My Kitchen - Mount Eden, Auckland

My Kitchen, along Dominion Road just outside Auckland CBD, makes you feel as if you are in Taipei. They serve meals at both dinner and lunch times in Japanese-styled bento boxes, are quick in taking food orders and delivering them to the tables of customers and have a rather fast turnover of both takeaway and dine-in clients through the two occasions I was there one week in November. Mandarin language television is broadcast on their flat monitors attached to the wall. Auckland residents of Taiwan origin are seen as patrons of this restaurant located upstairs, but the business also has a takeaway counter on street level, next to a branch of Love A Duck. Bento above, with chicken, and below, with unagi eel.

The bentos have a formula - three side servings to accompany the main meal of your choice, miso soup, a small bowl of steamed rice and cuts of different fruits each day. My favourite main dishes from My Kitchen are the belly pork ( final picture in this write-up) marinated in a rather satisfying sauce, plus the lightly steamed fish (image below). I also was impressed with the bubble milk tea creations they made here - not too sweet, lovely New Zealand milk and rather generous with the size of the mugs they serve such drinks in.

The ambiance is pop twenty something, with anime like hairstyles and perhaps a student cohort, mixed with families and regulars. The first evening I went to My Kitchen I was delighted that they provided bananas, which are still relatively expensive across the Tasman, due to Queensland flooding earlier this year and restrictions on such fruit imports into Australia.