall, just arrived back in Auckland from Wellington's stylish Matterhorn, agrees to wheel out the "fish soup", part of his 10-course degustation menu ($140), but which, if it stood alone, would retail for a substantial $42. This, he says, is a great dish – complex, time-consuming, demanding of expensive, difficult-to-source ingredients – to show people and hear them declare "I'm not making that at home".

"If you had to go to the shop and buy everything and start from scratch, you would need a couple of days, or even longer [to make it]," he reckons.

Sadly, we've picked an awkward, "shitfight" of a day to loom incongrously in Marshall's narrow galley kitchen. Just five days after opening the doors (and three after Metro magazine have been in to review them; "gorgeous", says Simon Wilson of the fish soup), he has six chefs working, but really ought to have 11 – three have quit that morning. That leaves Marshall and his six – French, Chinese, Swiss, Italian and Indian – prepping tonight's dinners but also running the kitchen for lunch service in the next-door bistro, Everybody's. He stands at the pass, firing out meals – at one stage, I clock eight plates leaving inside two minutes – and he's also attempting to talk to me, but soon gives up. When we do talk, some days later, he's on his Christmas break and more relaxed: "In 16 years, it was one of the toughest two weeks ever," he says. "It's just the way it is."

So he hands me on to his head chef, Teresa Pert, who flies nimbly around the kitchen, vaulting on to the counter to grab wine from the highest shelves.

To prepare the fish jelly (while simultaneously readying duck livers for the evening crowd), Pert stands over a red-hot stovetop which crisps my notebook pages, and begins by loading a pan with john dory heads and bones to caramelise; they are then removed and roasted, and into the vacated pan, in succession, go fennel seeds, carrot, leftover fennel bulbs and onions, bay leaves, rosemary, cinnamon sticks, star anise, orange rind, more fennel seeds, black peppercorns, some tomato paste (not enough to darken it), two bottles of sweet white wine, a bottle of vermouth and a bottle-and-a-half of Pernod.

Pert sets the mixture ablaze, and it burns until the alcohol has gone, then she thrusts in two chopped oranges, the fish heads and bones, fish stock and water, and lets it cook for 30 minutes, scooping off the impurities in the froth which rise to the top. A pinch of saffron powder, which costs $110 for a 10-gram jar, is added, before it is cooled, whisked with egg whites, and forms into a clear jelly to be strained through a cloth bag. Phew. And that's just the first bit.

Surrounding this time-consuming concoction are bite-sized tastes of smoked octopus, butter-cooked scampi, chilli lemon crab, clam, raw cucumber-wrapped snapper and scallop custard.

Here's where a chef must negotiate good supply lines, says Marshall. The octopus, for example, is sourced as a byproduct from cray fishermen in both Auckland and Christchurch to ensure there's always some available. It arrives whole, costs about $10 a kilo, and is beheaded, brined for three days in salt and water, then smoked, and perhaps cooked if necessary to ensure it's tender but still has "bite". Then it is peeled, the suckers removed and finely chopped before being dressed with grapeseed oil.

The clams are tossed into a hot, dry pan with white wine until they sizzle and pop open, accompanied by a sauce of stock, vermouth, thyme, bay leaves, mixed with an expensive, sweet chardonnay vinegar to ensure a sharp, fishy taste.

The crab is imported Australian spanner crab, $100/kg, which is cooked, seasoned, and dressed with mayonnaise, lemon juice and zest.

To make the scallop custard, the roe is removed and dried into a red powder. The scallop itself is blended with eggs and cream, seasoned, sieved or "passed", cooked, almost steamed, for an hour then plated with the roe atop. Most simply of all, scampi tails are sauteed with butter, and the fresh fish, usually snapper, is sliced, rolled and paired with cucumber.

Marshall then takes several minutes to arrange the dish – the components are placed at regular intervals around an oversize white platter. Across the centre, using a brush, he paints a thick black stripe of "liquorice ink": fennel, shallots, star anise, fish heads, stock, white wine, Pernod and squid ink are cooked down for two hours, refrigerated for five and form a thick paste. "When you plate a main course you have time constraints; with a cold dish, you can be more fiddly and dress it up," he explains.

The end result is a remarkable, distinctive, intriguing, challenging collection of clean, crisp flavours and works brilliantly midway through Marshall's degustation. Marshall sees degustations as a "progression", not peaking at the "main" course – there isn't one – but moving, from raw to cold to hot, from light to more substantial.

Marshall began trialling the fish soup at Matterhorn before his move north, but its origins date back a decade, to when he and his Danish partner Kristina ate fresh cream shrimps at a friend's Michelin one-star restaurant in Copenhagen. "You eat a lot of food, but certain meals you remember," he says.

When it comes to working out what a meal costs a restaurant to produce, fish soup would be one of the most difficult, considering it has eight different components, or "mixes", on the plate. Costing is, Marshall sighs, "not that simple", and he likens it to unpacking a Russian Babushka doll. His calculations begin with the "yield" from each ingredient (fish, for example, yields just 50% because of the skin, guts, and bones, which are usable only for stocks and soups). Then he must add the cost of ingredients in each "mix", and then total each "mix" on the plate. It is complicated by allowances for wastage, mis-cuts on meat and fish, and freight, which can all vary.

Marshall, who has worked extensively in Europe and Australia, says many foreign starred kitchens rely on unpaid kitchen staff working to secure a CV credit to bolster numbers but not wage bills but Kiwi kitchens don't operate like that.

So it's not ingredients, freight, heat, light and power but labour costs that bump up the final tariff. "You are paying for labour: you aren't buying things in, so you are making everything from scratch with chefs who may be at work from 7.30am," he says. "There's more service staff than in a cafe or bistro, and more specialists, like sommeliers, and the labour costs are higher, because everyone from the waiter to the chef is at the top end of the industry and costs more [to employ]."

Mark Keddell, chief executive of the Roxy's owners, Pack and Co, says fit-out costs for a new high-end restaurant average $2500 to $3000 per square metre; the Roxy site totals 1200m2 over three levels. "You take huge risks on long leases for big spaces, effectively guaranteeing rent for 10 years... so you've got to get a return," he argues. "Margins are pretty small, especially in high-end restaurants where [productivity is lower]."

Marshall does admit the intangible influences of ambience, status and style impact on menu pricing: at Matterhorn, he sold mains for $36 that shared the same core ingredients that two other more formal restaurants in town sold for $48.

At Roxy, his prices sit at $42, which he argues are "slightly below market price" for fine dining. "You have to work out what your market is. And there is a psychological barrier of how much people want to pay for something. Fifty bucks is getting up there: there is no reason to go to $50, you couldn't do it here."

So are we not paying enough for our dinner? Marshall won't say, but does note: "At the last Michelin-starred restaurant I worked at, the main courses cost 50 [about $82]."

Keddell says: "You wouldn't get this food for that cost if you were making it at home. And you couldn't make it anyway."

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