Vanilla Black, again
May. 26th, 2016 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettBecause I had a birthday, again. P had arranged to be Elsewhere this year, so A was my only dining companion. I was a little nervous about that, partly because I am a seething mess of anxiety at the moment but partly because my understanding had been that last year he'd enjoyed it well enough but hadn't been anything like as impressed as P & I. Which, you know, fair enough -- but in fact this year his main arrived and he proceeded to sit looking stunned and rapturous for several whole minutes, which I of course found utterly charming.
For my part, this year they took me well outside my comfort zone and it almost all just worked.
None of the wines jumped out at me this year; P & I are both in general more interested in wine than A is, so rather than ordering alcohol we weren't excited about, A got a Bloody Mary and I got a non-alcoholic cocktail called, I think, a Raspberry 1950's Special (no further details currently available from their website). A gives me to understand that historically when he's ordered Bloody Maries he's consistently fairly rapidly come to the conclusion that he doesn't actually like tomato juice; that was emphatically not a problem he had on this occasion. (I, of course, was absolutely delighted with my slightly fizzy hint-of-rose very-raspberry beverage. They're also currently doing something with wild nettles, but fancy raspberry juice is usually, for me, where it is at.) So we were off to an auspicious start, there.
Amuse-bouche. Announced as watermelon gel with seaweed, presented in shot glasses with tiny spoons: powdered seaweed in the bottom, a layer of champagne-coloured gel, and some very tiny very accurate melon cubes on the top, the whole scattered liberally with more powedered seaweed.
I do not like melon.
I have liked melon precisely once, in LA in 2011, when it was consistently much too warm and I was consistently slightly dehydrated. I will grudgingly allow that under such circumstances melon has a role to play. (I am nursing the theory that there does, in fact, exist a strict binary division of members of Homo sapiens, and it's "people who think melon is like cucumber but disgusting" and "people who think cucumber is like melon but disgusting".)
... I liked this. I even liked the cubes of not-actually-watermelon-and-therefore-even-more-objectionable. A, who is the different-foods-mustn't-touch autistic in this relationship (I'm the equal-amounts-of-everything-in-every-mouthful autistic), remarked with no small surprise that the flavours worked well together.
(The gel was pleasant: slightly grainy, such that it didn't just disappear, as of apple purée that had been sieved, or similar. It worked with the seaweed. It was great. This was the first thing we were served toward which I felt a decided antipathy. I tried it anyway! I liked it! Nobody was more surprised than me.)
Bread. Two types: cherry-(black?)currant, and spelt with soybeans.
I do not, with the exception of kirsch, like cherries. (I have historically disliked blackcurrants; given that my favourite G&D's ice cream is blackcurrant-and-honey, and given that I suspiciously bought a small tub of blackcurrant ice cream from the supermarket and promptly inhaled it, I'm resentfully giving up on the claim that I dislike blackcurrants. I am expanding my repertoire, okay.)
I liked the bread. (So did A, but that's less surprising.)
The fruit, various, was part-dried in the actually-still-slightly-juicy sense. The spelt-and-soybean in particular went fantastically with the butter (caramelised lemon; I will be Recreating This At Home, and then probably making pancakes in it, or something).
Starters. I had Chilled Pea Soup, Peanut Marshmallow and Vanilla - Pea Cake and Pea and Mint Salsa; A had Sweet Potato and Puy Lentil 'Dhal' - Crispy Lentils and Tamarind.
My notes sort of turn into scrawled allcaps superlatives here. A was saying something to me when I took my first mouthful; I had to cut him off to have a moment. The cake was a tiny beautiful green sponge; the marshmallow was a thin white cuboid with caramelised crushed peanuts along the top; the salsa was raw new peas, very lightly crushed, and delicately minted. It was garnished with pea shoots. It was perfect. In combination with my drink, it was like walking down the garden in summer and eating peas straight out of the pods and raspberries straight off the canes and everything still warm, despite the fact that they were both cold (the soup because it was chilled; the drink because it had ice). There were textures and it was amazing.
A was pleased with his likewise; "IT DOES A TEXTURE", say my notes: some of the lentils were soft and some of them were crispy and there were sweet potatoe cubes and also purée. There was something peanutty? There were lots of earthy spices playing of the textures? There were good contrasts and my mouth was surprised, but honestly I was mostly just endlessly distracted by communing with my soup.
Mains. I ordered Raw and Grilled Asparagus with Baked High Cross - Pickled Jersey Royals and Truffled Asparagus Juice; A had Fried Porridge, Wild Garlic and Broad Beans - Raw Garlic Almond Milk, Courgette Flower and Aged Garlic, as did someone sitting at the next table over whose order arrived first, and A spent the entire intervening wait glancing over at the plate longingly.
