Restaurant Review: Hopgoods, Nelson, NZ

Mari and I went to Hopgoods for dinner earlier today for our 8th year anniversary. We are pretty casual and had completely forgotten about the date, however our good friend, Dave Greenberg, reminded me about it later that day and all of us had a good laugh about it :) Since Cecile is here, we decided to take advantage of the situation and go out for dinner, leaving Cecile in charge of the two lovely kids.

The two places on my list in nelson were Hopgoods and The Cut. We decided to goto Hopgoods since our local friend Paul had also mentioned it and the chef Kevin Hopgood uses a lot of local Nelson produce and wines. Mari made a reservation and off we were on date nite ...

We got there on time at 6:30 pm and were seated immediately. Seems like folks eat dinner more like 8:00 pm or so out here and the restaurant was quite empty at 6:30 pm. Since Mari likes red wine we ordered a bottle of Pinot Noir from Orinaki (i suspect i have the spelling wrong, will fix this later tomorrow) which was quite good. We started off with an appetizer of blue cheese and apple tart for mari and a chicken liver parfait with home baked walnut and raisin bread for me. The appetizers were quite excellent (9/10) and set an incredibly high standard for the rest of the meal. The toasted walnut bread was just divine and perfect with the parfait, my favorite dish of the meal.

For our main course, Mari chose the pan fried dory with crispy potatoes, asparagus and fried ravioli. This was quite delicious, the dory was a wee bit overcooked and a bit dry, bit overall it was a good combination. I chose the slow smoked tasman bay lamb (12 hours!) over garlic smashed potatoes, green beans and tomato jus. The lamb was incredibly tender and quite flavorful (personally I would have liked a wee bit more fat on it!), i loved the mashed pototaoes along with the yummy soft garlic. Overall I thought the mains were quite good but did not match the excellence of the appetizers :)

I was quite stuffed and drunk at this point. Mari insisted on having desert (which to her is the most important part of the meal). We ordered the bitter chocolate with orange sorbet, but switched the orange sorbet for the white chocolate icecream. The dessert was ok, not as good as the flourless chocolate cake from Pizetta 211 (the best pizza in SF, if you have not been there, go there NOW), Mari did like it and managed to finish off the whole thing. She did claim that she was super hungry and famished after swimming for 60 minutes or so at the local pool.

Overall, we though Hopgoods was quite excellent and well worth a repeat visit. Mari gave it an 8/10 and I gave it a 7/10 for restaurants at that price, fairly high marks for us :). The service was quite attentive yet casual. We took a good walk by the Maithai river to walk off the yummy food and I suspect we'll be back with Maya, PJ and Cecile sometime in the next couple of weeks. Including wine and a decent tip the meal cost us NZ $150 which is fairly reasonable.

If you are in the Nelson area, you should plan on eating here :)