RANKING:  I need to eat more kaiseki meals to be confident about rankings.  This said, I think three Michelin stars to Kitcho is fully justified.  But I am puzzled by only two stars to Nakamura.  My meal at Nakamura was an unforgettable experience.  Only a handful of the chefs in the world can perform at this level of precision and sophistication.

DATE VISITED:  March 21 and 22, 2010, respectively.

PHONES: Kitcho 075 881 1101  Nakamura 075 221 5511

SUMMARY:  Japanese haute cuisine, the kaiseki meal, is a must if you visit Kyoto.  At its best, it is subtle, rigorous, harmonious, appeals to the eye and taste buds, and the course of the meal is driven by the availability of the best ingredients on the day you visit the restaurant.  (So the word ‘seasonal’ or the cliché ‘farm to table’ remain inadequate.)  I was taken aback by how much discretion chefs enjoy when designing exclusive kaiseki feasts for their guests.  At Kitcho in Arashiyama, the chef-owner Tokuoka-san works like a calligrapher, his style is quite restrained, and it is easier to appreciate him when his whole work is complete rather than on a dish by dish basis.  Nakamura-san, on the other hand, is capable of making some bold statements, and his cuisine is quite lusty by Japanese-kaiseki standards.  One thing that unites the two chefs is their absolute commitment to their profession and their attention to detail.

 Prior to our dinner, we visited the wild monkey forest in Arashiyama.  It is the best spot to have a bird’s eye view of Kyoto.  Arashiyama is a gorgeous district and a stroll along the bank of the river is recommended.

A. KITCHO

Kitcho is composed of some 7-8 private rooms, and the room where we dined was elegant and had a view of a beautiful garden.  The black lacquered table was also gorgeous.

The meal consisted of 10 courses, including dessert. 

The ceramics and the composition of dishes in Kitcho are individual masterpieces.  Notice the pink bowl in which o-toro and seasonal greens happily and harmoniously co-exist.

The presentation of dishes is breathtaking.  They mimic some aspects of nature, such as an island in the surrounding sea, the waves, the wooded hills, etc. The candles you see below are wrapped in daikon radish cut very thin in circles.

Some natural seashells are used as plates. Others are ceramics inlaid with gold.

Our first course consisted of two elements: pickled amadai fish (tilefish) and shitake mushrooms with mountain potatoes.   We then had steamed Japanese cod fish (ainame) with sea cucumber roe (hosiko).  Thirdly, we were served tai (red snapper) sashimi with okahigihi (crisp mountain green) and iwataki (tasted like a root vegetable).  Monkfish liver mousse was served alongside ponzu, and it married perfectly well with the tai.

Next, we had o-toro and baby squid served with a crunchy green vegetable (mikuna) and pumpkin sprouts.  Fifth, incredibly tender bamboo shoots were offered with shaved dried bonito.  The chef paired the bamboo shoots with white asparagus, kombo and kinome.  

The next course was a delight both for the eye and for the palate (photo above).  It consisted of three portions:  shrimp dusted with Japanese red mullet roe (karaseme), raw sea cucumber-espardenyes and shitake mushroom, also with fish roe,  and, finally, poached torigai (giant scallop) with ginger.

The sweet fleshed baby ‘ayu’ river fish featured in two successive courses.

First, the fish was presented on top of a ceramic cooking pot which contained burning charcoal and a metal cooking grill on top.  Next, we had two deep-fried versions of the same fish and swallowed them head to tail by dipping the ayu in ‘tadeza’ sauce.  The slightly bitter tasting head was especially flavorful.

We cleaned our taste buds with a remarkably clear dashi  which was subtly flavored by ginger.

 The final rice course was exquisite, on par with a perfect seafood and vegetable risotto. It featured ice fish from the Shimone prefecture combined with a medley of pickled vegetables and mustard leaves and eggplant.  The salty- briny taste in the dish turned out to be shad roe.  The chef is a master in blending the appropriate fish roe with many of his dishes to add depth.

The fruit platter had oranges, honeydew and two kinds of strawberries.   The quality of strawberries was noteworthy.

We punctuated our meal with an aromatic and slightly bitter green tea which seemed to be a fine digestive after a bottle of champagne and a bottle of house sake.

B. NAKAMURA

Nakamura is across the river from Gion, and it was a pleasure to have a walk in traditional Kyoto prior to our 19:00 meal during the beginning of the cherry blossom (sakura) season.

Nakamura is also a traditional restaurant where you take off your shoes and sit on the floor or in low chairs.  But it is more comfortable than Kitcho because they have a hole under the beautiful red lacquered table to stretch your feet so that you don’t have leg cramps after three hours.

Six weeks after our meal there, I can still savor some of the flavors.  Especially their white miso soup, abalone, grilled amadai, and the rice dish should rank as true classics.

We were served nine courses and a dessert, and some very good sake for a  fair price.

The sushi-sashimi course was served along with fresh cherry blossom or sakura leaves.  Both the presentation and the flavors were first rate.  We wrapped the tai and shrimp sashimi in the sakura leaves to make a roll.  The various elements of the first course were: tai sashimi, ebi-shrimp sashimi, steamed octopus, kore himono, mountain potato, and hiyou (small white fish).

White miso soup did not contain kelp or bonito.  The exact combination may be a house secret.  We were told that they only use water, white miso, and mustard.  There was a white rice cake floating on top which added some textural contrast. This soup has to be tasted to believe that white miso can be elevated to this level of excellence.

Next we had another beautifully presented sashimi course with tai, amadai and maguro tuna.

The fourth course was steamed shiroguji (cod) with sake.  It was presented in a bowl with bamboo shoots, kelp, shitake, Japanese lime, and kikuno greens.

This was followed by Japanese lobster tail which was first grilled and then cooked in dashi.  The dish also contained sesame tofu, citrus fruit, scallion and a thick soy bean curd broth.  This was a light and balanced dish.

Both of these courses were impressive in terms of the freshness of the ingredients and the clarity of taste.

 The sixth course, the abalone and its liver, was a masterpiece.  The chef handled wild abalone very well as it was soft but the taste had a depth that I have never experienced before.  The dish was composed of bamboo shoots, hama bofu, kelp, cucumber, hotate, daikon, crunchy greens and ginger.

This was truly a lusty dish.

Nakamura-san followed this masterpiece with another one.  He served a good portion of the amadai fish which was first slow-grilled, and then, hot sake was poured on top.  The fish was moist and firm.

We were told not to eat the skin and to leave the bones intact.

This is because, after we finished eating the white flesh, they added an indescribably clean dashi (very special kelp and bonito and water—I think the source of the water is the key to making the dashi so exquisite).  The whole thing than turned into a Japanese style fish soup with a clear and intense taste. Exquisite!

We must have been so excited with this dish as we have forgotten to take pictures.

Prior to the dessert we were presented with a beautiful ceramic bowl that drove home the point that we were in Kyoto during the beginning of the sakura season.

The lid opened.

This was perhaps the most decadently flavorful rice dish one can ever experience.  The thick and incredibly gelatinous broth reminded me of the Basque pil pil sauce.  The salmon trout you see in the photo was moist and flavorful.  Side dishes included takenoko and kinome and pickled vegetables.

Our feast ended with a strawberry dessert in various textures: soup, jelly, custard.  It was refreshing and wonderful in its simplicity.

Chef Motokazu Nakamura should be considered one of the greatest chefs of his generation. His technical command and his calibration of taste is simply stunning.  His mother is a most gracious hostess and is justly proud of her son whom, she says, is the 6^th generation descendant of the family.  There is no doubt that her husband would have approved of his son’s performance.

Few would disagree that Ciya Sofrasi is one of the most celebrated restaurants in Turkey, especially in international food circles. Most recently, the restaurant and its chef, Musa Dagdeviren, were covered very favorably in The New Yorker and the Financial Times. The restaurant is located in Kadikoy district in Istanbul and one needs to take a 20 minute ferry ride from Eminonu, in Old City, to get there.

Chef Dagdeviren travels around the country researching regional peasant home cooking and recreating some of those dishes in his restaurant. He’s also a regular attendee to many Culinary Institute of America (CIA) events in the States, highlighting Turkish and Anatolian cuisine. With his wife, Zeynep, they publish a quarterly magazine called Food and Culture which includes essays regarding the history and culture about the region’s rich and less documented cuisine. In each issue, chef Dagdeviren brings to life seven unforgotten dishes from the region by providing their recipes in the magazine.

Ciya Sofrasi is a product of romantic idea and in theory; it offers something new for those that are not familiar with Turkish cuisine other than typical kebab dishes found in the so-called Turkish restaurants overseas. Based on a recent lunch in early June 2010, I thought Ciya Sofrasi failed to live up to those lofty expectations.  I found many of the dishes slightly above average at best and one can have better versions of the same dishes in other places in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey. There are too many dishes offered at Ciya Sofrasi in a given day and this certainly impacts the kitchen’s ability to cook with precision and care.

In Ciya Sofrasi, all the dishes are displayed cafeteria style.  Customers chose their dishes and then the dishes are brought to the table.

We started with perde pilavi, a dish from Siirt, in south eastern Turkey. This is a rice dish with raisins, pine nuts, almonds and chicken and covered with dough like a dome. The dish was dry, overcooked probably sitting for a few hours at the counter and suffered from reheating. 

