Fishmarket
Great Eastern Hotel, London
The Conrad Group, which manages both the Great Eastern Hotel and its five restaurants, including Fishmarket, is known more for its design acumen than for its cooking. Certainly, the beautiful marble room which Fishmarket is lucky enough to enjoy is magnificent - neither garish or overdone, but simply elegant. What surprised me, however, was that Fishmarket's food was less objectionable than I would have expected. No, it's not quite Le Bernardin - but few places are.
My starter of dill encrusted gravlax (spelled gravadlax in the UK) was well cured (gravlax, of course, is salmon cured in salt and herbs, of Scandinavian provenance), and the sweet mustard sauce that came with it gave the dish a sophisticated tinge. I was surprised to see that no special bread was brought out for the fish, since I think some kind of hearty cracker or oatcake would have been perfect. Nonetheless, -the dish was actually quite good, and well priced for a restaurant that sits so high in the spectrum of London pricing.
For my main dish, I ordered a red mullet tagine. Now, normally, when you order a tagine of any sort the whole idea is for the restaurant to be able to present the dish in its dramatic clay pot - for that's what a tagine is, more than a style of cooking. The tagine, like a dutch oven, is supposed to create a certain kind of cooking environment for the dish - one that often provides a distinctive taste or texture. Here, you can see my description of a beef tagine, for example, that I had at the New York restaurant Django.
At Fishmarket, however, the dish arrived arranged simply on a plate, a perfectly aligned, thin square of couscous sitting underneath two obviously sauteed pieces of fragrant fish. This puzzled me for a moment, I have to say. The fish hadn't been cooked in a tagine - and it seems kind of odd to just do the couscous in a tagine and then not take advantage of the inherent presentation it affords. Still, the couscous was delicate and flavorful - both mildly spicy, and sweet with plump, well cooked sultanas dotted throughout. And it was small - finally, thankfully, I had run into a restaurant with a sense of proportion. Eating in New York for more than a month had fooled me into thinking that all restaurants served too much food - here, the portions were well thought out, and just adequate.
Dessert was fun, for a simple reason. My lemon tart arrived, adorned with clever sugar garnishes made in the shape of orange slices. I looked at it, and it looked back up at me, cringing. For, of course, it had obviously been ordered in from a bakery, and not cooked in house, and then sneakily disguised with its sugry finery. There's just a certain sheen, I think, to the ordered in tarte au citron - and even though I could be wrong about its capitalistic provenance, I don't think I am.
Anyway, I actually don't mind when restaurants order in desserts. I'd much rather they did that, and present me with a proper tart, made exactly with a slightly sweet shell of half french butter and half flour, than try to gin up some sort of graham cracker crusted lemon curd monstrosity slathered with whipped cream in their own kitchen. It's a real sign of the chef's humility, I think, to order food in when they know they can't do better, and as I crunched through the quite decent dessert, sipping gingerly at my hot coffee, I was glad for the master's virtue. In all, Fishmarket had impressed, even though I had expected little.
7/09/2004
7/07/2004
Le Bernardin
Bidding farewell to New York at the end of my seven week stint, I visited Le Bernardin, New York's premier fish restaurant. Unlike many of my previous visits to much lauded restaurants, I was impressed, though counterintuitively, my favorite dish hadn't a bit of seafood in it.
The meal was preceded by a sort of salmon dip - a distant cousin to the kind of smoked salmon pate one gets in the supermarket in a plastic tub. This version was made of fresh salmon, and creme fraiche, and some wonderful chives - while my table mates went for the admittedly good butter and relatively interesting sourdough boules, I went ahead and piled the bright dip onto the pieces of lightly oiled toast that accompanied it. I don't think it's my fault if no one else at the table notices what they should be eating, right? In any case, the early bird gets the worm, I think.
As I perused the menu, though, I was really surprised to see quite this much fusion in such an old standby - tandoori hamachi, for example? It's certainly clever, but I'm not sure whether that's quite what I have in mind when I go out to eat. My own choice was hardly more orthodox - a sort of tower made of potato, and vegetables, and crab, all topped with a spicy Peruvian mayonnaise. However un-French it sounds, I'll admit that the concoction was delicious - particularly impressive, if you haven't ever tried delicately stacking foods, was the fact that the dish never collapsed into a sort of all inclusive casserole. Each tiny layer remained distinct, different, and entirely identifiable - a real masterpiece of presentation, if not of cooking.
