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kaberett... and twice makes a tradition. P-the-ethical & I have a habit of going for A Fancy Meal most times we end up in the same place, which we probably need to curb a little now that we see each other more than twice a year, and he was keen to go back and is an excellent dining companion; I'd been wanting to know what facesfriend thought of the place since he'd mentioned to me that work owed him a fancy dinner; and I was wanting to introduce them in a context that wasn't in point of fact A Party. Plus taking more people out to fancy vegetarian dinners means I get to try more of the food, so. That was a motivation.
Because I am a shameless nationalist, we got a bottle of 2013 Austrian Grüner Veltliner (a white grape that likes alps; Höpler) and I had a glass of Luscombe pear & apple juice. Both were lovely; I was pleased. My dining companions were a bit perplexed by the GV but it was my birthday so I didn't care. Beautifully crisp & grassy example of the genre.
Amuse-bouche. Mushroom cracker, mango, tomato, lime. Beautiful: the cracker was thin and crisp and a rich brown, with the other flavours assembled on top of it. Texture & flavour contrasts were brilliant - the cracker was a slightly burnt/caramelised mushroom; mango cool & perfect in contrast. P & I like the cracker best; facesfriend was underwhelmed by the cracker but did not object to the thing as a whole as I recall.
Bread. Seeded sourdough (my notes say "robust!"), fennel seed & sultana ("!!! sweet & lovely"), browned lemon butter. I wasn't expect to like the second bread - I have Opinions on contexts in which fennel seeds are appropriate, and bread isn't one of them (caraway, always and forever), so I was startled by how much I liked both; I really should have learned better by now.
Starters.
Mains.
Dessert.
-- followed by coffee & chocolates. I have no idea what the coffee was like; my fresh mint tea was nice, but there's not much you can do to fuck that up, really, now is there. The chocolates were a set of fascinating little truffles; there was smoked & salted, cocoa nibs, violet cream, aaaand I think coffee? Plus smoked paprika fudge (which ff inhaled the majority of). The fudge was great (as we knew from P's dessert last year); I greatly enjoyed the smoked-and-salted and cocoa nibbed chocolates, both of which I went in on, and rapturous noises were made about the other two by them as had them.
We were very, very pleased.
As one might expect service was unobtrusive except when they had no option, e.g. the committee that assembled to gape in amusement at how badly I'd got my hair tangled in my coat on arrival; and the point at which we came to pay, my boys looked at each other and me and pulled out their cards and said we'd sort out my contribution later, the waiter was very carefully very impassive, and I ended up going bright pink and burying my head in my hands and giggling because yes, in fact, it was exactly what it looked like. But also at a point earlier in the meal I'd mentioned that It Was My Birthday Treat, was wished a happy birthday, and then my dessert came out on a plate with "Happy Birthday" in the glaze and a candle on top of it. So! It was showy but also judged exactly right for me. It was lovely. <3
Because I am a shameless nationalist, we got a bottle of 2013 Austrian Grüner Veltliner (a white grape that likes alps; Höpler) and I had a glass of Luscombe pear & apple juice. Both were lovely; I was pleased. My dining companions were a bit perplexed by the GV but it was my birthday so I didn't care. Beautifully crisp & grassy example of the genre.
Amuse-bouche. Mushroom cracker, mango, tomato, lime. Beautiful: the cracker was thin and crisp and a rich brown, with the other flavours assembled on top of it. Texture & flavour contrasts were brilliant - the cracker was a slightly burnt/caramelised mushroom; mango cool & perfect in contrast. P & I like the cracker best; facesfriend was underwhelmed by the cracker but did not object to the thing as a whole as I recall.
Bread. Seeded sourdough (my notes say "robust!"), fennel seed & sultana ("!!! sweet & lovely"), browned lemon butter. I wasn't expect to like the second bread - I have Opinions on contexts in which fennel seeds are appropriate, and bread isn't one of them (caraway, always and forever), so I was startled by how much I liked both; I really should have learned better by now.
Starters.
- Facesfriend: whipped jacket potato and crispy onions//tomato syrup and Wensleydale cheese. -- this was an astonishing potato foam with amazing sweet tomato relish. It was fantastic. I meant to try a second forkful but by the time I'd finished being distracted by my own plate ff'd inhaled the lot. I had been gently suspicious and reluctant to order it myself; I strongly suspect it is what I will be ordering next time I go, if it's still on the menu. It was light & rich & enjoyed a very great deal by all.
- P: dried yeast ice cream with red pepper and almond milk purée//avocado brioche, cured yellow pepper and yeast extract. -- PROPER PEPPERS, of the pointy and correctly-pickled variety, which made me & particularly P very happy. Very pretty and interesting flavour combinations, but not to my taste; P enjoyed it a great deal.
- me: grilled carrot cake with sheeps yoghurt//ginger carrots and orange oil. -- again, this was beautiful. They were described as "heritage carrots" in at least some of the menu; also present were carrot cake, steamed carrot as a base for the construction, and thinly sliced raw carrot that'd curled up, and was the gingery wossname. The carrot cake was small warm cuboids, a beautiful textural contrast and really not too sweet: nice depth of flavour (definitely rich!). The pairing with sheep's yoghurt gave it the sort of acidity one wants, really; and not listed on the menu was this frozen avocado-possibly parsley thing (a very soft and crumbly freeze) overall, which again provided textural & visual contrast. This was the thing that worked astonishingly well with the fennel seed & sultana bread: I was delighted.
