My favourite K Road restaurants

And the Google map that almost broke me

Bar Celeste. Photo/ Babiche Martens

Surely I’m not the first person in the world to try and map their favourite restaurants. Yet creating this for you involved days of pain and struggle - on MapMe, then Mapable, MapTiler and MapBox. I had a terse exchange of emails with the support person at Scribblemaps before, finally, reverting to Google Maps - a pretty terrible but at least familiar interface which wouldn’t even let me add hyperlinks.

So this was meant to be a quite stylish creation with links to my reviews of each restaurant, but instead it’s a much more rudimentary effort which should still, I hope, be of some use (“good enough for now and safe enough to try”, is my wife’s benchmark for releasing something into the world). My hope is that you’ll think of it when you’re next planning a K Road dinner but don’t want to end up with a dud.

When I’m recommending a restaurant to somebody I sort of fly around Auckland in my head, looking for places that I love. So please enjoy this K Road fly-by.

The best place to find complete information on Auckland’s best restaurants is in my annual Viva Top 50 (some of the above restaurants didn’t quite make the cut last year but I’d happily eat or drink at any of them).

The Top 50 is paywalled, like the below links.

Where I’m reviewing this week

Photo/ Babiche Martens

Mr Pickles, in my home town. “After 150 years facing away from its greatest natural feature, Hamilton’s CBD has painstakingly begun turning itself around, like a boomer about to reverse his car down the boat ramp.”

What people are asking

Hi Jesse my parents are coming up from Wellington for the first time since last winter. Where could I take them that’s new since then?

Livi

Hey Livi, try these four places.