This was the stage at which A abruptly Got The Point of this restaurant and began pulling rapturous faces, which I enjoyed a very great deal. There was a very lightly cooked baby courgette, providing textural contrast; there were cubes of fried porridge; there was a lovely wild garlic leaf purée; the courgette flower and broad beans were apparently also good. Beautiful colours, nice textures, very happy dining companion; I tried bits and pieces and actually quite liked them, which is notable mostly because I don't really consider porridge food.
I'd have enjoyed my main more if I'd gone for either of the things still on the menu that I know I adore, but I'd also have felt a bit ridiculous and I'd definitely have worried that I was Missing Something Amazing, and asparagus is in season and I'm fond of it, so -- but I wasn't really wowed by this, partly because I just... don't get the point of truffles, and partly because I keep on forgetting that I don't really like the form-factor of baked cheese that is just... a lump of breaded cheese. (And I've just worked out that the reason it was so familiar is that it is in fact the stuff you get on the market round here, ha.) But. The pickled potatoes (that were also fried or roasted or something so that they were brown and crunchy as well as being chewy and pickled) were excellent; the charred asparagus was lovely and the smokiness worked well with the potato and the cheese; the raw asparagus was very fine shavings and, on the whole, this was a plate that unambiguously worked best (in my opinion) with some of everything on every forkful (but I still liked the uncooked decorative cheese more than the baked). So! In the event that I do end up going for lunch with the friend who works for the Treasury, I'll get something I adore instead of something New And Interesting.
Desserts. I had the Caramelised Milk, Black Sesame Ice Cream and Yoghurt Crisp - Blueberry and Sheeps Yoghurt, which I had been pining over basically since it went up on the website. I was Pleased. The yoghurt crisp was a fascinating crispbread... thing, light and crunchy and full of black sesame seeds; there was an incredibly rich blueberry compote, there was the sheep yoghurt, and I have just realised that the baffling but intense yellow dollops must have been the caramelised milk and it was amazing. It was decorated with violet petals. The black sesame ice cream was lovely. I was very, very happy, and am delighted I got to actually eat it before it went off the menu again.
HAPPILY FOR ME, A was most interested in the other dessert on the menu I had immense difficulty not choosing, which meant I also got to try the Whipped Doughnut, Raspberry Sorbet and Crispy Custard - Crumbled Raspberry. The crumbled raspberry was, approximately, freeze-dried raspberry; the raspberry sorbet was a good raspberry sorbet and an interesting contrast to my raspberry mocktail; the whipped doughnut was perplexing and neither of us could quite work out what was happening with it (it seemed largely indistinguishable from whipped cream, and did not notably taste doughy or yeasty to either of us). The crispy custard, however, was brilliant: it was sort of texturally like someone had taken a thick layer of custard, and dehydrated it under a slight vacuum or something so that it was full of bubbles, and it was melt-in-the-mouth but also crunchy and custard isn't supposed to be crunchy and it has a very particular texture that goes with the flavour and -- it was very, very strange and counter-intuitive, and I really liked it.
Chocolates.
White & lavender: with a tiny bit of sea salt. Delicately purple. In what has become a tedious refrain, I don't like white chocolate -- but this was fantastic, and I'm suddenly determined to set myself up with a jar of lavender sugar, the better to make salted lavender shortbread.
Cocoa nib & olive oil: VERY TEXTURE. Lovely dark bitter crunchy cocoa nibs with olive oil binding it together and being a textural contrast more than it was a flavour; I loved it, A was indifferent, I got to eat almost all of it and was very smug.
White & tonka bean: still don't like white chocolate; still liked this. Very obviously tonka (which is approximately Weird Tree Vanilla, if you haven't met it before); quite sweet, but I did end up eating my entire half, slightly to my surprise.
Orange: no. It was milk chocolate with orange and no. I do not believe in orange chocolate. It is an abomination. A ate all of this. But, and I feel this was important, this was item #5 that I was deeply dubious of, and the first one I actually disliked and refused to finish eating, and quite frankly that is an achievement all on its own.
For my part, this year they took me well outside my comfort zone and it almost all just worked.
