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2014-07-26
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Well, I know the main chef Jason and other guys working here since I come here a few times already. Each time my guests were happy and intrigued.They serve the same menu for lunch and dinner. Often one finds a watered down lunch menu at many places but not here.How should I describe the food. Well, perhaps from the point of view of how to put it together and the ingredients that go into making up each dish. I find most of the small dishes tastefully put together and the ingredients work together
They serve the same menu for lunch and dinner. Often one finds a watered down lunch menu at many places but not here.
How should I describe the food. Well, perhaps from the point of view of how to put it together and the ingredients that go into making up each dish. I find most of the small dishes tastefully put together and the ingredients work together for an effect that is greater than the sum total of the parts. What you throw together and how they work with each other and how the whole looks on the plate is really a matter of the chef's taste buds and education. There are many places where this is not done well, not because of the quality of the ingredients or anything like that, but simply because the chef lacks that quality. It works well here. I usually avoid fusion cuisine but I love it here.
The main courses tend to be a bit more mainstream and I tend to avoid them because that is not why I come here to dine.
Some interesting dishes but also bear in mind that some you can make easily at home. Useful to know for home entertainment.
Some of the favorites:
Pork burgers with foie gras. They are really small so they are what is known in the USA as sliders. I would say three bites each. The pork is grounded and meshed with a bit of foie gras, which gives it a slight lift in fragance but I wouldn't say you get a distinct foie gras taste. Actually that is not bad. I had burgers with a piece of foie gras on top but they had not worked too well because the foie gras gets mushy and somewhat disgusting. The foie gras treatment given to these pork burgers is fine. It is served with a thick green sauce, I think of avocado and lemon grass. Each burger comes with a piece of pickle on top of the patty but do add the pickled cucumber which the dish comes with because they are sweet tasting and not the same as the pickle inside the burger.
Truffle ham toasties with quail egg - Basically cheese, parma ham and truffle paste inside. The portion is small but enough for 4 persons to get a small piece each. The small quail egg is excellent and fried sunny side up. I think it doesn't do much for the toasties. I usually order this for guests who have not been here before but frankly it is easily made at home.
Beet root salad with goat cheese - Well, they have altered the recipe to save on the cost of the beet roots. Previously they take whole cooked beets and cut out disks from the center and discard the rest. What a huge waste. Now, they use beet chunks, so presumably they are using the whole beet now. There are yellow beets and deep red beets. The previous version was small delicate beet cyclinders with goat cheese and micro greens, that are now replaced by not so elegant chunks. I wish they would go back to the old version and figure out what else to do with the unused portion of the beet instead.
They have made slight changes to the menu so they do not offer crispy fish skin with salt cod brandade cream on top with sprinkled paprika any more. I miss this one.
Dessert is interesting and refreshing. We had a green tea mousse with yoghurt sorbet and crispy honeycomb. I don't get wowed by chocolate dessert so I usually avoid the chocolate composition dessert but others love it. Equally I do not like the peanut butter dessert and avoid it. But we did not order these and so they do not affect my rating for this visit.
It is the height of summer here but it is winter in Australia. We had a steak tartare with a layer of grated Tasmanian truffle on top. Nice.
As the price comes to $500 per person before wine but includes a few bottles of bubbly water, and in my opinion one gets a more interesting and better experience than most fine dining restaurants that charges 3 times the price, I think it amounts to good value for foodies.
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