The next dish, stuffed zucchini with ground beef and chickpeas, was better but was a little overcooked as well.

Next, we had mumbar dolma. The sheep intestines filled with bulgur wheat, onion and spices, and then braised. This was a solid dish from Adana, in south-central Anatolia.

Next dish was from Syria. Lahm- i kiraz, sour cherries with lean ground beef and pita, is a colorful and visually striking dish. I thought the sauce was a little runny and pitas needed more crust to give a textural contrast. Overall, this was a good dish.

After that, we had stuffed sun dried eggplant and red pepper. This is one of my favourite dishes from South Eastern Anatolian city, Gaziantep. I found Ciya Sofrasi’s version a little dry and unbalanced with hot pepper paste flavors.  I had the same dish at Mabeyin Restaurant in Istanbul two days before and their version was truly stellar. I suspect Mabeyin braised dried eggplant on top of lamb ribs and bones which gave the dish its delicate richness.

The next three vegetable dishes were better. Kullubas, a type of wild greens from Black Sea region, was sautéed with onions. If we haven’t been told, its taste can be easily mistaken for spinach.

The second dish was swiss chard stuffed with fresh ricotta and bulgur wheat, was tasty and light.

The last and better was sirken borani, sautéed wild spinach served with yogurt and tiny lamb chunks.

I think the desserts at Ciya Sofrasi were better than the savory dishes. Kerebic which is a little ball of semolina flour filled with Antep pistachios was good. Much better was the accompanying foam with soapwort and honey. Its natural flavor balanced nicely the sweetness of kerebic.

Then, we have followed with a fig dessert, incir teleme, which was quite good. Boiled milk was mixed with dried fig with no added sugar and it’s a light, refreshing summer dessert.

It’s hard not to applaud chef Dagdeviren for all his research and effort trying to bring history and food culture that will be otherwise lost, back to the tables. He’s in process of opening a Turkish Culinary Institute which will include a library, a school and a research institute.  However, in its current state, a 20 minute ferry ride with breathtaking views of the Bosphorus might as well be the highlight of dining experience at Ciya.

During the last phase of the World Cup when Spain was triumphing based on skill and strategy and when Rafael Nadal was clobbering everybody else in Wimbledon, my wife and I spent five days in Aqua Blava Hotel.  We then used Aigua Blava as our base to explore some of the most interesting restaurants in Costa Brava.

I recommend Aigua Blava hotel highly.  The staff is efficient and courteous and the rooms are comfortable.  The view from our room could not have been better.

We spent the days in the beach, and also, thanks to Monsieur
Felix and his wife Maribel of restaurant Simpson, we had a boat tour which enabled us to discover some of the gorgeous coves in aquiline waters.  Some of the architect designed villas in Costa Brava are “hidden” from view unless you approach them from the sea.

I was struck by the view of Calella from the sea.  This is a town with great character.

During our visit, we made one exception to staying in the area and crossed the mountains to visit restaurant ELS CASALS. (+938 250388)

Hidden in the Catalanian countryside, Els Casals is also a working farm.  About 75% of ingredients used in the restaurant come from their farm.

My friend Josep Vilella is very fond of this rustic restaurant and rightly so.  Some of the charcuterie, such as the pork skin,  fuet (sausage), butifarra and butifarra negro is first rate.  On the other hand, the claim to fame of this restaurant may be their excellent sobressada.  Served with pan e tomat and honey, this dish is one of the reasons why one should make a pilgrimage to the town of Sagas.

But not only is this dish excellent.  Els Casals stunned me with the flavor profile of their vegetables and wild mushrooms.  For instance the exquisitely fresh “moixerons” or “mousserons” were served with incredibly fresh foie gras and crisp wild celery shoots, called “cuscons”.  A younger Michel Bras would have been proud to concoct such a dish.

I was impressed by the way the chef Oriol Rovira creates his dishes.  Most dishes in his restaurant are composed of three to four ingredients and the combinations are well thought out.  For instance, homemade fat butifarra blends extremely well with bitter and barely cooked fava beans, and a creamy potato puree which is reminiscent of Robuchon in the 1980’s elevates this dish to another level.  Farm fresh tomato confit blends well with crisp and bitter fresh almond hearts and wild basil.  The chef also adds a little campari to this dish to titillate the taste buds before serving more hearty dishes, such as butifarra negro with chipirones (a tad overcooked), chanterelles (they call them “rossignols”) in a soupy rice, and a very good roasted pigeon served with sliced zucchini and crisp zucchini flower.

Most surprising, however, was the eight year old mutton (yes, eight YEARS).  Only the tenderloin was served, and had I not been told what it was, I could have sworn that this was old Galician beef which was dry aged for longer than five weeks.

The wine list is also excellent in Els Casals.  Our sobressada with honey paired extremely well with 2002 Nicolas Joly Coulee du Serrant, and 2006 Ferrer  Bobet Priorat held up well against the bloody pigeon and the hearty mutton.

 Our second meal in Costa Brava was in Llagostera at ELS TINARS( +972 830626).

What struck me at Els Tinars was the consistency of the offerings.  The chef composed for us a special menu which consisted of tuna tartar, fried pig feet salad with squid and prawns, langoustines in Catalanian ajo blanca sauce (like an almond custard with garlic), espardenas pil pil, turbot with olives, chanterelles and olive paste, and confit of baby goat with tomatoes, onions, spices and a touch of honey (in the skin and in the onions).

While everything was the level of a Michelin two star restaurnt (the restaurant receives only one star), I found the espardenas to be outstanding.  Barely cooked, chewy and dense, espardenas are mostly about texture.  But the olive oil based pil pil sauce picked up the gelatin of the espardenas, which were cooked with a precision that I have not seen equal elsewhere. (They were crisp and juicy and flavorful.)

Another no miss at Els Tinars is a house classic: Patates Els Tinars.  One would be hard pressed to find a more flavorful potato dish anywhere on earth as this dish features crisp golden potato chips topped by a special butifarra made from the ears and feet of the pig.  This is comfort food at its best.

Desserts are pretty good, especially the brownie with the most natural and tasty raspberry coulis imaginable.  The grand marnier soufflé with passion fruit coulis is a house specialty but somehow it is a bit too strong, especially when compared to the marvelous passion fruit soufflé at Rochat.

July 3^rd was my wife’s birthday, and we wanted to celebrate the day with a traditional Ampurdan lunch and dinner in one of our favorite restaurants on the planet.

So, for lunch we headed for XICRA in PALAFRUGELL (+972 305630).  Our meal started on a high note with a mini gazpacho and sweet local white onion tempura.  We were then amply rewarded for choosing this restaurant on an important day (thanks to our friend Rogelio Enriquez who recommended it) with an excellent octopus stew with caramelized onions, veal tripe (callos) with sausage and tomato-garlic, and a suquet (fish stew with potatoes) with monkfish and langoustine.   I was especially impressed by the quality of the potatoes and how they soaked up all the fish-shellfish stock.

On the other hand, the dish which made a lasting impression was another local specialty:  caracoles or snails cooked with shellfish and tomato, onion, garlic.  The shellfish was not there for eating, but they imparted another dimension to the chewy caracoles.   Overall this is a superior way of eating escargot than the classic Burgundian preparation.

If you visit this restaurant, don’t miss the traditional dessert:  Borratxo.  It is basically a fresh sponge cake caramelized on top like crème brulee and washed by rhum.   It is offered with a homemade pastry cream sauce.

You may have guessed where we have headed for the very special birthday dinner:  HISPANIA in Arenys de Mar( + 937 910457).  We are always stunned by the way the two sisters, Paquita and Lolita, make cooking look so simple but so flavorful. Everything is special in this restaurant, but if there is one thing that I can munch every day, it is their version of “pan y tomate”.  Simply put, it is the best in Catalonia, that is to say, in the world.

Our meal started with excellent croquettes of bacalao which are light and airy.  We were then served what can be called the best tomato salad in recent memory:  sweet local white onions, tomatoes, a little pickled pepper, and a fruity olive oil.  This dish epitomizes the philosophy of this restaurant:  you have the ingredients shine by keeping it simple but ethereal.

Almost all of the dishes in Hispania achieve a similar level of harmony.  The Catalanian cassoulet with montxat beans, fresh cabbage, cauliflower, and butifarra negra is a delight.  So is “cap i pota”, which is basically the head and feet of veal with green peppers, garlic, and tomato.   Fresh fat anchovies are simply grilled and served with garlic chips.  Incredibly fresh chipirones are always prepared a la plancha.  Don’t miss espardenas if they are available.  They were available and we did not miss them.  We also requested their version of paella which was prepared with only vegetables.

Our great meal ended with slow roasted natural cabritos or baby goat.  It was accompanied by incredibly yummy potato chips which were moist in the middle and crisp on the sides.

If you visit Hispania, don’t miss crème catalane, which may as well be one of the best desserts anywhere on earth.

I think my wife was happy when Paquita joined us to  keep a visual record of this significant moment.

If Hispania is a must visit for its cuisine, then VILLA MAS is a must visit for its wine list, especially for Bourgogne lovers (+972 822526).

