What Restaurant did you eat at last night?

[DONOHUE07]

Popped into McDonald's yesterday afternoon, lovely!

 

[Ace Modder]

Revolution in Newcastle under Lyme.

Went there with the wife and our friends. (so 4 of us in total)

The food was very good, I have a blue cheese burger with mushrooms on it. Sweet potato fried, everybody else had similiar types of burgers. We ordered two sides, fried onion rings and cheesey garlic bread. We had 2 cocktails each ( so 8 in total) the whole bill only came to £54.33. Bloody good deal that was

Food was really nice too.

 

[Ahleckz]

On Tuesday I had the pleasure of having lunch at Osteria Francescana in Modena.

I'll write more later and post some pictures but suffice to say the place is absolutely incredible!

I'll leave one picture now. Five ages of Parmigano Reggiano in different textures and temperatures:

[IMGhttp://i.imgur.com/241qWEX.jpg?4[/IMG]

I've got his book, it's a great read. Not replicated ant recipes yet but good reading. Recommended if you're into fine dining food.

I've got reservations at El Celler de Can Roca in April but not sure I'll go. It's an expensive endeavour for dinner!

 

[glitch]

I'll leave one picture now. Five ages of Parmigano Reggiano in different textures and temperatures

You tease!

Nice little video featuring the man himself explaining that dish, for those who are interested in that sort of thing:

 

[the-evaluator]

I've got his book, it's a great read. Not replicated ant recipes yet but good reading. Recommended if you're into fine dining food.

I meant to pick up a copy from the restaurant but forgot. Bummer. I'll order a copy.

I've got reservations at El Celler de Can Roca in April but not sure I'll go. It's an expensive endeavour for dinner!

Ooh, nice! That's well up there on the list of restaurants I want to go to. We'll probably try to get a table there later this year.

 

[the-evaluator]

You tease!

Sorry, it's not deliberate. I haven't had the time yet to get all the photos off my phone and resize them. Soon, I promise!

 

[the-evaluator]

Time for some pictures from Osteria Francescana.

There was an a la carte menu plus 2 tasting menus to choose from. We went for this tasting menu along with the wine pairings. I'll put this one in a spoiler tag as I've uploaded the full size image so you can read it.

Spoiler

First up, amuse bouche. Italian take on fish and chips (anchovy in fried potato mousse with potato ice cream), parmesan something-or-other (I forget the proper term, I'll edit the post when I think of it), mackerel macaron and bread parcel filled with baccala.

Tribute to Normandy. Lamb tartare, oyster emulsion and green apple granita. Lamb tartare was a new one on me, I adore beef tartare but had never had lamb.

Lentils are better than caviar. Lentils on top of creme fraiche, pickled cucumber, eel and beetroot. The lentils were quite firm to minic the texture of caviar.

Mediterranean sole. A piece of sole with a lemon sauce and olive crumb. Cooked en papillote it was served in edible paper.

Monkfish ravioli with monkfish liver and tabbit 'a la cacciatora' sauce. Monkfish liver is an extremely strong flavour but this dish was of course excellently balanced.

You can also see the breadsticks. Normally breadsticks are like eating sand and do little other than make my mouth dry. Not these. Very thin, very crispy yet moist. We ate nearly all of them by the end of the meal.

A winter ceviche in Modena. Not my favourite dish as it was very strongly flavoured with mushroom which I'm not overly keen on. My other half loves mushrooms and really liked this dish.

Five ages of Parmigiano Reggiano in different textures and temperatures. I'd wanted to try this dish since first seeing it on Masterchef. Wow, it didn't disappoint. Rich, creamy, hot, cold and utterly delicious. Amazing to taste the differences that can be achieved with 1 ingredient.

The crunchy part of the lasagna. Best ragu ever. So rich! It's the first time I've had it with chopped rather than minced meat.

After this course we met Massimo Boturra who was going around talking to everyone. He's quite a captivating individual and his enthusiasm is infections.

Sometimes mallard, sometimes partridge and even bollito. I don't remember exactly what the components were in this dish, we'd had quite a lot of wine (plus we shared a bottle of champagne when first seated) but it had HUGE flavour. Rich and deep enough that it made my partner and I pause after the first taste. Served with pickled vegetables and black truffle topped bread so that the sauce could be mopped up. Utterly delicious.

Croccantino of foie gras. Foie gras ice cream with balasmic vinegar coated in almonds and macadamia nuts. Honestly one of the best things I've ever eaten. The guy on the next table asked for this course to be skipped as he doesn't eat foie gras. I was tempted to ask if we could have theirs!

Tiramizucca. Tiramisu with pumpkin puree.

