El Molin (Trento): enter a magic world

 (Visited July 2012)

When you enter El Molin, a restructured old mill with a weird architecture and unusual spaces for a restaurant, you already feel you are abandoning reality to enter a different, fairy-like world.



And indeed you're in for a unique experience, sometimes a great one, not always a perfect one, this place is not about perfection: but a unique one. Gilmozzi is an excellent chef who has has a style - a 'philosophy' as many a pompous restaurant website (but not he) would say. He creates  menus that it would be impossible to have anywhere else. And that, it has to be said, sometimes even seem to be out of commercial logic and really meant to fulfill his creative needs more than anything else.

Not that there is anything 'molecular' or overly strange going on here. The menu looks in part very straightforward and traditional, but even the traditional dishes will surprise you, sometimes in subtle ways. And tonight we mostly skipped the most adventurous items.

Be assured, for example, that when you see that Char coaled Grigia Alpina (Alpine Gray, a local cow breed) with rhubarb and horseradish is on the menu, it's not going to be just an anonymous slab of grilled beef. 

Unless you've been in the mountainous North East of Italy you've never tried this beef (this robust cow is deeply adapted to the local terrain), and even so you are far more likely to have had it at the table of a farmer than in a restaurant (we've never seen it in several years of restaurant/trattoria going in Trentino). The beef is intensely flavoured (in itself and thanks to the expert charcoaling, perhaps the real secret of this dish), with a marvelous texture, the crispy horseradish and the rhubarb, ingredients, especially the first, that definitely look to Central and Northern Europe more than to the Mediteranean, providing a gentle, apt accompaniment. This is a dish that not only is good, but that also tells a story, the story of a territory and of culinary influences.

This came after a pasta with local Fontal cheese and truffles from the Lessini mountains, which was OK but surprised us in being more forgettable than the rest of the meal. And a long sequence of breads, butters, nibbles and amuses made with skill and love (notable a potato bread). The pasta just below is an amuse, not the primo:

The breads came first in a nice basket:

... and then just kept coming, in a variety of flavours and cooking styles:

A Krapfen with seaweed mayonnaise, sea lettuce and braised eel

speaks, in flavour and presentation, of the more modernist side of the cuisine. It is elegant and playful, it is rich and light and delicious. 

A very clean dish of

Roe deer loin in extra virgin olive oil with vegetable chips and Moscato sauce

brings back again the primordial pleasure of a great piece of meat simply cooked (pink) with utmost care, yielding the flavours of the wood.

But a dessert called 'Borderline', stark-looking and dense with incredibly tight aromatic and bitter notes REALLY pushed the boat out, too much for more dessert-conservative Woman, but sending Man, who always found very sweet desserts ultimately immature, into Paradise. He would eat this again, and again, and again (oh we can't quite remember what it was: roots, herbs... gotta go back and find out!).




Woman is more content, very content in fact, with this milk torte, hay and violet. Remarkable: the milk transformed into a sponge soaking up the sauce below, and the ethereally crunchy wafer - delicious!

 And we both still remember with delight the Variation's of creme brulee, a kind of signature dessert which we've had on previous visits and is a lecture in flavour extraction.

Price wise, as we mentioned before, so great is the disparity between the quality and elaboration (and also quantity) of what you eat and what you pay (consider also that we are in Michelin starred venue), that we worry about the economics of this restaurant! Service was very friendly and correct, and the chef often comes out himself to introduce his dishes (to each table).



Chef Gilmozzi may not pull off only perfect dishes, and not all dishes are for all tastes, but he dares and thinks and researches, he creates a magic world in his unique restaurant, an experience that is strange and fascinating precisely because it is so firmly based on the local produce and tradition, where the flavours of the surrounding woods and mountains are assembled and disassembled according to his unlimited fancy. A must go place in Trentino, and the perfect complement to the not distant, more traditional Malga Panna.

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Yauatcha (London): impressive

(Visited 27/12/2011)

When expectations of surly, pushy staff (as we’d read on some sites and experienced ourselves in the past) are so spectacularly broken, with the trademark slick, dark, night-sky effect room adorned by a long fish tank along the bar, full (the room, not the fish tank) of efficient, UNpushy young waiters always swift to remove finished dishes, things can only look up. 

And they did.

The dim sums were as beautiful and good as they come (we have been to China). We had the regulation scallop shui mai, a steamed vegetable dumpling, a steamed prawn zucchini and cattlefish dumpling and a baked chicken Shanghai  dumpling.

In all, the pastry was light, tight, pleasant; in the steamed ones the gentle cooking method only adding to the sense of lightness, while the grilled ones offered crunchiness. In the scallop shuimai, the key is the balance between the scallop and the prawn (paste) flavours, with the gracious visual addition of the tobiko (flying fish roe).  Perfect. A similar balance shone in the colourful zucchini specimen. 

The sauces accompanying the Shanghai dumpling were a delight, one nutty, the other sharp.

A chicken hot and sour soup

impacted first with the heat assault, then gave way to uncover the delicate sweet, sour and umami feast. 

