Château Rieussec 1967

Sweet wines seem to bear age well, and this Sauternes beauty is no exception.

The burnt caramel-to-amber colour immediately gives away the age. The very intense bouquet mixes burnt notes – crème brúlée – with fresher notes of orange blossom water. The palate is surprisingly dry, with plenty of acid and the dominant fruit impression is of grapefruit rather than orange. There are also Sémillon-esque notes of candle wax. Luscious and fresh, probably at its peak, but equally, I suspect this could continue to lie happily in a cellar for many years without changing very much.

Château Talbot 1983

This 4^th growth from St. Julien is drinking beautifully now – everything a mature Bordeaux should be.

There is relatively little bricking at the rim. The classic Bordeaux cassis fruit has moved on, to be replaced by red fruits and particularly plums, followed by black tea, game and graphite. The tannins are fully resolved, leaving a silky wine that is probably drinking at or near its peak. Over time, with exposure to the air, the relatively light gamey notes get meatier; with further cellaring, these notes are likely to develop at the expense of the remaining fruit.

Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley

N1 had wanted to go to Marcus Wareing – by some accounts, London’s best restaurant - for a while, so it seemed the perfect place to celebrate her birthday. Situated in the 5-star surroundings of the Berkeley Hotel in salubrious Mayfair, this is not a restaurant for walk-ins or last-minute bookings. Our previous attempts to get a table had failed, so this time we got on the phone lines several months in advance, and even then had to settle for a reservation time – 6:30 – that seemed a little on the early side. In fact, that turned out to be a good thing. We chose the longest menu, worked through it slowly, asked for a pause at the end of the savoury dishes to finish our wine comfortably before the desserts turned up, and had a glass of armagnac to finish, so it was almost midnight when we left. 

Lunch is simpler, but at dinner, there are a variety of overlapping menus of increasing complexity to choose from. Currently, the restaurant is advertising an à la carte at £80, the Taste menu with more courses at £98 (with a vegetarian alternative for the same price, and wine matching menus at either £85 or £195 for the fine wine selection), and the Gourmand, with yet more courses, at £120. However, when we went there last month, there was also the Chef’s Surprise menu, at £140. We figured that in all likelihood we’d only be coming here the once, and it was N1’s birthday, and we like surprises, at least good ones, so we put ourselves in the hands of the kitchen and waited to see what would turn up. 

They’d put us into a side-room slightly cut-off from the main dining area, and we were the first people there, so we felt a bit isolated to begin with. As other diners arrived, we saw trends in the clientele emerging; we were far from the only anniversary celebration there, and some tables were indiscreetly moneyed – stoles and labels. Our neighbours, who apparently prioritised surroundings over food, chose one of the shorter menus, and dismissed a couple of courses to make their dinner a much shorter affair.

The canapés: a soft, smoked, deep-fried piece of chicken came with mustard. Pigskin crackling came as crisps to serve a taramasalata dip. Tiny grilled quail hearts came on skewers, looking like miniature barbecued kidneys, suitably blackened. An oyster came with caviar and a tapioca ball in a red-wine sauce. A thick onion soup had a parmesan mousse, and we could drink it or spoon it like a cappuccino. The most interesting canapé of all was the pickled egg with caviar, a vinegary, salty combination that tasted like something out of a modernist, molecular fish and chip shop.

With the mains in sight, bread came out. With a lot of food to come, we tried not to eat too much, and the bread was not particularly special, but the butter was fascinating. There was a run-of-the-mill unsalted butter, and then the same butter salted, melted, caramelised and then reset – a weird and delicious thing. We scoffed it. The last time I had anything comparable was in Asador Etxebarri in the mountains of the Basque Country.

It seemed strange to start the mains with a foie dish. Date purée (quite alcoholic) and fermented pear (like quince paste) and some crispy sides, to wit, walnut bread toast and a nutty caramel crisp, were all foils to the foie gras purée; a hit of salt first, then the sugar release, like an Oloroso sherry. This dish was a complete wine killer, and it could have passed for a dessert.

Cheese custard was wonderful – a beef consommé was poured onto the Tomme-based custard, in which we found mushrooms and slices of chestnut. The meaty consommé was superb against the salty cheese in an intensely autumnal dish.

Pan-fried scallops – soft, perfectly done – came with thin slices of cucumber, pineapple weed, toastlets of doughy, chargrilled bread and a yoghurt with chives. The scallops were clearly top quality, and we did wonder if they needed accompanying at all.

Just two (admittedly quite large) pieces of pappardelle pasta made up the next dish, with a butter emulsion, girolle mushrooms, herb, and very generous shavings of truffle. Simple, divine, delicious; probably the dish I most enjoyed all evening.

