Taiko

Melhor restaurante japonês de Auckland, staff atencioso, comida fresca e muito saboroso, fiel ao sabor japones! Recomendo!

love love love this place — food is GREAT — owner is GREAT
This place is just really good!

Thanks for a good night out Taiko! I recently came here with a group of ten. The owner Ian was my first point of contact via the phone and he was really helpful with tips regarding the best time to dine on the night we picked (Eden Park stadium close by means ‘game night’ may prove some minor obstacles), and with a bunch of picky eaters — paleo and vegetarian options needed. The service had no faults, very attentive and friendly. The food was good but not outstanding, my teriyaki salmon was delicious but so heavily flavoured and salty that it overpowered all the other flavours. My husbands chicken teriyaki dish was the same. Nonetheless we enjoyed it, perhaps some water at the table may have helped? Taiko is in a great location and has a wonderful ambience to the place, a little bit rustic — in a good way! -
Not just a pub, not just a restaurant, classy and casual combined nicely!

We had a great pre-​movie dinner here with a group — loads of delicious food (the chicken karaage and takoyaki were so good we ordered them twice!) and some fun veggies dishes to balance out all the good fried stuff. Helpful service, fun and laid back atmosphere — and we got a bonus plate of food with our Unilocal check-​in!
Will be back for sure!

Recommend by friends. Didn’t disappoint. Great food. A great hidden secret. Can’t wait to go back.

Taiko is one of those places that’s like a hidden secret tucked away. A secret I really don’t want to share with you lot because I don’t want to narrow my chances of getting a table in the future. I walked into this place not long after it opened and I’ve been going back every since. I’ve now got to the stage where I don’t bother ordering off the menu any more I just say to Ian you know what you’re doing order for us. The atmosphere is always great, the food is top shelf, the sake is both hot and cold, the fish fresh and the beer cold, crisp and delivered with a grin. Taiko has never let me down and it won’t let you down either.

I’m a huge fan of Japanese restaurants, and this one came highly recommended so I was keen to check it out. The host was friendly, the service was great, and the menu, well a little adventurous for my liking. Not being a fan of octopus or anything that was once alive being served raw, there weren’t a huge number of dishes that were to my tastes. The food we did have, though, was pretty good. Still it’s a bit out of the centre of Auckland and for my preference there are plenty of goo Japanese places a bit more central.

Taiko rocks. The manager here is so much fun and walks the line between professionalism and party host extremely well. He knows his restaurant inside out and makes informed recommendations on the food and wine (and sake if you’re into it).
Apparently there are Taiko customers who keep their own giant sake bottles on the shelf between visits which I think is so cool.
The food is fresh and delicious and vegetarians are well covered — they’ll make whatever you want without meat wherever possible. On weekend nights there’s a real buzz about this place which makes it feel almost like a bar and it’s the kind of place where I always seem to run into someone I know. Can’t recommend it enough.

So, I’ll definitely admit to being one of those white guys who reads Haruki Murakami and kind of wishes he was Japanese, and the guy who runs this little joint is like the kind of white guys who wish they were Japanese. He wears like a karate kid style headband! Yes! And sometimes to drum up business, he’ll go up onto the main part of New North Road, by the Kingsland train station, with this big (BIG) Japanese flag and start kind of flailing it around and (I think) yelling out stuff in Japanese. Which is obviously a big plus.
The food is Japanese and it is delicious. I think the prices are okay. Pretty good.

Came here the other day with some friends, we hadn’t booked and the place looked really full when we arrived, however the manager was great and found us a table straight away without any hesitation (it may have been booked for someone but he didn’t let us know that) which I really liked, so that was a good start. You can continue to order food throughout your meal so that’s what we did, as the dishes are quite small and you just order until you are full. The boys in my group ordered all the fishy things, octopus tentacles and the like, which they seriously enjoyed they said. I ordered their sushi, which came as four bits (a little skimpy) and to be honest, I have had better sushi. The chicken still had it’s skin on, which is a pet hate of mine, still it was quite nice and I ate it. So at the end all of us were really full, we had ordered alcohol too, and once we split the bill it came to $ 49 which I thought was extremely reasonable! The service was also great throughout the night, really attentive, all up it was an enjoyable evening!