We love vegetables, so we felt compelled to try a Spicy aubergine, sato bean, okra and french bean with peanuts

which was rich, unctuous, varied, vibrant of intensely satisfying colours and flavours. Only but not negligible defect, a piece of inedible fibrous material left in one of the vegetables.

Instead of the regulation crispy duck, we had the crispy duck salad variation

executed with skill, crispiness and moisture both there, and many textures in the vegetables (unfortunately once again including some inedible fibre, tsk tsk).

Yauatcha is at heart a tea house (-cha...), offering a unique selection of fine teas. Instead of wine, drinking which somehow feels silly to us with this type of food, we had an ever so delicate white Silver Needle and a stronger blue High Mountain Fo Shou. We are mentioning the names just to impress, as we're no tea experts and we have no idea of where these teas stand in the pecking order - but they tasted very good to us. The two pots, at £8 and £7.40, were more than enough for the whole meal.

Yauatcha has the rare virtue of being able to cater for large numbers at a very high level of quality. Except for a couple of slips in the preparations of the vegetables, our lunch today was excellent. True, the conditions were ideal, the room only half full projecting a sense of calm as well as slickness and the large number of staff being able to attend solicitously to every table without effort – no doubt things might get a little messier and less smooth at peak times, yet what we’ve seen witnesses to a very sharp organisation in the kitchen and in the room.

 At less than £90 for two including service, this was both one of the best value for money meals in recent times, and an excellent meal by absolute standards.

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The Peat Inn (Fife)

We've been more than a few times at the Peat Inn, first reviewed here.


To understand why this is one the most appealing restaurants we know, look, for example, from our last Summer visit, at the  neatness of presentation of this Lobster Thermidore (a starter): the plate is clean, the precious juices and moisture all contained within the shell. The cooking is the most precise we've encountered in our Thermidore eating career: the sauce not overpowering but merely supporting the soft, delicate, succulent meat. The dark chips layered on the right provide a touch of textural variety. This is what we would call restrained class (it isn't nice to make comparisons, but we have to say that this offering is on a different level of cuisine even compared to our very good recent Scottish experiences at Ondine and The Honours), which in the end defines this restaurant.

The other starter was a stunner, too, but very different, going for a wider palette of flavours and colours. Here we have a pea and ham pannacotta with a ham hock bon bon and a quail egg.

There are so many layers of flavour and textures and details and ingredients in this simple looking dish that it's hard to tell. So we won't tell but merely assure you the result is amazing - to save time just be amazed, enjoy the colours, and try to imagine!


We also had our first Grouse of the season, here in the rich and powerful sauce that this meat wants. On a 'gameiness scale' we would say this was in the middle, quite gentle and hence, we think, acceptable also to more delicate palates - it's a matter of personal preferences but we could cope with more extreme versions and uses of the innards...(so far in the season the gold medal belongs to this guy). In terms of cooking, look at the brown outside, memory of flavour-giving high heat, and at the pink inside, and you get an idea of the satisfaction for the game-lover.

A dish of veal cooked in two ways (roasted rump and braised shin) is not only very accomplished,

 

but it also hides a lovely, lovely tomato sauce in the middle, redolent of Italian flavours, that we of course very much appreciated...Look also at all the small details in the dish - as ever, the more you look the more you discover - rarely here a dish of X is a mere dish of X, it's more like a minute construction around a core.


We would have wanted to choose the entire dessert list, so enticing it read, but we limited ourselves to these two:


A beautiful Eton Mess, with its crunchy, bright white meringue in which once again neatness of presentation (Chef Smeddle, who definitely has a bent for neatness, clearly cannot tolerate a mess even in an Eaton Mess...) and balance reigned supreme,

 

and a creamed vanilla rice pudding with peach compote, frosted hazelnuts and a peach sorbet (which can be served either cold or warm - the rice pudding, that is :) ). Imagine comfort food at its most refined, richly velvety yet elegant and light; this is it!

While Scotland is graced with several truly excellent restaurants, where highly talented chefs ably handle the marvellous Scottish produce, for us none of them quite matches the unique combination of charm, comfort, great cuisine and class-without-stiffness in service that one can enjoy at the Peat Inn. It is just our kind of high-end restaurant with a human face, not to mention the best value for money (no doubt a base but not unimportant dimension...) all round. That's why we'll be back here again, and again, and again, and we hope that even higher recognitions will be added to an already impressive record.


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L' Ortica: breaking news

Remember L' Ortica? (And here). A beautiful restaurant around Lake Garda (Manerba) for which we immediately predicted a bright future...which came a few months later in the form of a Michelin star.

Well...now they are expanding internationally. A Dutch branch has opened recently in Eindhoven, supervised by the Chef Piercarlo Zanotti and with the former sous chef in Manerba in control.

And in early September, the Italian branch will move to a brand new location. We can reveal that the location is...Bedizzole, not too distant from Lake Garda but closer to the wealthy town of Brescia.

Stay tuned...

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