A divergence now. N1 got lobster (with pea purée, broccoli, seaweed, and a salty reduction), but as I’m allergic to lobster and its kin, I was given game: breast of quail with squash and goats’ curd. I think N1 rather preferred N2’s dish.

Fillet of seabass came in a beautiful matching act with “tastes of cauliflower” – a cauliflower carpaccio stood out – polonaise sauce and pine nuts.

I was surprised by how dark the pigeon breast was. Coming with wild sorrel, celeriac, chestnut purée and artichoke leaf, it was a dish straight out of autumn’s kitchen.  

And there stopped the savoury dishes; this was, after all, a surprise menu, and I was surprised (yes, and a little disappointed, I admit) that there wasn’t a piece of lamb or beef – good job we hadn’t gone down the Bordeaux route when we ordered wine.

And so, post wine-pause, to the desserts. Redcurrant sorbet was billed as a pre-dessert – I suppose elsewhere they would have called it a palate cleanser. It came with chili pepper and white chocolate ice cream, and the taste of vanilla pervaded the dish. N1 found it too salty. Personally, I found the saltiness an attractive quality.

Hazelnut cake came with layers of sandwiched praline and chocolate. The thick lump of cream on top was very salty, and altered our appreciation of the whole dish. Again, I found this a very attractive quality, but it is a question of taste. This was still not the “main” dessert, but with the thick flavours it was the antithesis of a palate cleanser – a palate cloyer, perhaps? 

Apple millefeuille was the showcase dessert, with apple in three different forms – sorbet, purée and jelly coming sandwiched between crispy, cornflake-like layers. The variations on apple are the “wow factor” intended to sway us to admire the dish, even as the cornflake irritated me a little; but as a lighter dish that did feel more like a palate cleanser, I can’t help but feel it should have been served before the hazelnut cake.

And there, sadly, ended the desserts. We’d been there so long that we were not feeling uncomfortably full, as tasting menus can sometimes leave you (more than one tasting menu has concluded in the battle between discomfort and delight). It is a great virtue of Marcus Wareing that you get the table all night, although a few diners on the shorter menus managed to be in and out quite quickly.

We’d declined a cheese option, although from what we saw going on at other tables, the selection was immense, and divided by styles, with every diner being invited to choose a soft, a hard, a goat’s and a blue. The waiters seemed impressively knowledgeable about the many cheeses on offer.

At this point the cognac trolley rolled over. They knew it was N1’s birthday, and referenced this – would she like a birthday cognac? I was sure that in the little spiel that was delivered at this point I’d descried the promise that it would be complimentary – N1 later said she wasn’t sure about that at all, and when we got the bill, it certainly hadn’t been complimentary at all, it was £35 worth of uncomplimentary. It was lovely, though, an Armagnac, in fact;

Laberdolive 1976

Nutty, even with notes of green olive, and a slight agave flavour like tequila. Fine, and with the complexity age can offer. Notes of candlewax, like white Bordeaux, make a showing. By all reports, Laberdolive is one of the finest Armagnacs there is.

Along came the petit fours, a selection of mostly dark chocolates. The Turkish delight was the rosiest I have ever had – “not sure I like it,” said N1, but otherwise, they were much what you would expect from your average superior chocolatier – peanut and caramel, banana, orange jelly, a coffee ganache, a very confected rum and coconut. Apparently some diners get post-dinner sweeties in the format of a takeaway bag, which would have suited us better after so much food and such a long evening.

This was an intensely seasonal menu, and with mushrooms, truffles and game on the menu, autumn is nature’s most flavoursome season; N1 has timed her birthday well. We associate such massively multi-course tasting menus with avant-garde institutions such as Alinea, The Fat Duck, and Arzak, with the associated experimental food; so the slow succession of relatively conservative (but perfectly-made) mains actually felt slightly strange, to the point where I was beginning to miss indecipherable cuisine. A tasting menu for those who don’t like their cuisine as a science lab? In the modern gastronomic age, we are spoiled for variety and experimentalism; many of the faultless combinations here would probably have seemed outré a generation ago. In any case, dinner was faultless, perfectly delicious, and to complain it was not experimental enough would be a perverse and uncharitable cavil. London’s best restaurant? It may well be. It’s a question of criteria: for a high-end anniversary blowout unsuited to the new age of austerity, quite possibly.

http://www.the-berkeley.co.uk/marcus_wareing.aspx

Checchino Dal 1887 – Rome

By N1

On previous trips to Rome, I had been a non-meat eater. But no longer. This being the offal-loving N2’s first trip to the Eternal City, and there being a dearth of Roman experiences that would be novel to us both, it seemed like an ideal time to sample Checchino Dal 1887, a well-known fine dining institution that is fittingly located in Testaccio, the old meat packing district.

