3 days ago
Three ways of eating, bound together in one perfect room
At Amuse Snack Bar, the lines between ambition, tradition and comfort blur into something extraordinary.
There are so many different reasons to eat out, and so many different ways to enjoy restaurants. I am not ashamed to admit that I absolutely adore it when a chef gets all silly and cheffy, mucking about with produce in ways I never thought possible. You know the kind of place: all manner of things being dehydrated, rehydrated, fermented and pickled. A three-word description on the menu in a sans serif font.
In the middle, there are those places that do it traditionally in the very best sense of the word. Parfaits worth their weight in silk next to sauces so shiny magpies tap at the window to get at them. Recipes from a hundred years ago brought up to date.
And then there are places you pop into because you know it's honest, proper food. That cafe that spreads actual butter thickly right up to the edges of fresh bread, a pot of pickles next to everything, because of course you want pickles. A whole ham on the bone cooked up at the start of the week for sandwiches and salads.
Sometimes, we get all three in one. We get Amuse Snack Bar at the top of Willis Street.
Opened by Dori Raphael in March, Amuse is the culmination of a life of hospitality experience and the realisation of a dream she has held for years. Born in London, she moved to Aotearoa at the age of 15 and dedicated most of her life to music. Travelling the world and ending up back in London studying for her masters in music, the one constant was service. She worked the floor at the famous Strawberry Fare in Wellington, then went on to work at the historic Poilâne bakery in London and found a home among the all-female staff at 26 Grains in Neal's Yard, where she was head barista for two years. When Covid hit, she moved home and began planning for a new challenge. Roles at People's Coffee and Hillside rounded off her training, and in 2025, she decided the time was right to take the leap.
Situated on the ground floor of a university hall of residence, the space itself is Tardis-like. To walk through the door is to enter somewhere totally unexpected, like your eyes have glitched momentarily from the urban sprawl of upper Willis Street and into a historic space somewhere in Italy. A concrete room, which, in the wrong hands, could feel clinical and unlived in, becomes warm and right. Antique furniture and jars of ferments and pickles fill the space, the kitchen and pantry jutting out into the room.
Anyone who has spent any time in either France or England will know of the jambon beurre, a sandwich so simple that there is simply nowhere to hide. Bread, butter, ham and cornichons. That is it. Here, the bread is a traditional demi-baguette. It is golden and blistered with two small burnt ends to nibble away at. The butter has been whipped up until it is light and frothy and spiked liberally with sea salt. Next, Raphael braises ham hocks before shredding the meat away, leaving something fatty and salty and intensely decadent. A final peppering of sharp cornichons finishes the whole thing off. This is a truly world-class version of an iconic sandwich. This is no fluke; all of the sandwiches are beyond anything this city has seen before. Egg mayonnaise is laced with tarragon and chives and served on a plump brioche roll with a fistful of greens. Salmon is cured in beetroot before it is cut generously and served on seeded bread with cream cheese and greens.
There is the Snack Plate. Yes, I am putting it in capital letters, for it is singular and profound and deserves to be recognised as such. It is the lunch we all dream of; a plate filled elegantly with all manner of picky things. There are wedges of properly crumbly cheese stacked up next to a little bunch of red grapes and a pot of brightly coloured pickles. A fistful of chopped salad full of red cabbage, greens, chewy grains and thinly sliced radish. Tomatoes dressed simply in salt and oil, a thick smudge of salty butter and a chutney that is the spirit of a European Christmas distilled down into something spreadable. All this next to four doorstop slices of their homemade malt and seed sourdough. You can add house-cured salmon, that ham hock or other bits. For me, I can't quite get past the nostalgia of a thinly sliced boiled egg. This all sounds so simple and comforting, which is why the eating is quite so magical – like going to your gran's for lunch, but your gran just so happens to be one of the best chefs in the world.
Come four o'clock, the menu changes – the amenable and polite Dr Jekyll changes form and a rambunctious Mr Hyde appears. I'm handed a menu consisting of small plates, platters, bar nibbles and a comprehensive, curated drinks list. A couple of decent bottles from Aotearoa and a few Italian gems. Cans of craft beer from across the country and a tight roster of classic aperitivo. Of all of these, it is most difficult to look past the good selection of vermouth that comes served over ice and topped up with a light soda. You can almost hear the dominoes being tapped down on the tables by the old gentlemen while the nonnas fuss around.
The small plates, much like everything else here, are so good they defy logic, expectation and all common sense. Take the rillettes with pickled cherries. Pork and duck rendered down in the oven for hours with spices and aromats before being set in a pleasing tower. On its own it is bold and wintry with big chunks of shredded meat rippled with fat. On the plate whole, and in a liquor such a deep and vibrant red that it feels as though you have accidentally stumbled on the aftermath of some terrible crime, they are all things sweet and spiced and sharp that the terrine is not.
The list of brilliance is endless. There is a mushroom parfait, lighter than is strictly possible and served with foraged mushrooms. Platters are beautiful and invoke a sense of childlike wonder, like walking through the forest with your family: cheese and cured meats nestle among pickled artichokes and seeds that have been baked in honey and are now sweet. A roulade has been made here and is enriched with tarragon and rosemary folded through. An artichoke dip sits in the centre and is a molten pot of pure luxury, and all of that bread in a pile to one side.
Some places in this world truly confound my understanding of what food and eating out can be. Amuse is a room I think about every time the opportunity to eat out comes up and a space I find myself spending more and more time in each week. It is not one single thing, but rather every single last microscopic thing I love about eating out all somehow bound tightly together in one room.