Situated in the attractive San Pol (S’Agaro), this sophisticated restaurant is owned by Carlos Orta.  Unfortunately when we visited the restaurant, Mr. Orta was visiting Leroy cellars in Auxey-Duresse, but his sommelier, Mr.  Morrelo took good care of us. He ably paired the heads of palamos prawns with a Fino Sherry, while he offered 2007 Wittman Riesling Trocken for the prawn tails.   The zippy acidity of the Riesling stood up well against the sweet fat of the exceptional prawns, while the first wine I chose from the list, 2004 Francois Jobard Meursault Genevrieres, felt a bit flat with the prawns.

But this excellent-elegant example of the exquisite Genevrieres terroir matched very well with the super chipirones served on a fork and with mashed potatoes and also with a wild turbot cooked Basque style, i.e. with fried garlic, olive oil, sherry vinegar, and red pepper.

Villa Mas is actually a very good restaurant.  They served us a classic salmorejo soup, excellent quality raw tuna, and vegetable ravioli, in addition to the baby cuttlefish and the great prawns.

For the main dish we were looking for something to go well with 2006 Claude Dugat Charmes Chambertin and we decided to order lamb.  The grilled lamb (shoulder and rack) was quite good, but I may have sinned in uncorking  the Dugat wine so early.  The dry extract of this wine is such that it sends electric shocks to your spinal cord when you sip it. Yet, despite the very prominent kirsch character and amazing concentration, it remains elegant.  I ranked it 97+.

There are also good desserts to be had at Villa Mas.  We liked the carrot puree with mandarine sorbet and a mango piece.  Our sommelier’s choice for this wine was something new to me: a botyrized chardonnay from Penedes (Caligo). It featured mango and orange jam aromas which obviously married well with the dessert.

Likewise a Pedro Ximenez from Domaine Spigola struck me as the correct pairing with the excellent chocolate dessert served with various wild berries.

I think I will be back.

For our last meal in this trip we chose the restaurant SIMPSON in the cozy and wealthy seaside village of Llanca (+972 301157).

I have featured and ranked this gem of a place earlier in gastromondiale.  Since I am now friends with the owners, Felix and Maribel, it is somehow difficult to be totally objective.  This said, Simpson was my uncle and aunt’s favorite restaurant in their trip to Catalonia and I can see why.  (They have also tried some of the three star restaurants.)  Maribel’s cooking is impossible to classify in the sense that it is spontaneous, intuitive, hearthfelt, and based on the availability of ingredients in the very same day (some vegetables, such as the green beans on the day of our visit, come from their own garden).

The restaurant is visited each day (except weekends) by the fishmongers with their daily catch.  Baby squid, prawns, lobster, etc. are alive when they hit the plancha, but Felix prefers to let the big fish, such as merou, sit a few days before cooking, in order to soften the hard flesh.

If on the day you visit the restaurant they have it, you should ask for a few “Gambas Palamos” a la plancha.  They are as succulent as this species gets. They have to be tasted to be believed.

But this is not simply an a la plancha restaurant, like the great Rafa in Roses.  Maribel concocts some very personal dishes which vary on each visit.  This time I admired her anchovies sitting on fried (pane) red pepper and her tomato, fresh peas, and anchovy salad with a soft white cheese. But I was especially impressed by a millefeuille with brie cheese, membrillo, fresh spinach and pine nuts.  I also loved her mix of tomato jam, melted gorgonzola and pieces of duck foie gras, artistically served in a martini glass.

Unfortunately we did not have room for Maribel’s incomparable grilled pork feet after the trio of escamarlins (langoustines), gambas and merou.  Yet we were still served a yummy lemon semifreddo (I believe she learned this dish from her frequent trips to Italy) and an intoxicating silky flan with honey and strawberry jam.

Unfortunately five days seemed far too short for visiting this lovely corner of Spain where good food, wine, friendship, and gorgeous nature all combine to create a unique sense of wellbeing.

PH: 075 551 3310

CHEF: HITOSHI ISHIHARA

EVALUATION: 18.5/20

Linda and I visited Kyoto in November 2010 to dine at Mizai,  Nakamura,  Hajime and Gion Sasaki.  I had previously reviewed Hajime and Nakamura based on Spring 2010 visits.  My second meal at Hajime was less good compared to the first one and I ranked this meal 15/20.  Nakamura was almost as good as the first one and should rank 17.5/20.  Sasaki is very impressive and in my opinion it deserves 3 stars and should rank 17.5/20.

My best meal outside of Tokyo, however, was at Mizai.  Together with KOJYU in Tokyo, Mizai remains as one of the  two most impressive meals I have had in Japan, excluding the sushi meals at the great MIZUTANI (best white fleshed fish) and SAWADA (best tuna and sea urchin).  I should add that my second meal at the Okuda-san restaurant KOJYU confirmed my earlier impression that this is not only one of the best tables in Japan, but one of the best tables in the world. (19/20)

Mizai is a traditional tea-house located in the beautiful Marayama park.  All guests arrive promptly at 6 PM and the kaiseki meal takes about three hours.  There are no private rooms and only ten seats at the counter.  On the day of our visit,  Friday November 19, 2011, we were the only non-Japanese.  There were three ladies  clad in traditional garb, one couple in their 60s (the man took careful notes) and a Japanese matriarch dining  with her daughter and cousin.  The daughter spoke some English and told me that her mother is a regular here.  They had also lived in France and they agreed with me that Bernard Pacaud of L’Ambroisie is the greatest French chef who is still active today and running his restaurant.

Ishihara-san does not speak English, French and even Turkish!  He looks like he is in his 50s; he is fit and friendly.  He did not allow us to take photos of the dishes, except one.  His sous chefs met us as soon as we got off the taxi, sheltered us from the heavy rain with their umbrellas and escorted us back to the taxi after our meals.

The cooking skills and ingredients are as impeccable as the hospitality.  Ishihara belongs to the pantheon of the very great chefs  who can compose dishes with great confidence and have a non-imitable style  of their own.  His compositions are harmonious and the way he calibrates different elements (not too many as in avant-garde Spanish cooking) to achieve depth and balance is amazing.  There is a transcendental dimension in his cooking which is less apparent in a single dish than in the overall progression.  That is, one does not feel overwhelmed while consuming the 10+ courses which conform to the norms of the kaiseki meals.  Each course is of course near perfect or perfect on its own merits.  But what is more interesting is how flavors build on each other and progress. It seems to me that more thought is given to that progression and relationship between courses than trying to create individual dishes.  This may be why the true greatness and uniqueness of this table dawned on me after finishing my meal and in the succeeding days.  I don’t want to invoke the cliché of “the whole being greater than the parts” but, I should say that, my overall very high grade is not the arithmetic average of a dozen courses and desserts, but it is based on my general impression after reflecting  on the whole meal.

Our meal has started with three bowls serving sticky rice, miso soup with fu (incredible clarity) and braised fall vegetables.  This was followed by an outstanding sashimi course featuring squid, squid tentacles, magura, hamachi, and tai.  Ishihara cuts slices rather thick, but they literally melt in the mouth.  The dip made of the fish liver is also noteworthy.

It is hard to do justice to the “futamono” or ladled dish.  His dashi soup with sea bream milt (shirako), matsutake mushroom, yuzu slices and leaves was breathtaking in its clarity and flavor depth.  This is the only photo I could take.

We were than offered a more hearty course: wagyu beef from Shimane prefecture.  Extremely rich in taste, the beef was topped with a vegetable puree (eggplant-like kinoko and some fat green peppers called takagamone).  Ishihara served fall greens, lettuces (one tasted like aragula) and herbs.  The wagyu was thickly cut  in the shape of cubes.  We ate it by dipping it in yakimano sauce whose main ingredient was the flavorful sancho pepper.

Following the excellent marbled wagyu we were offered a light and soothing  course.  Turnip and clam custard topped by ikura and a bitter-sweet jelly was presented in a champagne flute. 

The 6^th Hassun course was the most elaborate of all.  It consisted of many small plates served in a beautiful tray decorated by maple leaves.  Different bowls, small martini glasses, egg holders, etc., all contained fish, shellfish, vegetables.  I identified deep fried ebi with rice crackers and roasted chestnuts, baby shrimps, ankimo or monkfish liver sitting on top of hokunomi (garden caviar which is crunchy), broiled sardines, edameme beans.  Everything was topped by a different jellified sauce, very light and slightly acidified.  The most amazing taste, however, was the shirako.  It was served with thinly cut daikon radish, green onion, and soy. 

One of the distinguishing features of dining is Japan is the personal interaction with the chef.  A common spoken language is not necessary as the eyes and gestures tell the story.

Ishihara-san noticed our appreciation of the very subtle, rich, gelatinous shirako and quickly scooped out a  yuzu, filled it with shirako, and squeezed a couple of drops of yuzu on it.  Heavenly!

The 7^th course, or Shiizakana in the language of Kaiseki, was a simmered dish. It consisted of taro root with nishin (herring) and some bitter vegetables. It had multiple flavors, as well as clean, well defined and complimentary tastes.

The grilled course was also impressive:  Matsuka crab and kamas (barracuda).  They were slowly grilled and then taken back to the kitchen to be topped by kimizu (egg yolk and vinegar) and chirizu (daikon radish, green onion, rice vinegar and soy).