None of the wines jumped out at me this year; P & I are both in general more interested in wine than A is, so rather than ordering alcohol we weren't excited about, A got a Bloody Mary and I got a non-alcoholic cocktail called, I think, a Raspberry 1950's Special (no further details currently available from their website). A gives me to understand that historically when he's ordered Bloody Maries he's consistently fairly rapidly come to the conclusion that he doesn't actually like tomato juice; that was emphatically not a problem he had on this occasion. (I, of course, was absolutely delighted with my slightly fizzy hint-of-rose very-raspberry beverage. They're also currently doing something with wild nettles, but fancy raspberry juice is usually, for me, where it is at.) So we were off to an auspicious start, there.
Amuse-bouche. Announced as watermelon gel with seaweed, presented in shot glasses with tiny spoons: powdered seaweed in the bottom, a layer of champagne-coloured gel, and some very tiny very accurate melon cubes on the top, the whole scattered liberally with more powedered seaweed.
I do not like melon.
I have liked melon precisely once, in LA in 2011, when it was consistently much too warm and I was consistently slightly dehydrated. I will grudgingly allow that under such circumstances melon has a role to play. (I am nursing the theory that there does, in fact, exist a strict binary division of members of Homo sapiens, and it's "people who think melon is like cucumber but disgusting" and "people who think cucumber is like melon but disgusting".)
... I liked this. I even liked the cubes of not-actually-watermelon-and-therefore-even-more-objectionable. A, who is the different-foods-mustn't-touch autistic in this relationship (I'm the equal-amounts-of-everything-in-every-mouthful autistic), remarked with no small surprise that the flavours worked well together.
(The gel was pleasant: slightly grainy, such that it didn't just disappear, as of apple purée that had been sieved, or similar. It worked with the seaweed. It was great. This was the first thing we were served toward which I felt a decided antipathy. I tried it anyway! I liked it! Nobody was more surprised than me.)
Bread. Two types: cherry-(black?)currant, and spelt with soybeans.
I do not, with the exception of kirsch, like cherries. (I have historically disliked blackcurrants; given that my favourite G&D's ice cream is blackcurrant-and-honey, and given that I suspiciously bought a small tub of blackcurrant ice cream from the supermarket and promptly inhaled it, I'm resentfully giving up on the claim that I dislike blackcurrants. I am expanding my repertoire, okay.)
I liked the bread. (So did A, but that's less surprising.)
The fruit, various, was part-dried in the actually-still-slightly-juicy sense. The spelt-and-soybean in particular went fantastically with the butter (caramelised lemon; I will be Recreating This At Home, and then probably making pancakes in it, or something).
Starters. I had Chilled Pea Soup, Peanut Marshmallow and Vanilla - Pea Cake and Pea and Mint Salsa; A had Sweet Potato and Puy Lentil 'Dhal' - Crispy Lentils and Tamarind.
My notes sort of turn into scrawled allcaps superlatives here. A was saying something to me when I took my first mouthful; I had to cut him off to have a moment. The cake was a tiny beautiful green sponge; the marshmallow was a thin white cuboid with caramelised crushed peanuts along the top; the salsa was raw new peas, very lightly crushed, and delicately minted. It was garnished with pea shoots. It was perfect. In combination with my drink, it was like walking down the garden in summer and eating peas straight out of the pods and raspberries straight off the canes and everything still warm, despite the fact that they were both cold (the soup because it was chilled; the drink because it had ice). There were textures and it was amazing.
A was pleased with his likewise; "IT DOES A TEXTURE", say my notes: some of the lentils were soft and some of them were crispy and there were sweet potatoe cubes and also purée. There was something peanutty? There were lots of earthy spices playing of the textures? There were good contrasts and my mouth was surprised, but honestly I was mostly just endlessly distracted by communing with my soup.
Mains. I ordered Raw and Grilled Asparagus with Baked High Cross - Pickled Jersey Royals and Truffled Asparagus Juice; A had Fried Porridge, Wild Garlic and Broad Beans - Raw Garlic Almond Milk, Courgette Flower and Aged Garlic, as did someone sitting at the next table over whose order arrived first, and A spent the entire intervening wait glancing over at the plate longingly.
This was the stage at which A abruptly Got The Point of this restaurant and began pulling rapturous faces, which I enjoyed a very great deal. There was a very lightly cooked baby courgette, providing textural contrast; there were cubes of fried porridge; there was a lovely wild garlic leaf purée; the courgette flower and broad beans were apparently also good. Beautiful colours, nice textures, very happy dining companion; I tried bits and pieces and actually quite liked them, which is notable mostly because I don't really consider porridge food.
