63 Tay Street (Perth): well worth the while

En route to a walk in the Perthshire Highlands, we needed some calorie intake - an excellent opportunity to stop at one of our favourite addresses, overlooking the Tay river in Perth.


Chef Palliser's cuisine is not always the most prettily presented, nor the service the most refined, and a three course menu (plus amuse bouche and an intermediate palate cleanser) at £35 is bound to face some constraints, but this is a case of substance over style, it's goodness with the hair let down. He definitely has that touch and ability in extracting flavours from the raw materials that marks out the talented from the run of the mill. 


This starter of smoked roast wood pigeon with remoulade and cherry jus

was intensely satisfying and balanced, the crisp and unsoggy salad for once serving a purpose in the dish rather than being a mere add-on, and the pigeon of good quality.


And this sea-land combination packed a real punch:

 It's an Ayrshire pork belly with Scottish (where else?) langoustine in a ceps sauce. The produce is excellent and skillfully cooked. The addition of the egg creates yet another protein dimension in a dish where a lot is going on already, but everything holds together beautifully. And we had similar thoughts regarding this:

An admittedly rather confused mass consisting of an Angus beef shin with pearl barley risotto, Summer truffles, girolles and Parmesan. Once again, much, much flavour (literally) compressed and bursting on your palate, even though for us the Parmesan was  one step too far in an already rich, creamy, moist dish.


We also had a refined starter of line-caught Scottish mackerel, a fresh, intriguing dish with fennel and smoky aubergine.


We said we needed calories. At some point we implored the waitress to bring us more bread, on the grounds of our carbohydrate need derived from our Italian genetic makeup. The waitress patiently said: 'I know, I know...', and kindly contented us. On this and other occasions the service was most kind, and smiling, although those looking for formal precision will find some points to pick...


The dessert section did not disappoint either on the calorie front nor, more fundamentally, on that of taste. 

 

The above is a rhubarb crumble with vanilla custard and cinnamon salty icecream: simple, well-made, rich, and interesting. 

But the next one was a different level of creativity: layered chocolate cappuccino, hazelnut fudge doughnuts.



Layer upon layer of pure pleasure in the "cappuccino", and well, you coffee and chocoholics know what we are talking about.

63 Tay Street is not the place where you will be indulged or pampered - but it serves good and interesting dishes, delivering powerful flavours, at prices that approach rock bottom for this quality.

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The Greenhouse (London): an enticing trial lunch

On arrival, despite visiting on a budget offer, we are given all the customary extras - very elegant, very pleasant, very welcoming.






When we ask whether they mind if we take photos of the food, the maitre d' almost laughs: why should I mind? We'd like to send the tape of this scene, occurred in what is otherwise a pretty formal setting, to the many stuck-up venues that consider themselves and their food so sacred that its images cannot be handled by mere mortals.

So let's take a photo of the bread

It has a 'professional boulangerie feel', very standard but perfect looking, and it's undoubtedly very well-made (we didn't ask whether it was bought in).


We decided to have a "trial lunch" at this illustrious and historical Mayfair venue that has seen several chefs at the helm - they must have a Michelin star or two, they really must, but we can't be arsed to check - show us the food first :) - based on an amazing offer with this site, that afforded a three course meal and a coffee for less than what a single main costs in most fine dining places in London (the regular lunch menu, anyway, is also good value at £29 for three courses). Of course at this price we expect the selection to be limited and the dishes to be simpler, and that's why we prefer to consider this visit as a mere trial, to get an indication of the style of Chef Antonin Bonnet's cuisine. 

There is, anyway, an art in designing a budget fine-dining menu.

A tiny matter. A wine waiter or junior sommelier attempts to persuade us to buy a bottle of Barbera that is almost 50% more expensive than the more moderately priced (£36) Loire we had selected. Now, apart from the fact that a sommelier should be able to spot two cheap bastards like us, who would never upgrade so much on their stated request unless already fully drunk, we also consider it slightly bad form to attempt this upselling feat and jarring with the previous impression of hospitality.

After this, however, everything was smooth, including the impeccable topping up of the wine by the aforementioned waiter.

Very soft, enveloping textures in the first dish, Spaghetti squash and hen egg, hazelnuts, bristly ox tongue, apple balsamic vinegar (nothing else) with pleasant contrasts and balance between acidity and sweetness.

The strongly flavored sardines, glazed with birch syrup, do give pleasure, matched by an equally decisive jus (chicken?), accompanied by an aubergine caviar and girolles mushrooms;  a good ensemble although the aubergine caviar was overdelivering on labour and underdelivering on flavour.

More delicate but with neat flavours, and simply beautiful, was a dish of grey mullet with artichoke puree and dolce-forte sauce which once again created that acidic counterpoint:

A rich, sumptuous featherblade was enhanced by a shiny and powerful Guinness sauce and accompanied by smoked new potatoes, buttery and soft. This would have been a fantastic dish had it been completed by some other vegetable element; as it was, it was pleasant and powerful but slightly one-dimensional both texturally and taste-wise, and tending to become monotonous - more a dish to gobble up rather than one to slowly enjoy

A Guanaja chocolate dessert came as a ganache, it was light and delicious, with crunchy chocolate "medals" and a very very intense blackcurrant coulis that really shone through.

The cheeses featured a Morbier and three others that we have in the meanwhile forgotten in the orgy of intervening restaurant outings... Perhaps you can recognise them from the photo. They were excellent if, according to us, served at a very slightly sub-optimal temperature. A suggestion that seemd to greatly demoralise the maitre d' who clearly cared, and made Man feel guilty for having made it. Let's say that our mouths were too warm.




All in all an impressive display of precise cooking and creative, sometimes subtle combinations within a tight budget. While, for all the politeness and attentiveness, the whole atmosphere felt somehow a little cold for our liking (they certainly tend to cater for a clientele that is very different from low class us, as the mind-boggling wine list attests, and these are impalpable feelings anyway), we are very enticed to go back for the whole hog. That, however, will imply a serious dent in the wallet, even compared with restaurants of similar level of cuisine.

The petit fours, pure class, certainly do invite you to return,  



and ever more so does an excellent espresso, served with a spark of originality - had it been slightly 'shorter' (less diluted) it would have competed for one of the best espressos of the year, and we don't take such issues lightly...

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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