Reviewing the documentation it's entirely possible but not 100% sure, that my initial calls using this SDK often fail because there's no preinitialised connection so I'm getting an UNAVAILABLE response code - https://grpc.github.io/grpc/node/grpc.Metadata.html.
On retrying the same call it's returning correctly and quickly.
Happy for this not to be a default option and something to configure to maintain current behaviour for users.