Pop corn. This was two dishes. A dish of pop corn of several flavours (I forget what though - blame the wine) and also the other dish I really wanted to try having seen Massimo on TV - Oops I dropped the lemon tart. Best lemon tart ever and very interesting to eat the flavourings on the left of the tart along with it. Caper and lemon tart. Oh yes.

Then finally it was petit four. Dark chocolate with liquid cherry filling, foie gras and truffle macaron and 'camouflage' - a thin layer of foie gras with hare blood powder, coffee and herbs.

Then it was time to leave We were in there about 3 hours and were the last people in our dining room to leave. We were given a bottle of Massimo's balsamic vinegar as we left.

 

[the-evaluator]

Whilst in Modena we also ate at Massimo's other restaurant - Francescetta 58. Well worth a visit if you get the chance, excellent food and very well priced.

 

[the-evaluator]

Saturday night we ate at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud in Dublin. The food was excellent but there were a few issues.

Our fish course arrived before our starter then the second bottle of wine we had was full of sidement. They decanted the wine and changed the glasses but the first glass I was given was dirty.

But as I said the food was excellent. Service was very good too, teh waiting staff were friendly and had personality.

 

[One More Solo]

Went to Grafene in Manchester last night after accumulating a few half price vouchers through Manchester Confidential. It was alright, but in the context of the full bill (£210ish) it was pretty disappointing. Even paying half that I was a bit miffed. Granted, we had wine but the food menu alone is getting up towards The French pricewise and there's a large gulf between the two.

A couple of the courses - the seabass and the ganache dessert - were very good, a couple of others were good and a couple were pretty disappointing. It was particularly poor that one of these was the venison main, which was very underseasoned aside from the few vegetables dotted around which were almost inedibly salty. The bread was a massive letdown too.

It could have all been saved by the service which was also very poor and I really begrudged the mandatory service charge. The things that stood out were:

-Why ask at the point of booking which menu you want if you're going to give customers all the menus when you sit them down? Just seemed a bit pointless.
-Our waiter didn't know the menu at all - on one course I actually knew what was being dished up when he didn't.
-He also had an annoying habit of bringing things to the table when only one of us was sat down - why bother explaining the wine to just one person?
-To top it off he thought he was very funny making jokes about the fish coming from Tesco and generally having no pride in what he was serving.

The more I think about it the more disappointed I am actually... The food is easily fixable and only needs a few tweaks to get it up towards really good, but everything else lets the place down massively. I worry when I don't enjoy a place like this that my expectations are too high, but I think you foster high expectations when you set high prices.

 

[the-evaluator]

In that situation I would have asked to have the service charge removed from my bill. Mandatory or not I would object paying for crappy service.

 

[Tuppy_Glossop]

Blimey, Eval, I am jealous of your fine-dines :redface:

 

[the-evaluator]

My partner and I do like our fine dining

I keep meaning to pull together a list of the places we've visited but I think I'll scare myself at how much we've spent.

Edit. I went through the calendar and looked at 2016 and 2017. The list for that period is:

Hand & Flowers. Three times. 2 star.
Ormer. 1 star.
Osteria Francescana. 3 star.
Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud. 2 star.
Dinner by Heston. 2 star.
Galvin at Windows. Twice. 1 star.
Benares. 1 star.
Midsummer House. 2 star.
The Man Behind The Curtain. 1 star.
Alcron. 1 star.

Crikey.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

Ate at Trishna in London at the back end of Jan for their lunch tasting menu. Quality Indian food as you would expect from a 1 star Michelin place. Thoroughly enjoyed it and a steal at only £35 a head.

 

[Tuppy_Glossop]

Thirteen fine dines with a total of 21 stars - wowzers

 

[the-evaluator]

It may be more actually, I think there was another trip to Dinner by Heston one evening when my partner and I both happened to be in London overnight on business and went on a whim.

 

[Tuppy_Glossop]

Toying with the Black Swan in N. Yorks (Tommy Banks). Might be able to get some beer drinking in Masham (Theakston and Black Sheep breweries) into the same trip.

 

[DominicStar]

We went to Ceviche in Soho this week and I honestly cannot understand the hype. I was aware service was hit and miss but they have far too few staff. Everybody is so tightly packed in that if there were any more staff then it wouldn't work. You can't store coats, bags, hats etc anywhere so you are sitting with them on your lap. It took 20 minutes to get a first drink because they forgot completely, the same happened when we ordered a second with some of the dishes and they came 10 minutes after we had finished eating and were waiting to ask for a bill. 2 of the 4 hot dishes we ordered were also lukewarm to cold. On the positive side, everything was really tasty except a chicken thigh dish.

 

[the-evaluator]

This Saturday we're off to The Rabbit In The Moon in Manchester

 

[Tuppy_Glossop]

That's the Asian O'Hare/Neville/Giggs one is it ?