Things got off to a bad start when we were given menus in English, despite my having booked in Italian and our greeting the staff in Italian on arrival. We would have asked for the Italian version but the waiter didn’t even look at our table again for 40 minutes. Maybe he walked off in disgust at our request for tap water, which was refused.

I can name at least four other well-reputed restaurants serving traditional offal-based Roman cuisine in Testaccio. If only I owned a smart phone, we would have been sitting down to dinner in one of them in less than the time that it took our waiter to return.

I have read that Checchino’s has a formidable cellar. If so, then they didn’t give us the full wine list. We asked for our wine to be double decanted but the request fell on deaf ears. The waiter did go through a ceremony of decanting a large splash of wine through every glass, which he then kept. The rationale, apart from keeping back a tasting portion of the wine, might have been to clean up any lingering smells from our glasses. Or maybe it was just for the tourists.

For the restaurant was full of tourists. Every table was speaking English except one, and they appeared to be Italian tourists from the north. (Maybe that explains the lack of Italian menus.) Even the waiters insisted on speaking English. This was especially irritating when it became clear that, with the exception of the manager, they only had a few stock phrases, and so were unable to answer our questions about the menu.

  

We started with the insalata di zampi (calf trotter salad), the testina de vitello (calf’s head), and the antipasto misto. The trotter was warm and gelatinous; the salad tasted mainly of the strong parsley sauce. The role of the trotter seemed to be more for texture than for taste. The calf’s head had been boiled, boned, mixed with lemon peel and spices (pepper, cloves) and cooked into a terrine that N2 said had the texture of superior, melting corned beef. It was very rich and tasty, if a bit of a wine killer because of the lemon. The antipasto was, well, mixed salami. It would have been nicer if the explanation of what the different cured meats were had arrived before we ate them - and we did save them until last.

For our primo we shared the rigatoni con pajata (lamb intestine in tomato sauce). The intestine had a lovely texture, but (like the trotter) not very much taste. For mains we had the restaurant’s trademark coda alla vaccinara, oxtail stewed with tomato, nuts, raisins and sprinkles of bitter chocolate. This was fine but not particularly special. Alongside, two contorni: cicoria in padella (chicory sauteed with garlic and chili) and melanzane alla piastra (baked eggplant). The chicory was very hot, which tickled N2’s tastebuds. The melanzane was a bit rubbery, like it hadn’t been salted properly.

As for desert, we decided it couldn’t possibly be worth the anticipated wait. Instead, we did as the italians, and stopped off for gelato on our way home.

Via di Monte Testaccio, 30 Testaccio

http://www.checchino-dal-1887.com/

Coda by N2

-    The oxtail was fine, but not a patch on the stellar slow braised oxtails as cooked by N1 (from Paula Wolfert’s Slow Mediterranean Kitchen).

-    After 4 days in Rome, the best Italian food I have ever had remains outside Italy; at Babbo in New York and Bocca di Lupo in London.

La Taverna dei Fori Imperiali - Rome

We were a little worried that the Taverna dei Fori Imperiali - “a restaurant serving traditional Roman food, managed by four generations of the same family” - would be packed with tourists, and give us the kind of deliberately bad food and service reserved for people who will never be coming back anyway; but we were pleasantly surprised. There were plenty of tourists, to be sure, but at least the same number of locals, which was immediately encouraging, and following advice we found on the forums (the internet ones, that is, not ancient graffiti on the nearby capital “F” Forum) got the best food by ordering from the specials list. Service was gratifyingly cheerful.

When in Rome…drink Roman wine? Not necessarily, but we thought we might as well; we had a half of Villa Simone 2007, made from the local Cesanese grape. It turned out to be a quite rustic, quite acidic, medium-bodied mix of black fruit and stewed plum with notes of tar and some fairly prominent wood influence. It did improve with decanting. The wood notes were heavy enough to suggest glue.

For starters, aubergines came alla parmigiana, in tomato sauce with basil; there was almost more cheese than aubergine. Gnocchi con Agnello also came in tomato sauce, with little bits of lamb – not a bad dish, but I think I prefer my gnocchi with sage butter instead of sauce.

Moving on, Ragú di Vitello con Tartufo was superb, veal on tagliatelle with a truffley, herby sauce.  Polpettone was a splendid meat loaf containing pork, ground beef, pistachio and sesame, and was served with sauerkraut and a gravy with juniper. We had a side order of zucchini as well, cut so thinly it looked like more like shellfish than vegetable, absorbing the flavours of garlic, vinegar and mint.

Lulled into a false sense of security, since everything had been fine so far, we shared a zabaione for dessert; but rather than egg yolk with marsala, it turned out to be whipped cream and marsala; N1 was disappointed. Otherwise, a meal and an experience in a bustling, friendly restaurant that exceeded expectations.