The last course was the communal potage:   Ko no mono and Tamewan.  It was a vegetable potage, served from a larger tureen to all of us.  It had steamed rice and fried rice.  The quality of rice was mind-blowing, and the clarity of the soup was noteworthy.

The first dessert was a chestnut inside a wheat gluten-fuku cake.  This was followed by new harvest Mattcha from Yasuka.

Then came a most amazing dessert:  fruit salad with champagne jelly.

This course was like the fruit equivalent of Bras’s gargaillou or Hajime’s “minerals of the earth” which consist of 60 or so vegetables and herbs.  Ishihara combined about 20 fruits, some raw, some cooked, and bound them together with a champagne jelly.  The quality of the fruits, especially  the plum, persimmon or khaki, pear, and fig were outstanding, to say the least.

Our meal ended with a grape sorbet served with plum jelly and cassis sauce.

With two bottles of sake the bill came to 64,100 Yen for the two of us.

I look forward to a second visit in the Spring.

EVALUATION: 18.5/20

Imagine a city which is visited by about 10 million foreign tourists in a year.

This city is Antalya in Turkey along the mediterranean coast. It is only second to Istanbul as the major tourist attraction in Turkey.

Crowne Plaza is a five star hotel in Antalya.  It charges accordingly.  The room prices are rather steep.

I had the misfortune of spending four  nights there.

A nightmare.

My first impression was that this was a second rate business hotel.  Rooms were rather small;  bathrooms lacked basic amenities; and there was no working space.

We arrived very late on a Saturday.  Although we were the only people at the time, the reception desk took forever to check us in. 

The next morning started with a nasty surprise.  The water which was flowing from the faucet was as thin as a thread.  Washing your hands and face would take forever, and taking a shower was impossible.

I waited for some time for the repairmen to come and fix the problem.  Apparently they are using some water saving device which controls the pressure.

The same problem kept repeating itself every morning.  So I was consistently late to my meetings.

There was no shower and only a bathtub with a hand shower and a shower.  Yet operating the shower was a major operation and techical help.  I needed to dismantle the hand shower and  assemble some pieces together in order to use the shower.  In other words, it was not possible to use both the shower and the hand shower.

Operating the shower system was like solving a puzzle.  This may be OK.  The worst, however, was the bathtub.  It was so slippery that one should call it an ice skating rink.  Getting out of the very high bath tub without falling flat on your face required tremendous concentration and athletic ability.

Antalya is very hot during this time and one needs the air conditioning.  The hotel had air conditioning, but it ceased to operate after the first two days.  I called to ask the repairman.  To no avail!  Nobody ever showed up.

The worst of all, however, was the WAKE UP calls.

No they did not forget them.

They called you even if you never demanded it!

The nights in Antalya are long and quite fun. One stays up late.

On my second morning they called me at 7:30 AM.  I politely told them that I did not ask to be woken up.  I told them that I would stay two more nights and that I would NEVER require a wake up call.

To make sure that the problem does not repeat itself I informed the reception about the problem. Not once but twice.

Guess what?

The next day I received a call at 6:30 AM after four hours of sleep: THIS IS YOUR WAKE UP CALL SIR!

My protests were met with a very reassuring excuse:  it was in the system and there was no way to change it.

You may ask about my last morning.

Well,  I learned my lesson.

I dismantled the phone.

I will never ever again stay in a Crowne Plaza hotel.

In Turkey the Ministry of Tourisme is the responsible body rating the hotels.

They gave five stars to Crowne Plaza Antalya.

If I had the power to punish the gentlemen who gave five stars to this hotel I know what to do.

I will force them to spend a week in Crowne Plaza Antalya!

One category of restaurants that often disappoints me is high end dining in the States.  Contrary to the widely held belief that the US has been catching up with Europe, I think the opposite is the truth.  I have some vivid memories of memorable meals in the 1980s in New York at LUTECE (superlative canette for two, blanquette de veau),  Le Cirque during the reign on the great Daniel Boulud, early years at restaurant Daniel (I still remember a lunch there in December 1994 when Monsieur Boulud prepared for us a whole menu around pico magnatum), and at LESPINASSE under Gary Kunz. The early years of LE BERNARDIN were also memorable.

California came a little late to the fine dining game, but it did in 1993 when Thomas Keller started the FRENCH LAUNDRY.  My first meal at the French Laundry was a year after the opening, i.e., in the spring of 1994, and between 1994 and 2000 I had many great meals there when Tom was at the helm and inspired.  Lucky people who have eaten at the French Laundry during the heyday of the restaurant should attest that Mr. Keller combined unerring precise technique with a playful but measured sense of experimentation.  The result was often breathtaking, and some of the dishes were truly memorable.

There were, of course, others.  In the early 1980s Jean Pierre Doignon cooked some of the best Burgundian dishes outside  of Bourgogne.  I think his restaurant called LA CHEMINEE in north Tahoe was about on par with the Michelin three star Lameloise.

Unfortunately California was not ready for superlative cooking and wine service outside of San Francisco.  (La Cheminee dared to serve crisp, high acid California Chardonnay and cool climate wines rich in minerals,  when the norm was oaky, creamy big Chardonnays and high alcohol big reds.)   Critics either did not discover or appreciate La Cheminee.  The restaurant closed and the two partners (the chef was co-owner with another gentleman, whose name I can’t recall, who was maître d’, chose the wines, and was a very kind person with a noteworthy palette) went their own ways.

The other great chef I know in the States was the late Jean Louis Palladin at WATERGATE.  For the lovers of the gutsy cuisine of Southwest France, Jean Louis had an iconic stature.  He was a passionate, emotional person, and these characteristics found an echo in his cooking.  Consequently, his cooking was not as consistent as, say, the cooking of Keller, but when he hit his marks, he hit very high marks indeed.

Unfortunately all this changed in the 2000s.  To me New York is now a gastronomic wasteland in the upper end since the closing of the last great restaurant there, i.e. ALAIN DUCASSE.  JEAN GEORGES is a good chef and an excellent saucier who has a very good brasserie that works with average ingredients.  LE BERNARDIN is a fine seafood restaurant worthy of one star.  MASA is a very good restaurant, and I have no qualm with two stars, but he is really not on par with the best sushi houses in Tokyo.  DANIEL is not too consistent nowadays and does not hit high marks for the average diner.  My sole meal at PER SE was lackluster and did not compare even with post-Keller French Laundry.  David Chang’s KO is intriquing, but I am really puzzled as to how it deserves two stars. The cooking is simply too bold and too fussy to be considered in the great league (but it is certainly recommended for some very tasty dishes, and it deserves one star).  MADISON ELEVEN is a fine restaurant, but the chef relies too much on sous vide cooking, and I was underimpressed by the quality of his ingredients. There are always some good dishes and very good ingredients at THE BLUE HILL at the Stone Barns but the chef relies on a too limited range of ingredients, and one feels that dishes become repetitive and boring after a few courses.  (He tries to make up for this by using humongous rectangle plates which are 90% empty, with, for example, one asparagus and a painted sauce, but to me this is awkward and amateurish.)

I have eaten quite well at CHARLIE TROTTER  in early 1990s, but what I most vividly remember was a great wine service and a  sommelier who had impressed me (Larry Stone). 

I wrote a review of ALINEA in gastromondiale.  Overall, I found the cooking unnecessarily complicated, and some presentations are theatrical.  However, the chef is talented, and I am looking forward to another meal there to see how the chef evolves.

I have also tried the new Michelin three star MEADOWOOD in Napa.  Some dishes were good, one dish was exceptional, but some were misconceived (like white asparagus and sea urchin). I found desserts to be outrightly bad.  I doubt that when Michelin was Michelin this restaurant would have received more than one star.

As far as my pocketbook is concerned, I find spending more than $500 for two in the States in upper end restaurants to be misspent money.  There are quite a few restaurants in the States where I eat very well for much less (CHEZ PANISSE is a great restaurant and has been reviewed here), and I miss the New York scene in the early 1990s.

However, there is one exception.

MANRESA.

I probably had David Kinch’s cooking in New York at the QUILTED GIRAFFE without knowing he was cooking (how can one forget the “beggar purse”).  Then I “re-discovered” him at Sent Sovi in Saragota.  Finally he opened Manresa in Los Gatos where he has been cooking for some years now.

The amazing thing about David’s cuisine is the fact that he consistently turns out excellent dishes and his cooking is very consistent, despite slight changes in his style over the years.

I am in a good position to judge the consistency of the food at Manresa.  My wife and I have had a total of 12 meals since 2004, and I have nine of his menus with my own notes.

I would like to rely on the six criteria of gastromondiale (we formulated them with my friend Mikael Johnson who now is at the helm of his own restaurant HEDONE in London) to argue that Manresa is a great restaurant.