For the main course, I ordered a wild striped bass, surrounded like a sort of edible stonehenge by some brightly green, lightly steamed okras. That alone was delicious, especially since the fish was cooked so precisely - not quite at the quiver I tend to like, but at perhaps the even more difficult to achieve line between flakiness and dried disinterest. I've certainly never been able to achieve that in the oven, as Le Bernardin says they did. But additionally, as part of the elaborate table service favored by Le Bernardin (they go in for the synchronized waiter thing there, and I think it works), the bass was accompanied by the lightest fusion broth of lime and mango, adding a tiny sweet tinge to an already near perfect dish. The flavors weren't the strongest, and in a world used to powerful sensations that might be a problem for some people, but in my view there's a yawning gap between bland and subtle - this fell, (as I hope to. heh), on the latter side of that divide.
Good though the previous dishes were, however, dessert was outstanding, especially if you order wisely. My warm almond cake combined all the deep flavor of those runny chocolate cakes everyone (including me) likes so much, with the distinctive tinge of a dense almond base. This kind of cake should be like eating a miraculously light marzipan, I think, and Le Bernardin achieved that ideal precisely. But even here there was a little surprise, accomplished I think by lining the baking instrument (presumably some kind of ramekin, though I won't guess) with a thin layer of some delicious sugar, which provided a startling texture to the outside of a usually quickly softening sort of cake. In any case, with our without the shavings of surprisingly tasteless pear alongside (I think chosen more for its firmness than taste), I wish the restaurant was open for just dessert. It's not that I wouldn't like the rest of the menu again, but sometimes, a full meal isn't in the cards- but a striking dessert like this one might be.
Bidding farewell to New York at the end of my seven week stint, I visited Le Bernardin, New York's premier fish restaurant. Unlike many of my previous visits to much lauded restaurants, I was impressed, though counterintuitively, my favorite dish hadn't a bit of seafood in it.
The meal was preceded by a sort of salmon dip - a distant cousin to the kind of smoked salmon pate one gets in the supermarket in a plastic tub. This version was made of fresh salmon, and creme fraiche, and some wonderful chives - while my table mates went for the admittedly good butter and relatively interesting sourdough boules, I went ahead and piled the bright dip onto the pieces of lightly oiled toast that accompanied it. I don't think it's my fault if no one else at the table notices what they should be eating, right? In any case, the early bird gets the worm, I think.
As I perused the menu, though, I was really surprised to see quite this much fusion in such an old standby - tandoori hamachi, for example? It's certainly clever, but I'm not sure whether that's quite what I have in mind when I go out to eat. My own choice was hardly more orthodox - a sort of tower made of potato, and vegetables, and crab, all topped with a spicy Peruvian mayonnaise. However un-French it sounds, I'll admit that the concoction was delicious - particularly impressive, if you haven't ever tried delicately stacking foods, was the fact that the dish never collapsed into a sort of all inclusive casserole. Each tiny layer remained distinct, different, and entirely identifiable - a real masterpiece of presentation, if not of cooking.
For the main course, I ordered a wild striped bass, surrounded like a sort of edible stonehenge by some brightly green, lightly steamed okras. That alone was delicious, especially since the fish was cooked so precisely - not quite at the quiver I tend to like, but at perhaps the even more difficult to achieve line between flakiness and dried disinterest. I've certainly never been able to achieve that in the oven, as Le Bernardin says they did. But additionally, as part of the elaborate table service favored by Le Bernardin (they go in for the synchronized waiter thing there, and I think it works), the bass was accompanied by the lightest fusion broth of lime and mango, adding a tiny sweet tinge to an already near perfect dish. The flavors weren't the strongest, and in a world used to powerful sensations that might be a problem for some people, but in my view there's a yawning gap between bland and subtle - this fell, (as I hope to. heh), on the latter side of that divide.
Good though the previous dishes were, however, dessert was outstanding, especially if you order wisely. My warm almond cake combined all the deep flavor of those runny chocolate cakes everyone (including me) likes so much, with the distinctive tinge of a dense almond base. This kind of cake should be like eating a miraculously light marzipan, I think, and Le Bernardin achieved that ideal precisely. But even here there was a little surprise, accomplished I think by lining the baking instrument (presumably some kind of ramekin, though I won't guess) with a thin layer of some delicious sugar, which provided a startling texture to the outside of a usually quickly softening sort of cake. In any case, with our without the shavings of surprisingly tasteless pear alongside (I think chosen more for its firmness than taste), I wish the restaurant was open for just dessert. It's not that I wouldn't like the rest of the menu again, but sometimes, a full meal isn't in the cards- but a striking dessert like this one might be.
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