Via Madonna dei Monti 9

www.latavernadeiforiimperiali.com

Gaja & Rey 2008

This is the Gaja Chardonnay, probably far too young, but beautiful wine. The first thing the bouquet offers is oak, quite identifiably, if a little unusual – I find it hard to pin down, and settle on “acorns” for a descriptor. In fact, I later learn, it is matured in a wide variety of different barrels; French, Russian, Austrian, Polish, and Hungarian. (Italy does go further afield for its oak barrels, with interesting results.) After the oak comes the fruit, tropical but muted – a blend, initially of pineapple and lemon. N1 approves, comparing it to many a New World Chardonnay: “This is not hideously disgustingly fruity.” And there is a third element we take a little while to identify, but which goes on to become more prominent: goat’s cheese.

The cheese and fruit notes build up with time. It is definitely doing banana at one point, before moving on to lemon, lime and green olive and fennel; and after two hours, we are arguing over whether it smells of pecorino or parmesan.  

By the end of the bottle it is tending towards a slightly more classic Chardonnay character. In any case, I suspect we are just scratching the surface of this wine, and that it will be a different, more powerful beast 10 years down the line.

Mamma Angelina - Rome

Mamma Angelina is a fish and seafood restaurant a fair hike north of the city centre in Rome. It was a Monday evening when we went and it was quiet; apart from us, there were only a couple of Italian families. N1 approved of the lack of tourists. It can get busy, though, by all accounts, so reservations still recommended.

The waiter thought we were asking for a cheaper wine than the one he had recommended, so he dropped down to the cheapest on the list. No, we said, more expensive. He still thought we were garbling our Italian and regretted there was nothing cheaper - then beamed when the penny dropped. At this point we got a visit from the manager, who doubled as sommelier – but no hard sell. We ended up going to the very top of the white wine list for a Gaja & Rey (next post), partly because it was no more expensive than we would pay in any shop. (And, an internet search later confirmed, in fact cheaper than in quite a few shops).

A julienne of seppioline - cuttlefish – was juicy, relatively soft and not too chewy, simply done, sliced and with a vinaigrette. Coppo di polpo, octopus sausage, was served with potatoes and mint. Again, the quality of the basic ingredient really stood out – it was the best octopus I’ve ever had, the flavour brought out by olive oil.

Quite a few of the mains we would have most liked were off the menu that evening – Monday is not the most logical evening to go to a fish restaurant, since not many fishing boats anywhere (in Europe and North America, at least) sail on a Sunday – and so we plumped for a turbot for two. It was a good choice, since it was a fine foil for our wine, and we’d already twigged that here, the ethos is high quality ingredients, simply cooked.

Viale Arrigo Boito 63

Ice Cream: Paris v. Rome

Modern, chaotic Italy can be traced back to the 5^th century development of pizza and ice cream; hardened Roman soldiers, used to austere diets of buckwheat pancakes, now glutted on these delicious new developments from the imperial kitchen. Stuffed, they found themselves unable to conquer the far side of the street, let alone remote countries. Lean, Germanic barbarians raised on Atkins-friendly sausage diets invaded southwards in search of plunder and better weather, and the once-great Roman Empire fell into a turbulent miasma of toppings, frozen fruit flavours and upset political stomachs. (Historical note: the preceding paragraph may not be entirely accurate).

But surely, as the home of gelato, the very best ice cream is still to be found in Italy? In among the classical fruit flavours of yore, we’ve noticed some herbier, more savoury flavours appearing. Basil or the sage and raspberry at Gelateria del Teatro (Via di San Simeone 22a, Rome) are delicious, but the blowaway winner in my book is the amazing fennel and liquorice at Gelateria Fatamorgana (Via G.Bettoli 7, also at Via di Lago di Lesina 9/11, both in Rome.)  

Can more genteel Paris compete? Maison Bertillon (29-31 Rue Saint Louis en l'Ȋle, on the charming if a little touristic Ȋle Saint-Louis) is the undisputed master of French ice creams, whose wares were so good last weekend that they salved my stomachache. I loved the almond milk flavour, which was really ice cream that tasted of marzipan, and salted butter caramel; but the flavour which we had three times in the course of two days was the incredible combination of marron glacé and rum.

Bertillon makes a sweeter, creamier style, which works better for the chocolate and alcoholic flavours; it is less good for the fruit flavours at which the Italians excel. Bertillon is not serving its ice cream quite cold enough, so it melts a little too quickly. By a small margin, the fennel-and-liquorice at Fatamorgana still has it; so the decline and fall of the Roman Empire may have been worth the Dark Ages.