1.  What is the quality and rarity of ingredients?

As far as sourcing for fish, shellfish and greens-vegetables is concerned, Kinch is second to nobody, and on par with Chez Panisse. His meat sourcing, on the other hand, has been erratic and of varying quality.  One big plus Kinch has compared to other chefs in California, who often source inexpensive ingredients of exceptional quality is that, Kinch  sources some rare and expensive ingredients.  Examples range from beluga caviar to spot prawns to amadai to abalone to European-Atlantic turbot to sea urchin to same day picked matsutake mushrooms and sometimes to white and black truffles. At the same time Kinch does not paint the eye of the customer by luxury as he is in constant search to upgrade the quality of inexpensive but rare ingredients.  His “into the vegetable garden” course and his “beignets”, deep fried herbs-vegetables, from the organic garden he sources them from, are invariably exciting, multi-dimensional, courses.  I have also never seen Kinch serving anything questionable, such as  low grade foie gras or canned truffles or wilted greens.

2.  How well do preparations respect the used ingredients, how well has the appearance and true flavors of the ingredients been enhanced and with what clarity do the ingredients shine in the preparations?

It is here that David really excels.  Many Michelin two to three star chefs today, especially in Spain (the now defunct El Bulli, Can Roca, Arzak, Akelarre, Mugaritz), but also in Italy (the newest three star Osteria Francescana), and also in France (post-2000 Veyrat, Gagnaire) are guilty of not respecting their ingredients.  They either try to make a carrot taste like a tomato through techniques, such as morphing, or  they do not respect the texture of an ingredient and go overboard in carrying out their  experimentations, or they complicate dishes to much and try to marry discordant flavors, thinking that they are being “creative”.

There is a reaction to all that which is healthy, but does not necessarily result in high-end cooking. That is, some chefs now feel obliged to respect the shape or “raw” tastes of the used ingredients. If the chef is a good shopper, one can eat some tasty dishes as a result, but, in order to create great dishes, the chef should have the discretion to modify ingredients, as long as the result respects the essence of the used ingredients. (There are of course some exceptions to this rule.  I have eaten the best examples of San Remo or Denia prawns or langoustines-cigalas-scampi from the Atlantic or Mediterranean in simple restaurants, which cook a la plancha and not in gourmet temples.)

This is where David Kinch truly excels. Over the years he developed a keen sense of how much he should modify a given ingredient, and with what else he should combine it to underline a particular aspect of that ingredient.  For example, I have seen him prepare “abalone” in three different ways.  (This is a very difficult ingredient to deal with and during the last six months I have seen two very good chefs failing in their preparations: Michael Tusk of Quince in San Francisco and Stephan Jego of L’Ami Jean in Paris on the 7^th arrondissement.)  David Kinch’s dish:  “Raw milk panna cotta with abalone” contrasts beautifully and emphasizes the unique rubbery texture of the abalone.  His “Abalone and seaweed persillade, buckwheat” brings out the earthy-meaty aspects, and his “A late autumn tidal pool” is the incarnation of what some call the umami taste, which is achieved by the balance between sweet sea urchin, true dashi with dried tuna, and rich-concentrated abalone.

3. How much of a magic touch of the chef is displayed in the preparations and how well has the chef calibrated and married tastes to achieve greatness?

Somebody recently asked me about what I mean by “balance in the wine”. One can give the pet answer about the interplay between acid-tannin-sugar-alcohol, but the truth is that it is hard to define.  Sometimes you encounter ridiculously unbalanced wines.  Many wines have far from perfect balance, and rarely does one encounters great balance. Once you drink such a wine, you notice it!

I have never failed to find some dishes with perfect balance and depth during my multiple visits to Manresa.  The ability to turn out such dishes on a consistent basis is the hallmark of a “great”, as opposed to a “very good”, chef.  Below, under a separate heading, I will list such dishes with their respective dates.

4.  What is the level of originality? Is it just a copy, has the chef actually tried to take another’s dish to a new level, or is it a completely new approach with little influence from something that has been done before?

There was once a discussion about the “Arpege farm egg” served in Manresa as an amuse.  Some felt that David should not have served the creation of another great chef, Alain Passard.

I think the very opposite is the truth.  This is a great dish, and there is no way to re-create the identical version with different ingredients.  I like the way chefs pay homage to each other by naming certain dishes after each other.  It shows respect for others and self-esteem.

One can actually claim that there is nothing new under the sun, and the search for originality is fraught with dangers and pitfalls. Instead the important thing is for the chef to develop his/her own style by taking into account the ecology and the geography of the region in which he/she is located.

Kinch is one of the very very few chefs in the States who has a style of his own.

There has been some constant and changing elements of this style. What has been constant is his love of earthy-forest flavors. His cooking is almost the opposite of the “food candy” approach I notice more in America than elsewhere.  David always searches for some umami-salty-earthy flavors, and he loves to combine them by emphasizing their complementarity, rather than by painting bold strokes of truly contrasting flavors. 

The result is mostly satisfactory, but not always. For example when David complements Iranian caviar with buckwheat and Brillat Savarin cheese, one cannot fault him for the cerebral approach, but my taste buds feel that something is missing to balance the discordant flavors.

But this example is the exception, not the rule.  Combinations are well thought out and precisely executed.  This is especially the case with seafood.  “Terre et mer” dishes are now the craze of the day, and many inedible examples in fancy restaurants abound.  David was practicing great examples of such dishes before they become “a la mode”. 

The evolution of David’s cuisine is towards incorporating more ideas and cooking techniques from kaiseki style Japanese cuisine.  Certainly he is not alone in doing this, and one can hardly find any multistarred chef in Europe today who is not inspired by Japanese cooking one way or another.  But the problem is that, as my most recent meal at MUGARITZ has proved, experiments with textural components of the food and so called infusions, modeled after the Japanese approach to dashi, often result in awkward cooking and inedible food.

David Kinch certainly has not fallen into the trap of emulating Japan without understanding the philosophy of Japanese cooking.  He has worked in a first rate kaiseki house in Kyoto; he is a true lover of the best sushi in Tokyo; and he interacts with Japanese chefs.  Consequently, he is well aware of the limits and pitfalls Western chefs face when working with very different ingredients. Consequently when he composes dishes, such as “Shellfish with chestnut and rice, roast chicken jelly”, or “Crab with avocado and almond, citrus” (and persimmon), these are certainly not dishes one is likely to encounter in Tokyo or Kyoto, but they will certainly make a Kaiseki master proud if he is served them as part of a Hassun course paying homage to late autumn in his hometown—Los Gatos!

5.  Can the dish be improved by adding or substracting an ingredient without completely changing the preparation of the dish?

 I define a perfect dish as one from which you cannot subtract or add an element/ingredient without lowering the quality.  In this sense, I am quite impressed by David’s non-minimalism, so to speak. That is to say, as a healthy reaction to fussy dishes comprising 10+ elements, modern chefs have been trying to incorporate fewer elements to their compositions and to highlight the clarity and unique taste of these elements.  I have no problem with this approach, except at times “simple” becomes “simplistic”.  Some dishes just don’t taste profound and multi-dimensional.  Often the extra step to make the dish taste profound (for example, a rich broth to flavor a green vegetable) is very time consuming and chefs prefer to take shortcuts or no extra steps at all.

One hallmark of a great cuisine is the ability to fully explore the potential of each ingredient.  One benchmark example is Michel Bras’ Gargouillou, where each vegetable is cooked on its own, ensuring that every component in the dish respects its true taste on its own, and where the total result is a symphony of tastes that together enhances the impression of the true tastes by offering all those clear tastes of the garden at the same time.

In that regard, Manresa never ceases to amaze me by creating some perfect and quasi perfect dishes each time I have visited.  Kinch pays homage to Bras and always includes his own version of Gargouillou on the menu called “into the vegetable garden…”. This dish is a ‘constant’ in his menu although its composition changes daily.  In addition, I have never failed to find a few extraordinary dishes in my visits to Manresa.  Below I will cite these dishes.

6. To what extent is the chef able to build a successful flow of the meal?  

David’s meals progress beautifully without repetition, and the flow of courses has always been very well thought out.  Especially during the last two years, after several visits to Japan, I have been observing even more complementary variation in his cooking techniques. That is, two consecutive dishes, even though they may have some common ingredients, always taste very different.

But Japanese inspiration entails its own cost.  Manresa does not achieve a high note at the end of the savory meal.  This has often been the case in the past too, since Kinch could never consistently find a great source of  red meat and game.

Of course, this is a problem in the States in general.  American restaurants, including two and three star restaurants, often fail compared to a simple bistro in France or an osteria in Italy in terms of offering quality internal organs, veal, all kinds of game, good lamb, and suckling pig.  Occasionally Kinch finds good wood pigeon (palombe) and cooks nice sweatbread dishes. In my last three visits he offered kid goat, spring lamb, and wild black buck, but none of them made an impression.  On the other hand, with the EXCEPTION OF CHEZ PANISSE, which offers first rate Liberty Farm Duck and Goose, Paine Farm Pigeon, Quail, and very good lamb (not on par with what can be found in France and Spain though) from Lewis and Dal Porto ranches, I don’t know any American restaurant which satisfied me with their meat offerings (other than steak, for which I prefer corn fed first for marbling and grass fed for a short time afterwards).  Worse still, one cannot find the rich internal organ-abat culture of Europe in the States, because people simply do not order such dishes.  At the same time, the internal organs should be eaten very very fresh, and refrigeration should be avoided.  David, in the past prepared his own foie gras.  He also included cod tripe in some dishes and offered homemade high quality salumi as part of the appetizers.  Personally I am missing a high note ending to my meals recently at Manresa.