Mains.
- Facesfriend: salted and ash baked celeriac and wild garlic//whey poached celeriac, broccoli and yogurt curd. I had this last year! I loved it and wrote about it in more detail last year! The sea asters were replaced with wild garlic (it's in season - I strongly considered bringing the handfuls of it I pulled up from the patio at the mouldering ancestral pile back and cooking for friends with it for the lols); I was very good and didn't steal much of the celeriac. It was fantastic. I did, however, manage to avoid regretting having ordered something else...
- P: cornmeal, beetroot and horseradish with aged garlic oil//artichokes in hay, parsley root and hazelnut milk. So P was dithering between a couple of options; we ended up persuading him into this one, and I'm very glad that we did because I was extremely curious (but didn't think I could eat a whole one on spec - I'm still learning to cope with beetroot); it turned out to be the plate I'd been fascinated to see going by to another table, with the roasted (some of them ashed) vegetables arranged along one edge of the dark stoneware and the hazelnut milk a small lake in the middle. It was absolutely fantastically balanced; P was unable to find fault with the artichoke hearts, despite having been thoroughly spoiled by his parents' homegrown for most of his life; the horseradish, to our collective perplexity, showed up in the approximate form factor one might expect of parsnips, which is to say the entire root. I have never previously enjoyed horseradish that much. The limiting factor on how much of this I nicked off P's plate was honestly feeling bad about eating his entire dinner; it was brilliant and earthy and sweet, and and and. Gushing enthusiasm.
- me: goats cheese, fennel pollen and pistachio with apple purée//fennel and rainbow chard. BUT IN SPITE OF HOW GOOD THEIR FOOD WAS, I still thought I'd won. The goats' cheese was sweet and crumbly and very very fresh, with the slightly citrus taste you get from that, and how the fennel pollen featured was as its "rind" - the log had clearly been rolled in the stuff, and it was delicious. The apple provided a sweetly acidic spike that complemented the pollen (THAT TASTED OF FENNEL, I am not over this) extremely well; the chard was slightly wilted and texturally excellent; and as a bonus there were tiny florets of my favourite fractal broccoli. I was an extremely poor dining companion for this course, because I spent most of it making tiny delighted noises and closing my eyes and paying no attention to anything at all apart from my food.
Dessert.
- Facesfriend & me: baked black treacle sponge and cardamom milk//mandarin and parkin crumbs; we paired it with a 2010 Portuguese vintage port, which worked very well. There were baffling little white geloid cuboids we didn't understand at all; I was not up to feeling bad about having ordered identical things, because it was rich and complicated and orangey and treacley and cardamom and spice and I am not going to do a good job of explaining how nice this was, okay, because I am just delighted. Only just this side of overwhelmingly sweet, but extremely well judged.
- P: roasted white chocolate and cep mushroom custard and tarragon cream cheese/toasted meringue and caramelised rice. Pedro once again indulged our curiousity by ordering the mysterious mushroom dessert both ff & I were suspicious of. IT TURNS OUT THE MYSTERIOUS MUSHROOM DESSERT IS AMAZING; P's dessert wine choice - with Tokaji (Aszú, 5 Puttonyos, Patricius, Hungary, 2003) - was bang-on. Like, the custard was unambiguously mushroom? And unambiguously dessert? And delicious? And there was texture everything; the tarragon cream cheese actually arrived lightly frozen in a block; and the rice and meringue kept it from being too creamy (if such a thing is possible in the world of desserts, etc). It wasn't too sweet? It was a delicious dessert made out of mushroom? I'm sorry, I'm pretty much at "bafflingly delicious mysterious mushroom dessert". Get it if you go (& it is compatible with your diet, etc). Mushroom. I don't even know.
-- followed by coffee & chocolates. I have no idea what the coffee was like; my fresh mint tea was nice, but there's not much you can do to fuck that up, really, now is there. The chocolates were a set of fascinating little truffles; there was smoked & salted, cocoa nibs, violet cream, aaaand I think coffee? Plus smoked paprika fudge (which ff inhaled the majority of). The fudge was great (as we knew from P's dessert last year); I greatly enjoyed the smoked-and-salted and cocoa nibbed chocolates, both of which I went in on, and rapturous noises were made about the other two by them as had them.
We were very, very pleased.
As one might expect service was unobtrusive except when they had no option, e.g. the committee that assembled to gape in amusement at how badly I'd got my hair tangled in my coat on arrival; and the point at which we came to pay, my boys looked at each other and me and pulled out their cards and said we'd sort out my contribution later, the waiter was very carefully very impassive, and I ended up going bright pink and burying my head in my hands and giggling because yes, in fact, it was exactly what it looked like. But also at a point earlier in the meal I'd mentioned that It Was My Birthday Treat, was wished a happy birthday, and then my dessert came out on a plate with "Happy Birthday" in the glaze and a candle on top of it. So! It was showy but also judged exactly right for me. It was lovely. <3
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Date: 2015-05-28 07:25 pm (UTC)Happy Birthday and good eating.
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