I'd have enjoyed my main more if I'd gone for either of the things still on the menu that I know I adore, but I'd also have felt a bit ridiculous and I'd definitely have worried that I was Missing Something Amazing, and asparagus is in season and I'm fond of it, so -- but I wasn't really wowed by this, partly because I just... don't get the point of truffles, and partly because I keep on forgetting that I don't really like the form-factor of baked cheese that is just... a lump of breaded cheese. (And I've just worked out that the reason it was so familiar is that it is in fact the stuff you get on the market round here, ha.) But. The pickled potatoes (that were also fried or roasted or something so that they were brown and crunchy as well as being chewy and pickled) were excellent; the charred asparagus was lovely and the smokiness worked well with the potato and the cheese; the raw asparagus was very fine shavings and, on the whole, this was a plate that unambiguously worked best (in my opinion) with some of everything on every forkful (but I still liked the uncooked decorative cheese more than the baked). So! In the event that I do end up going for lunch with the friend who works for the Treasury, I'll get something I adore instead of something New And Interesting.
Desserts. I had the Caramelised Milk, Black Sesame Ice Cream and Yoghurt Crisp - Blueberry and Sheeps Yoghurt, which I had been pining over basically since it went up on the website. I was Pleased. The yoghurt crisp was a fascinating crispbread... thing, light and crunchy and full of black sesame seeds; there was an incredibly rich blueberry compote, there was the sheep yoghurt, and I have just realised that the baffling but intense yellow dollops must have been the caramelised milk and it was amazing. It was decorated with violet petals. The black sesame ice cream was lovely. I was very, very happy, and am delighted I got to actually eat it before it went off the menu again.
HAPPILY FOR ME, A was most interested in the other dessert on the menu I had immense difficulty not choosing, which meant I also got to try the Whipped Doughnut, Raspberry Sorbet and Crispy Custard - Crumbled Raspberry. The crumbled raspberry was, approximately, freeze-dried raspberry; the raspberry sorbet was a good raspberry sorbet and an interesting contrast to my raspberry mocktail; the whipped doughnut was perplexing and neither of us could quite work out what was happening with it (it seemed largely indistinguishable from whipped cream, and did not notably taste doughy or yeasty to either of us). The crispy custard, however, was brilliant: it was sort of texturally like someone had taken a thick layer of custard, and dehydrated it under a slight vacuum or something so that it was full of bubbles, and it was melt-in-the-mouth but also crunchy and custard isn't supposed to be crunchy and it has a very particular texture that goes with the flavour and -- it was very, very strange and counter-intuitive, and I really liked it.
Chocolates.
White & lavender: with a tiny bit of sea salt. Delicately purple. In what has become a tedious refrain, I don't like white chocolate -- but this was fantastic, and I'm suddenly determined to set myself up with a jar of lavender sugar, the better to make salted lavender shortbread.
Cocoa nib & olive oil: VERY TEXTURE. Lovely dark bitter crunchy cocoa nibs with olive oil binding it together and being a textural contrast more than it was a flavour; I loved it, A was indifferent, I got to eat almost all of it and was very smug.
White & tonka bean: still don't like white chocolate; still liked this. Very obviously tonka (which is approximately Weird Tree Vanilla, if you haven't met it before); quite sweet, but I did end up eating my entire half, slightly to my surprise.
Orange: no. It was milk chocolate with orange and no. I do not believe in orange chocolate. It is an abomination. A ate all of this. But, and I feel this was important, this was item #5 that I was deeply dubious of, and the first one I actually disliked and refused to finish eating, and quite frankly that is an achievement all on its own.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-26 06:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-28 11:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-26 07:09 pm (UTC)Melon is indeed like cucumber, except disgusting. (And it took me a while to come around to cucumber. The only cucurbits I have an uncomplicated relationship with are squashes, and I still won't eat most of them raw.)
Lavender sugar? Oh my. The internet at large suggests it's done the same way as vanilla sugar, which: yes good. I see a need for small containers of flavoring sugar in my near future.
Blackcurrants. <3
The cacao nibs thing sounds truly amazing.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-28 11:20 am (UTC)The other flavoured sugars I'm intending to get around to making are chamomile (thanks, the Graun and possibly rose...
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Date: 2016-05-26 08:51 pm (UTC)Unfortunately for your theory, I happen to like both melon, and cucumber.
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Date: 2016-05-28 11:21 am (UTC)Vanilla Black are, in my experience, absolutely excellent for leaving me with difficult choices about what I want to eat...
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Date: 2016-05-27 06:02 am (UTC)This sounds like a delightful culinary adventure! \o/
Also. Belated happy birthday!!
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Date: 2016-05-28 11:23 am (UTC)Thank you <3
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Date: 2016-05-29 01:23 pm (UTC):-)