Onslow

The Restaurant

Onslow opened in early 2021 inside the foyer of The International, a residential hotel building on Princes Street at the edge of Albert Park, and is the most personal project to date of multi-Michelin-starred chef Josh Emett — a New Zealander who spent more than a decade as Gordon Ramsay's senior chef across London, New York, Las Vegas, and Tokyo before returning home. The dining room runs about seventy covers across a long, restrained space with high arched windows facing Albert Park, plush mid-century banquettes, and a polished marble bar at the entrance. Helen Cranage, Emett's wife and business partner, runs the front-of-house operation, and the result is one of the most tightly choreographed dining rooms in New Zealand.

The cooking is Modern New Zealand with a deep European spine. Signature dishes — refined across multiple seasons and rarely off the menu — include the Fiordland crayfish eclair with spiced bisque, a yellowfin tuna tartare with avocado cream and brown-butter brioche, the salmon trolley (filleted tableside from a single side of ora king salmon), house-baked fried bread with cultured butter and seaweed, and a twelve-hour Te Mana lamb shoulder with roasted eggplant and smoked yoghurt. The menu runs as an à la carte and a tasting at NZD 195, with a non-alcoholic pairing developed by the in-house sommelier that has earned its own following.

The wine programme is genuinely serious — around five hundred references with deep New Zealand verticals (Felton Road, Pyramid Valley, Te Mata Coleraine going back twenty years), real Burgundy and Loire bench strength, and a Champagne list that would not embarrass a London hotel dining room. Service is the most polished in the country: captains who time a three-course dinner inside ninety minutes when the guest wants it short, and stretch a seven-course tasting to three hours when the guest wants it long. The room has carried Onslow into the top of every serious New Zealand dining list since opening.