Jesse Mulligan: 21 Days Bar & Brasserie Is Auckland’s Best Steak Restaurant & Worth The Journey

Is $400 too much to pay for a steak in NZ? Not this one... There is only one restaurant in this country licensed to cook and sell Kobe Beef, a meat so indulgent it has become world famous. As Champagne is to sparkling wine, Kobe is to wagyu. If I remember when Jervois Steak House was the apotheosis of meat eating in this country. They’d make you call 24 hours ahead to order their overnight ribeye, a truly incredible slow-roast creation. But once you’ve visited 21 Days Bar & Brasserie, you might not ever go back to Herne Bay. To obtain a Kobe beef licence, you have to fly an inspector from Japan, who examines every element of your kitchen and technique to ensure the brand reputation is maintained. It’s no wonder nobody else has been through the process. But chef Robin Lee has been patient, working quietly on this project in a corner of the New Zealand restaurant world even the Michelin people missed.21 Days is the only restaurant in NZ licensed to cook and sell Kobe beef.This restaurant is a shrine to beef – not just Kobe but another Japanese producer, Omi, and the best cuts from around Australia and New Zealand. You can see them through the glass of their dry-ageing fridge – like looking at necklaces through the window at Michael Hill, but much more expensive. There must be tens of thousands of dollars worth of meat in these fridges – not just beef but lamb as well (somebody could really put the ram into ram raid).Each steak has a price sticker – one thin strip of Kobe fillet close to $400. It’s not something you’d buy every week, but neither is a Coldplay ticket. For many, this will be once-in-a-lifetime eating; the Taj Mahal of beef (except, of course, they leave the cows around the Taj Mahal well alone).Once you've visited this restaurant you might never go back to any other steak restaurant. I visited 21 Days for a taste test last week (I almost never accept free meals, but said yes to this invitation on a whim). You can’t trust a chef to cook a reviewer only one dish so before I got to the steak, I was served a selection of entrees, every one of which would have been the best thing on the Jervois menu (I have no figurative beef with those guys by the way, I’ve had plenty of great literal beef in that cool building – they’re just an obvious point of comparison).Then came the meat – perfectly cooked despite the steaks being thin and creating almost no room for error. Lee cooked me one each of Kobe and Omi, each sliced and presented on a wooden board with a tiny pile of Japanese black salt especially imported for this purpose. The meat comes with your choice of sauces – I went for horseradish and a red wine jus.As Champagne is to sparkling wine, Kobe is to wagyu.The Kobe tasted like nothing I have ever experienced. More tender than any eye fillet you’ve ever eaten, but with the savoury flavour of that generally much chewier scotch. You could have eaten this steak without using your teeth (though to be honest I’m not sure how that would work and you’d probably get some pretty weird looks from the waiter). 21 Days' chef/owner Robin Lee. The Kobe tasted like nothing I have ever experienced.I will tell you that the Omi contained a little too much fat for my tastes (the cut had so much marbling it looked like a piece of pork before they cooked it). Of course, I had ingested a lot of rich food by then, so perhaps my taste buds weren’t at peak form. It reminded me of sucking on that sirloin fat cap that you generally leave on the side of your plate. Others will love the indulgence.Why have I waited so long to tell you where this restaurant is? Because I suspected that if you’d seen the name of the suburb earlier in the piece you might have drifted away to read something else. What self-respecting banker is going to drive a client 30 minutes to lunch? Well, it’s their loss. 21 Days Bar & Brasserie, at 37 Clyde Rd in Browns Bay, will cook you the best steak you’ve eaten in your life.Read more by Jesse MulliganWhat you’ve asked, and what he’s shared.