There is of course a personal stake here.  I like to bring one of my favorite Bourgognes to the restaurant, and nothing matches the Bourgoge better than gamey game. I would rather have three less courses at Manresa than to forgo a memorable finish, such as a game tart (L’AMBROISIE,  LE CINQ, JADIS, APICIUS in Paris), a duckling for two, a great wagyu steak, true wild venison and wild buck, wood pigeon and pigeon, grouse, woodcock, etc…

BREAD-DESSERT-CHEESE-AMBIENCE-SERVICE.

Manresa serves very good bread and superb homemade salty butter. In that regard, it is unique in the States and compares with the three star French restaurants.

I had some very good Comte from Bernard Anthony and also great Portuguese cheese at Manresa, but recently they have been downplaying the cheese course.  To me this is a great pity, as there are now quite a few good seasonal cheeses in the States too.

The dessert course is the weakest part of the meal at Manresa, but this is in general a problem for top end US restaurants.  (I consistently eat good desserts at Chez Panisse, because they don’t overreach and stick to the classics.)  On my part, I prefer to end my meal there with cheese, seasonal fruit and coffee with a piece of chocolate.

The ambience is always charming and suits the surroundings.  Recently they have upgraded it with great success.  The room now is airy, comfortable and enchanting.  The art pieces are very well selected and suit the creative yet not avant-garde cuisine.

The sense of well-being one experiences at Manresa is enhanced by the style of service.  Servers are well trained and can answer specific questions.  If they don’t know the answer, they say so, and ask the chef immediately.  They combine good will, efficiency, and a restrained sense of passion and pride.  It is team work at its best, and the composition of the team beautifully reflects the multi-cultural mosaic of Northern California.

But there is also a sad note.

The dining room has been presided by a gentleman called Michael Kean who unexpectedly and prematurely passed away last Spring.  He was also a shareholder in the restaurant.  Without exaggeration I should confess that only two dining room directors gave me as much cause to rejoice when I stepped in to their restaurants: the great Monsieur Pascal of the French Laundry in the 1990s and Michael of Manresa.  The common thread unifying them was that they exhibited a sense of hospitality and grace that one cannot learn.  One is born with it.

Later I learned that Michael Kean was a dancer in his youth.  I was not surprised.

As clients of the restaurant, Linda and I will miss him, but we rest assured that his legacy is in good hands and the ballet will continue without missteps untill Kinch retires from an active role.

WINE LIST- SERVICE AND FOOD-WINE MATCHING.

Another big plus of the restaurant is the existence of a first rate sommelier.

Jeff Bareilles, the sommelier, is a kind and intellectual person who has been doing a great job upgrading and enriching the wine list. His choices are very apt given that David’s unique cuisine calls for crisp white wines, high in acidity, and rich in minerality.  Personally, if I bring two bottles to the restaurant,  one is an aged Austrian Gruner Veltiner (GV) or Austrian or Mosel dry Riesling and the other is a red Bourgogne.  The red matches usually with one, or at best two dishes (sometimes David prepare  a meaty-fatty fish, such as turbot, and sautees it in hot pan). GV or Riesling marries well with about 50% of the rest of the meal.

So, what I bring, does not match with about 40% of the dishes.

Hence I have been requesting Jeff to match the rest with a glass of wine.

This is one possible approach.

The other approach is to not BYO wine and give “carte blanche” to Jeff.

The first approach works beautifully.  For example, one day I brought 1989 Knoll Gruner Veltiner and 1990 Rousseau Chambertin. Jeff supplemented them with 2006 Domaine du Salvard, Cheverny, 2004 L. Boillot Pommard les Fremiers, 2003 GB Burlotto Barolo and 2002  Clos Saron Cuvee Mysterieuse Sierra Foothils. 

The second approach works quite well.  Besides Diebolt-Vallois Blanc, which is an interesting terroir Champagne  that matches most amuses, Jeff makes ample use of earthy-high acid-minerally non-Chardonnay whites which accentuate but do not dominate Kinch’s subtle, complex, very precisely seasoned creations.

The only problem perhaps is that Jeff feels obliged to include some California red wines in his pairings, which dominate the very thinly cut and rather modern style-minimally sauced meat offerings.  Non-elegant-robust reds, such as Kathryn Kennedy Cabernet Sauvignon (2000 and 2003), and over-extracted unbalanced reds, such as 2006 Vinoce Cabernet Franc, should be more apt with candy-crowd pleasing food that made some Californian restaurants famous, such as Mustard’s .  (This is not to say that no California wine should be included.  I was especially elated by Jeff’s choice of a Calera Aligote in my last visit, which brought out the earthy beauty of David’s “into the vegetable garden.”)

BEST DISHES OVER THE LAST SEVEN YEARS.

Below, I list what I have starred in the nine menus I have kept, implying that they are 19-20/20 dishes in gastromondiale criteria.

December 23, 2004:  Parmesan churros (amuse), Turbot with mushrooms “vineuse”, Tasting of suckling pig…..trotters with foie gras.

September 15, 2005: Jeremy’s fennel salumi (amuse), Mi-cuit of foie gras and pickled pig’s trotters (amuse), Sweet corn croquettes (amuse), Onion and foie gras royale (amuse), Japanese bass with shellfish with sofrigit “saffron-anchovy”, our chocroute with boudin noir, local strawberries with 50 year old balsamico.  MY BEST MEAL AT MANRESA.

May 9, 2006: Oyster in urchin jelly, nori croustillant (amuse), Salt fish tripe and shellfish pil-pil, arugula, sweetbreads roasted whole, asparagus with morels.

December 30, 2006: Prawn roe tartlettes, salted butter (amuse), Cauliflower with abalone, anchovy…romanesca and foie gras royale (amuse), consommé of caviar, laitue de mer, roast turbot with meat juices, truffles.

December 28, 2007:  Golden beggar’s purse (amuse), Amadei and crab, sashimi style,  with soy sauce and sesame, true cod and its tripe pil-pil, water and beach herbs, wood pigeon roasted in winter savory salt, cereals.

December 26, 2008: Citrus and Jasmine tea jelly (amuse)

December 29, 2010: Chestnut braised with kelp, abalone with avocado.

April 13, 2011: Raw milk panna cotta with abalone (amuse), Roasted egg yok and asparagus, caviar, Black Cod, onion-marrow  broth with chervil, smoked lentil.

December 22, 2011: Raw milk panna cotta with abalone (amuse), Bay scallops, white truffles with brussel sprouts, A late autumn tidal pool.

CONCLUSION:  Manresa is the best Western style fine dining restaurant in America.  Chef Kinch always achieves a high level of cooking characterized by exemplary consistency.  Dishes which comprise his tasting menus never fall below the ‘good’ and ‘very good’ marks and in each meal one also encounters superlative courses.  While chef Kinch composes well-balanced and multi-dimensional dishes, he also knows how to build a well thought out flow of a meal without repetition.  Chef Kinch’s recent incorporation of Japanese cooking philosophy in this regard is a double edged sword.  While he is now able to create perhaps multi-faceted and nuanced courses, he is also sacrificing some intense flavors which set him apart from other celebrity chefs in America. Ironically this shift in cooking should earn him the three stars from the guide Michelin that he long merited, since it is more in line with the norms of the day and David Kinch incorporates Japanese philosopy in his cooking better than any other American chef.

No.  None of these restaurants have three Michelin stars.  Actually only of them is starred by Michelin.  They will never feature in the top 10 or the 50 best list of  RESTAURANT MAGAZINE either, which helps  to get free meals and favors (like special meals) for the trade/jury members who mostly are the devotees of molecular gastronomy and are awed by presentation and plating skills at the expense of ingredient quality and precise cooking.

Personally I try to visit Donostia (San Sebastian) twice a year to dine in this trio.  I occasionally try other restaurants too.  ZUBEROA remains a very good restaurant indeed, but one has to order the classics and pre-order what may as well be the world’s best cheese cake.   MUGARITZ, on the other hand, which once was one of the world’s most promising restaurants, is venturing towards a no man’s land, cooking conceptually interesting, but mostly inedible and absurd dishes for an increasingly foreign clientele.

There are also three Michelin three star restaurants in the area,  ARZAK and  AKELARRE in Donostia and BERASETEGUI 30 minutes away in Lasarte.  ARZAK used to be a great restaurant, circa 1990.  Akelarre never impressed me.  BERASETEGUI may be the most interesting of the three, but I have shied away from visiting it after I encountered a farmed sea bass a few years ago.

Here are my three must VISITS in alphabetical order.

1. ELKANO

I consider Elkano to be the best place for seafood in the Western World, equaled only by Mr. Zazzeri’s great seafood temple in Italy, LA PINETA.

The restaurant is known for turbot-rodaballo, and there is no doubt that turbot does not get better than this.  Unlike the Michelin three star restaurants which only serve a filet,  you can experience whole turbot in the right season.  The turbot is cooked on the oak charcoal ashes very slowly, without touching the fire, and I should say that nine out of ten times at Elkano it was perfect.   After cooking the turbot whole, with a sprinkling of a little sea salt, it is placed on a platter with the white side up, carefully remove the middle bone and add a little olive oil and cider vinegar.  This way the natural gelatin of the turbot oozes out.  It is delicious with the country bread served at Elkano.

