Plabita Florence’s Forest began as a pop-up, progressed into a petite restaurant on Symonds St, and then after a hiatus, reopened last month in a new, significantly larger site in the Valley Rd shops on Dominion Rd. Over a late-morning coffee, I sat down for a korero with Plabita at one of the restaurant’s handsome and practical cork-topped tables…

Fronds of dried kombu (kelp) decorate a wall in Balmoral’s Udon Works and the same thing lies at the heart of the menu. It’s rausu kombu – kombu from the cold waters off the coast of the city of Rausu on the island of Hokkaido in Japan’s northern reaches, rich in minerals from the Siberian ice flow. Among several species, Rausu is considered the ‘King of kombu’ when it comes to making dashi, the stock flavoured with dried kelp that is the foundation of so many of the dishes on the menu at Udon Works…

Dominion Rd is lucky to have Omni – in a nutshell, it’s one of those un-showy but over-delivering neighbourhood eateries that diners love returning to over and over.

When Yuli Roesli emigrated from Indonesia to New Zealand in 1997 she suffered culture shock – Auckland was quiet (and a bit boring), with few fellow Indonesians, and very limited access to her favourite things to eat. Back then, opening an Indonesian restaurant would’ve been a pretty tough call – the cuisine not being well understood at all by the general population here then, and with only a very small community of expats upon whom you could count to give you a go…

Restaurant-quality food in a cosy pub setting – sounds like a dream scene, but it exists IRL on the corner of Dominion and Valley Roads, in a heritage building no less. The Bridgman’s Sean Lee worked his way through 5-star hotels in his native UK before hopping on a plane and hopping through South East Asia and Australia on his OE, landing in New Zealand in 2007 and here he stayed, working in top establishments around the city…

In the lead up to Ooh-Fa opening in August last year, the excitement was palpable among the many fans of its sister restaurant, Kārangahape Rd’s petite Pici, who were keen to see more of its ilk in a different part of town.  Where Pici nails the tightly focused handmade pasta brief, Ooh-Fa does the very same in perfecting pizza…

A few doors down from the intersection with Valley Road, Dominion Road’s Petaling runs like a well-oiled machine which is seriously impressive when you learn there’s only two people running the front of house, and four chefs in the kitchen who make a rather large volume of orders look like a cinch. The restaurant sits 50 up and 50 down and is very often full – booking is definitely a good idea if you don’t want to resort to takeaway, and the best way to enjoy what this Malaysian restaurant has to offer is absolutely by dining in, with a group if possible, so you can sample more than a few dishes from the very extensive menu boasting 150 items…

A beautiful thing to witness over the past decade or so has been both the diversification and specification of the dining scene along Dominion Road. Where once we had a good showing of simply Chinese restaurants, we now see outlets proudly specialising in fare from various regions and cities including Shanghai, Sichuan and Chongqing, Fujian, Guilin, Taiwanese, Xi’an, and Hunan, as well as Cantonese eateries flying the flag with roast duck and pork hanging up on display…

Rebecca (Bex) Smid and Dariush Lolaiy expanded on their second-generation restaurant Cazador a few years ago, opening Cazador delicatessen next door. A bustling daytime crowd is drawn to this section of Dominion Rd for the deli’s excellent coffee, sandwiches, pies, pastries, charcuterie, and its treasure trove of goodies filling every inch of shelf in the bijou space – including a colourful array of handsomely adorned tins of premium fish.