Its discreet white frontage doesn’t give much away, but push open Kazuya’s door and you’ll soon find a hint of what this contemporary restaurant is all about. The bar immediately in front of you is lined with premium Japanese whiskies and beautiful, gem-coloured Kagami crystalware. Above it, a cut-out panel features clusters of spheres that represent bubbles, one of several motifs woven through the design and menu of chef and owner Kazuya Yamauchi’s Symonds Street establishment. 

Alongside the menu is another beautifully-crafted list that outlines the themes that lie behind every decision made at Kazuya, beginning with kokoro-oduru – excitement, delight, pleasure. Yamauchi and his tight-knit team of culinary wizards ensure each customer is greeted with kokoro-oduru at the beginning of their five, seven or 10-course dining experience. 

In the current menu, as Yamauchi shows me, this is encapsulated in a first dish of cuttlefish, sweetcorn, basil and Parmigiano served in an elegant fluted glass dish that has visible, trapped air bubbles in its base. The bubbling up of pleasure continues through this light, ethereal dish right to the top, where the Parmigiano appears in ultra-fine bubbled foam form. 

While Yamauchi and his staff, including sous chef Koujiro (Kozzy) Nagatoshi, are Japanese-raised and schooled and their approach to creating a harmonious dining experience feels, in essence, very Japanese, the cuisine at Kazuya’s dinner service is not – it’s essentially modern European fare shaped by Yamauchi’s intense focus, his interesting background in the industry, and the best local ingredients. 

Yamauchi cut his teeth at lauded fine-dining Italian restaurant Acqua Pazza in Tokyo, where “Japanese ingredients were used in Western-style dishes, served with Japanese hospitality”. He travelled many times to Europe to study, before moving to Auckland, where he worked as a chef in several restaurants before searching for the perfect site to open his own restaurant. Uptown had a pedigree in fine dining, with The French Cafe a long-standing success. 

“The area is accessible for people travelling in from all directions,” says Yamauchi, whose prime purpose is customer enjoyment. “I’ve met or spoken with every customer who has dined here in the nine years we’ve been open; it’s my responsibility to make every customer smile.” He’s also thrilled to have organic garden OMG up the road, which his chef visits each day to source produce. 

At Kazuya, he turns the tables to create his own unique offering; he doesn’t often call on Japanese ingredients or dishes – the menu features ratatouille, risotto and ricotta among other distinctly European items – but Japanese techniques and methods of preparation are very much at play in the kitchen, as is an overarching ethos of not wasting ingredients. In a move more typical of a sushi restaurant, all fish comes into the kitchen whole, allowing the chefs to fillet it to their standard. Frames and other scraps make their way into stocks, and so on. 

Then there are Yamauchi’s own innovations. He believes that every ingredient possesses an optimal serving temperature and he has devised intricate methods of cooking to reach these. He describes how he cooks snapper: first, a flash cure in shio koji, before washing and storing in the fridge overnight as a kind-of brief ageing process. The next day, it undergoes a very brief stint in a hot oven and then into a super freezer – twice – to reach bliss point. “It turns out a bit like a rare steak, or like a slightly warm sashimi,” he describes. 

Although the restaurant is not open for lunch service, Kazuya has recently added takeaway lunches from Thursday to Saturday. This is Nagatashi’s domain and his Kozzy Riceboxes are donburi-like offerings of a special blend of seasoned rice topped with chicken, tofu or beef along with vegetables and dressings, as well as a chirashizushi option with sashimi. Being Kazuya, these riceboxes are almost too beautiful to eat and their pricing makes them a clever way to enjoy a touch of the magic in between dinner dates. 

Did I mention there’s cheesecake to go, too? Something between a Japanese-style and a burnt basque, it is of course Yamauchi’s painstakingly researched recipe and you can currently order it by the slice or whole to takeaway. Customer enjoyment, you bet.