What astonishes me when eating whole turbot at Elkano is the contrast of texture and flavors of different parts.  The fillets from the white side taste more delicate than the black side (which does not see the sun).  Morrillo, the back of the neck, is very complex in flavor.  The cheek is perhaps the best part.  The ventresca is not as subtle in flavor as o-toro, but intriquing.  The brain is very gelatinous, and no one would guess that it is fish in a blind tasting.  The bones are the most flavorful part, as they contain a good amount of gelatin and should be sucked.

In terms of complexity of natural textures and flavors, only a whole tete de veau can challenge the whole wild local turbot at Elkano.  Make sure that if your turbot is female, it has not laid its eggs.  As a caution, ask for a male turbot.

But don’t have the turbot if you visit the restaurant in the Fall.  Try instead a sole fish -- the lenguado.

As good as the turbot is, the small fish and shellfish at Elkano have always been local and impeccable in their freshness.  For instance, in the Fall, you are likely to suck the tender meat of the little crabs, necoras, and the sweet meat of the baby cigale de mer  (santiagianos).  If you are lucky, you may also be served fresh fish liver, such as from rascasse or rouget (salmonetes).  The taste of the fish liver is of the quality that one encounters only in Japan’s best restaurants.

My last meal there in end-March began with barely steamed almejas (clams) from Galicia.  Then we were served an excellent piece of mackerel wrapped in fresh zucchini and stuffed with cubes of tomato and onion and a drop of olive oil.   When I commented about the freshness of the mackerel, I was served “gonadas,” the eggs of mackerel which  can only be obtained when the fish is just caught and only at the beginning of the season (mainly March and the very beginning of April).  The eggs were served warm.  They had the gelatinous texture of young lamb brain, but tasted fishy, not meaty.

Our feast continued with firm and sweet camarones (baby local shrimp) a la plancha.  Don’t miss them if you see them on the menu.

Don’t also miss the Basque classic:  “kokotxas pil pil”.  This is the jowl of the merluza fish, and the sauce is prepared with its own gelatin, olive oil, parsley, and garlic.  To me, this is one of the most deep and satisfying tastes in the world.  I understood the quality of what I was eating in Donostia last year when I was served some not too fresh and  chewy kokotxas pil pil in Llerida.  Elkano’s kokotxas pil pil are always perfect.

I was also taken aback by the salmonetes (triglie, rouget, barbunya).  This is one of the top three fish for me (together with turbot and lufer), but I should say that in the last 20 years, I have never found the taste of a true rock rouget that I used to find in Turkey prior to 1990.  (The last exceptional rouget I had was at the Italian restaurant BALZI ROSSI in the early ‘90s.)  ELKANO’s version was amazing, tasted like the sea, and the meat was firm, but juicy and flavorful.

Finish your meal with helado de queso at Elkano.  It is ice cream made from a mascarpone-like local cheese and is served with fresh strawberry coulis. It is delicious.

A Galician albarino is a good match with the food.  My choice is Do Fereiro Cepas Vellas.  The wine is intense and has a good dose of minerality/salinity.  It matches the shellfish especially well.

The now irrelevant Michelin guide mentions the restaurant without starring it, a testimony to their jaded palates.

A sumptuous meal for two at Elkano with wine should cost about 200-250 Euros.

2.  ETXEBARRI

I had first reviewed Etxebarri for Gastroville in 2004, which I co-founded with Mikael Johnson.   (Mikael now has his own restaurant, Hedone, in London.)   In 2004, Etxebarri was not known to the larger public.   Gastro-tourists did not make pilgrimages to the mountainous areas of the beautiful Basque country.  Victor was still at the helm, laboring in front of the grills that he had designed himself.

Things have changed since then.  Gone are the days when huge platters were served, and the wine list was underpriced.  Now they have a very capable sommelier.  Dishes are served in small portions on sometimes silly plates which sacrifice practicality in favor of misguided aesthetics.  And Victor is not always present in the kitchen.

But the restaurant is still great, if more pricey.  The ingredients are of impeccable quality; combinations are well thought out; and the execution is perfect, 95 percent of the time.

Ironically, the only dish I did not consider to be excellent at Etxebarri was the chuleton or the grilled rib eye.  While the grilled steak is quite marbled and has some mineral depth, it is not outstanding.  It is very good.  One can find this level steak in quite a few other steak houses in the Basque country, and the steak I had at a traditional sidreria, Sidreria Zapiain, was on par with Etxebarri’s, albeit much cheaper.  (If you go to Sidreria Zapiain, I especially recommend  the tortilla de bacalao.)  I had better quality steak in the Madrid restaurant Sacha which I will review separately.

Here are the highlights of our end March meal at Etxebarri.

The amuse was pumpkin soup, light and appetizing.  The homemade buffalo mozzarella was excellent.  It was paired with rhubarb puree.  Things then went into an even higher gear with the salt cured anchovies that made a statement in a country where one can find outstanding examples.  Etxebarri’s version was plump, rich in fat, with the just optimum balance between salt, fat, and acidity.

Next we were served some Arcachon oysters, barely grilled, with seaweed puree.  I fail to comprehend why Victor chose relatively simple Arcachon oysters over the more complex and nutty flavors of  Galician flat oysters.

Espardenas (sea cucumbers) strike me as overpriced, given that they are  more about texture than taste.  But Victor’s version was memorable.  The little espardenas were sweet, crunchy and juicy, and they were sitting on the most memorable baby fava beans, spiked by a good dose of spicy olive oil.  The sweet espardenas matched beautifully with the slightly bitter first of the season fava beans, and the spicy olive oil bound the two together.

Even more memorable than the espardenas was the baby octopus, pulpitos. They were the size of your fingertip.  In March 2011, Victor had served them with sweet onion puree.  This time he made a Galician preparation and paired them with diced potato and paprika.  The taste literally bursts in your mouth.

Memories also held for Victor’s version of the fresh chorizo tartar served with toast.  It was barely cooked, and both the spicing and the quality of the meat was noteworthy.  Bravo.

Next came egg yolk and black truffle.  Except for the silly platter that makes it impossible to place your cutlery and to eat without spilling, this dish was almost as good as IBAI’s version (19/20 versus 20/20).

The next two dishes, on the other hand, both merit 20/20.  First, we had wild red tuna belly, which was cut from a gigantic wild tuna caught near Asturias.  I have never seen in Japan such a whole filet of wild ventresca de atun cooked extra rare.  Each bite sent shock waves to my brain.

The last savory dish of the tasting menu was beef chop-chuleta, but they substituted wood-fire roasted kid (cabrita) for us.    With crunchy skin (probably marinated in honey), an irresistible layer of fat underneath the skin, and very tender flavorful meat, which is reminiscent of  baby lamb (but less fatty), the kid may as well be one of the world’s seven wonders.  Nobody handles it better than Etxebarri.

The tasting menu is 120 Euro + tax (7%), but we added one dish to the menu and shared it:  angulas or baby eels. I find the grilled Etxebarri version of angulas to be a unique and excellent way to handle this very subtle tasting creature.  It is more about texture.

The desserts are also very good in Etxebarri.  In Fall he prepares a Spanish version of tarte tatin, which is my favorite. But the grilled reduced milk ice cream was also noteworthy and an appropriate ending to the meal.  Wood-fired flambéed biscuit with vanilla ice cream was also quite memorable.

I think the best drink to pair with the tasting menu is champagne.  I opted for a favorite of mine, which is Georges Laval.  It has small and persistent bubbles, a quite leesy aroma, and intense refreshing citrusy notes on the palette.  The finish is long with agrume skin notes.  It is quite a complex 1er cru champagne which combines power with elegance.

We were served a glass each of Ferrer-Bobet Riesling and Ferrer-Bobet Acusp Pinot Noir with the tuna and the roasted kid, respectively.   I had tried and quite liked Ferrer-Bobet Priorat wines for their elegance in a region which mostly produces over the top very high alcohol wines. I was quite impressed by the clean-fresh-fruity-honest Riesling (vines are young but planted at 1000 meter altitude in Penedes) and the opulent-chunky-juicy Pinot which balanced its upfront slightly candied black berry fruit with nice acidity.   Apparently the young vines of the Pinot are also planted at 1000 meter altitude in the Pyrenees.

Ferrer-Bobet is a winery to watch.

Etxebarri is a temple of great and rare ingredients,  cooked simply but ingenously.  One should frequent it as much as possible.

3. IBAI

They don’t look like each other, but they remind me of one another:  Bernard Pacaud of L’Ambroisie and Alvise of Ibai.

They are both middle aged, slightly below average in height, and well built.  They are both the antithesis of the celebrity chef in the sense that they are no nonsense individuals, who are rather shy, retire to their kitchens to execute their trade, and hardly interact with their clients.   They don't take part in celebrity chef events,  they don’t like to be in the limelight, and they are genuinely modest.  They are also good fathers and husbands, who have married chic and lovely ladies who illuminate the dining room with their presence.

Michelin three star (Pacaud) and not even in the bible-rouge (Alvise) are two of the greatest chefs. 

