Chef Simon Wright’s way of merging modern technology with classic French techniques has long won the hearts of diners but you’ll win his heart if you give him more restaurants that serve “honest good food.”

By Veronica Johnston

Don’t get Wright wrong. He reckons we’ve never had food so good. More top chef-owned restaurants than ever before are churning out some great dishes using the fresh produce, lamb, dairy and salmon right on their doorstep.
He’d just like to see more middle-of-the-road, laidback restaurants serving “honest, good food,” where he lives and works, which are also open on Sundays and Mondays (his days off).
“It’s just so difficult to find somewhere to eat sometimes because so many places are shut,” he says.
And what is open is usually packed with people.
Take a recent Sunday, for instance, when he decided to pop into Auckland’s Prego on Ponsonby Rd for a quick bite to eat with his family after a Warriors game. Not so – as the 45-minute wait for a table forced him to try elsewhere.
“How amazing – on a Sunday night?” he says approvingly of the restaurant’s popularity, before lamenting how he’d wished there was “a great Italian” restaurant nearby where he could have gone instead. “Like in Sydney where they’re two a penny,” he says. “It would have been amazing…some Italian food and a bottle of red – I would have been as happy as Larry. But there’s nowhere like that.”
Though he eventually found a little Japanese yakatori joint just up the road, he says it would still be nice to have more choice in the area.
Wright attributes Prego’s popularity to the fact that “you know exactly what you’re going to get.”
“They’ve stuck to their guns, and I think they’ve done really well.”
But then so has he for the same reason.
Wright has co-owned one of the oldest restaurants in New Zealand, the French Café, for more than eleven years. Though a number of hospitality stars including Annie Mantell and Connie Clarkson ran the restaurant before him (and he recently found some menus in the attic from its hey day as Café L’Amore), his style of fine-dining classical cooking with a modern twist continues to win accolades.
This year alone, he has already won Lewisham Awards for his Outstanding Restaurant Food and for being an Outstanding Chef as well as a gold status award on the Dine Out restaurant review website.
He admits it wasn’t always easy as the start as he struggled through “three really hard years.”
When he first opened the restaurant, he wanted it to be more of a neighbourly bistro type of place, which people would hopefully frequent twice a week
But they didn’t and he sometimes found himself serving just three or four people a time.
The problem was the restaurant already had a fine-dining reputation that its customers had come to love. And they still wanted to be able to leisurely sit, drink some wine and stay for four hours.
So it wasn’t until Wright started offering more premium wines and gourmet-style meals that things clicked for him. This was something he was more comfortable doing anyway.
From this he says he learnt how important it is to know exactly who your customer is and what they want. That’s his number two mantra.
Mantra number one is that he always stays true to himself.
“The first thing I’ve done here from day one is not copied anybody. I’ve done exactly what I wanted to do. Every time I make a change, I research it and I think about it myself; how I want to eat, how I want my dining experience to be and, of course, that is influenced from places where I go and eat as well.”
Which isn’t very many places in his area at the moment – so how about that great little Italian restaurant?