When the boiled seafood bundle, consisting of lobster tails, prawns, mussels, baked potatoes, and corn cobs, was brought out to the table and emptied onto a large plate, it was indeed a “wow” moment for everyone at the table.
Manaia Seafood Boil started selling their food during the Covid-19 lockdown before becoming a takeaway business, and then a proper small eatery.
In August, they will be celebrating their third anniversary and the couple behind Manaia, Metida Iwasa (a Sāmoan) and Julian Baleli (Malaysian), have confirmed that they’d be opening their second branch that month.
Their current restaurant, at 31 Hill Street, Onehunga, is close to their home kitchen where they first started their business.
“People from both our cultures, Pasifika and Asians, just love seafood and I think having a seafood boil meal, the appeal is also the wow factor,” Julian said.
The restaurant, located in a rather discreet part of Onehunga, offers a home-like, rustic, no-frills dining experience, with food served on wooden tables that are wrapped in plastic covers.
The restaurant is pretty crowded and is packed up, especially on weekends, so it is highly recommended that you call and make a reservation. Even while dining, you’d find queues of people waiting for their takeaways.
Diners are provided with plastic bibs to tie around their necks to prevent splashes from the meal from getting on their clothes, and gloves to dig into the seafood with their hands.
The seafood bundles are delivered in a clear bag to the table, and our $150 Matariki Goodness platter came with a Chilean king crab, lobster tail, 12 prawns, 12 mussels, 500g of crawfish, five potatoes, three corns and three eggs.
This was a limited-time special, but the regular medium platter, costing $75, that feeds up to three people comes with two half-cut crabs, 12 mussels, 12 prawns, five potatoes, three corn, and three eggs.
They are open to swapping seafood and offer options for add-ons including the lobster tails ($30 each).
There were three of us, but we had plenty left over to take away from our meal.
Julian, who first came to Auckland as an international student, said he and his wife had always dreamt of owning their own eatery business.
“My wife’s family thought a seafood boil business would be a good one, and I guess they are right,” he said.
“The incredible support we have had from our customers over the last three years was what prompted us to look at having our second branch, which would be a more proper, dine-in type restaurant.”
Seafood boil is casual style dining that brings people together - and because they’ve got to peel and eat with their hands, it also gets people off their mobile phones and to be engaged with each other.
There are no utensils here, and so it is a full-on hands and finger-licking (or glove-licking) dining experience.
If you had the king crab like we did, you’d get to use the mallet hammer to crack open the shells - be careful as this could send bits flying towards neighbouring tables.
The seafood is boiled in spices beforehand, then poured into this bag and served.
Manaia is open daily from 12pm to 8pm, except for Mondays, and does not use pork products.
Manaia offers a casual, fun hands-on dining experience, where prices - if you break it down to what it costs per person - is pretty reasonable.
Bee Koh is a co-founder of Chow Luck Club.