What makes them great is the internalization of the “perfectionism” principle.  They don’t get swayed by culinary fads and Japanese plating techniques.  They perform the very best of their respective heritage with the best ingredients available: French haute cuisine and Basque home cooking, respectively.

The unifying trend of these two very disparate cuisines and chefs is the consistency.   All chefs have good and bad days, and it is hard to turn out consistently the same level of impeccable cooking.  But I should say that, among all the three star French chefs I know, L’Ambroisie has been the most consistent.

So is Ibai.  The restaurant is only open for lunch and on weekdays, buys the best available ingredients, and consumes them during the day.

If you visit the restaurant during late Fall, don’t  miss Alvise’s baby eel (angulas) salad.  In early Summer, don’t miss his tuna belly.  They are even better than Etxebarri’s version.

And who can beat Elkano’s kokotxas pil pil or kokotxas confits (slowly cooked)?  It has to be experienced to be believed.

My late March meal began with a great amuse: some chorizo from a producer in Rioja.  One can beg and appeal to have a second serving, but NO.  There are so many other things that we choose from the daily menu recited by Alvise (in Spanish; No English is spoken).

First came bogavante salpicon.   It is a lobster salad served at room temperature with lobster eggs. Lobster is truly sweet and firm and not cottony, like farmed lobsters from Maine. Great.

Next, we had the best vegetable dish in recent memory. It was the season’s first baby artichokes, borrajas, and baby peas, in a vegetable broth.  The baby peas with their sprouts were a revelation.  They are as rare in today’s world as albino sturgeon’s white caviar.

Next, and equally outstanding, we had farm eggs, potatoes, and end of the season fresh black truffles (tuber melanosporum) from Teruel.   The quality of potatoes equals the famous new potatoes that l’Ambroisie procures in late spring and serves with Brittany lobster.    This is an amazing dish in its simplicity, and the complementarity of explosive flavors is unbeatable.

This masterpiece is followed by the merluza kokotxas, which melt in the mouth, without chewing.  The gelatinous flavor sends shock waves inside your brain.

To finish, we had a whole lenguado or sole fish.  This fish is much better than a dover sole and is the level of the turbot at Elkano.  There is no brasserie in France where one can have this level of whole sole meuniere.

The desserts are not a strong suit, so you can end your meal with coffee.

Unfortunately the absence of good bread is another drawback.  Elkano and Etxebarri serve very good bread, but not Ibai.

There is also no written wine list. You select from the rack or tell them what you want.  In my last visit I had a very decent 2010 Pazo Senorans (but such cooking really merits a Leflaive Chevalier Montrachet).

Reservations are a must, and there are only six tables.

Don’t forget that credit cards are not accepted. Bring cash.  Depending on whether you have angulas, expect to pay between 200 and 400 Euros for two.

The best lamb in the world is eaten in Spain, or in Ribera del Duero, to be more precise.

The reason is simple.  The Spanish slaughter churra breed lamb (I believe it is a cousin of the Turkish breed “kivircik”) when it is about three weeks old.  This is true spring lamb, and the meat is tender and juicy.  The baby fat under the crunchy skin is the best part, and one gets hooked to it and feels deprived when devouring mutton which is called lamb in many countries.  (In France, too, “agneau de lait” can be found and is normally about three months old. It too can be very good and perhaps more complex than Spanish “cordero lechal,” but some of the best breeds in France, such as l’agneau de Pauillac and pre-sale, are now  almost extinct. I like the breed from Lozere.)

In Ribera del Duero, the so called “asadores” cook the lamb in wood fired stone ovens.  You have to order it in advance as they start cooking it about two hours prior to your arrival.

MANNIX in Campaspero may be the most famous Asador in Spain.  I have been there twice, and it lived up to its reputation.

This time we tried ZURITA in Tudela del Duero, 20 minutes away from Valladolid, where we stayed.  My friend Rogelio Enriquez, who has a great palette (both for food and wine), recommended it as being at least as good as Mannix.

I concur.

Zurita possesses a very original stone oven encrusted in the wall.  Unfortunately we did not see it, as I did not know about it until after we had lunch there.  If you go, make sure to see it and drop me a note.

Normally one baby lamb feeds eight people.  (Lambs are served in quarters -- two fore and two back quarters -- and each quarter serves two people.)  As we were two, I wanted to have the upper part, the ribs and the shoulder.  There were two ladies serving us in the dining room.  Assuming that they did not speak English or French, I grabbed my wife’s ribs and caressed gently the parts that corresponded to the upper part of the cordero lechal.  The nice lady smiled and perfectly understood, but somehow my wife did not seem to have particularly appreciated my hard work in getting her the best part of the meat.

At any rate it turned out that one of the ladies spoke sufficient English!

One advantage of Zurita over Mannix is the existence of great jamon iberico.   You may have heard about Joselito Grand Cru. It is excellent.  If you find it extra aged (there is one bar-restaurant in Madrid where you can find it), it is outstanding.

Equally outstanding is the great Carrasco.  You can find it at Hotel Niza’s restaurant Narru in Donostia, and one stand in the closed market in Donostia sells Carrasco.

This said, the jamon iberico we had at Zurita was on par with these superlative hams.  It was from a small producer from Guijuelo.  The name is Casa Bartolome.

Upon the recommendation of our waitress, we also had a fresh green salad from their garden.  It tasted like a cross between baby purslane and wild arugula.  Our waitress wrote the name in three different ways: maruja, pampline, coruja.

There is not much to say about the lamb:  20/20.  Have it with the fresh salad to cut the fat. 

Tudela del Duero is where the winemaker Mauro is located. But I chose a ‘99 Vega Sicilia.  If you have had the ‘42 or ‘68 Vega Sicilia, you may know that it is capable of greatness—what I call 100 point wines or classics.  The ‘99 will not reach these heights, but it is still a very good to excellent wine.  It has a complex tarry, licorice, wild mushroom, earthy nose and layers and layers of flavor, where noteworthy black wild raspberries is one component among many.  The considerable acidity is well buffered by the dry extract, and persistent tannins are beginning to melt and do not detract from the pleasure.  I noted that the texture was suave. I  ranked it 97/100.

I have one word of caution.  We parked our car in the village where you can park between 13:30 and 16:00 free.  The restaurant in at the middle of the village, on the main road.  When we arrived we were told that they have their own parking, and we brought the car there.  This was a good decision because our meal began around 14:30 and ended around 17:00.

We stayed at Valladolid at night and could not eat.  It was a pity, because some tapa bars looked quite good in the old town.

The next morning, before heading to Madrid, we went back to Tudela del Duero  at 14:00 to have lunch at restaurant 2,39.  This was also Rogelio’s recommendation.

Again it was a great recommendation because 2,39 excels in seasonal vegetables. We had first of the season small white asparagus.  They simply steam them, and you dip them in olive oil and salt and eat them whole.  (The stems are soft.)  The quality is outstanding, about the same level as the Bassano del Grappa white asparagus in Italy in end March/early April.  We also had a vegetable paella which was quite good.  (This has to be ordered a day in advance, as I did when we came to Zurita.)

Local winemakers seem to enjoy meat and fish dishes at 2,39 too.  Prices are very reasonable, and I am looking forward to sample some wild mushrooms there in the Fall.

Note that 2,39 is open for dinner on Friday and Saturday only. It is open for lunch every day except Monday.

I have not been in any experimental restaurant for a long time that excited me as much as Diver-XO. The last time was in MUGARITZ in 2007, but since then Andoni Aduriz adopted a totally new and artificial style, which may be apt to feeding astronauts on their way to Mars in that the food there bears no resemblance to what we can eat on earth or what we do not eat with good reason.

People also do not eat David Munoz’s food on everyday basis.  It is actually very hard to characterize David’s cuisine.  On the face of it, he cooks FUSION.  I, for one, am not a fan of fusion. I may even be overly critical of chefs who derive ideas from Japanese and other Asian cuisines, which mostly strike me as  conceptually interesting but as half baked ideas.  To use a metaphor, it is like interdisciplinary research in social sciences.  One gets ideas from other disciplines and tries to integrate them into your discipline.  It is rarely successful.

But when it is successful, some of the best works/breakthroughs come from interdisciplinary research.  If you are familiar with social science research, think of “Exit, Voice and Loyalty” by Albert O. Hirschman.   It is neither economics, nor psychology, nor sociology, but maybe all.  And there is also a philosophical dimension.  But the work is unique, and it defies narrow boundaries.  It is not only original, but it has great depth and is very grounded (in history).  It does not matter if the rather narrow minded committee members which distribute Nobel Prizes in Economics appreciate it.  This book alone renders Hirschman as one of the most distinguished minds of the century.  (He has many other great works.)

Well.  There is no Hirschman in cuisine, and there may never be.  The nature of the art is very different and unlike the written text.  The creations of chefs live only in memory.

Like Hirschman, not every institutionally recognized food writer will appreciate David’s cooking.  (His restaurant does not figure in Rafael Garcia Santos’ book, but garners two stars from Michelin.)  But I know why I liked it so much.

For one thing, the cuisine is grounded.  It is fusion, but it is also unmistakeably  Spanish.  The chef does not try to, say, out-Japanese the Japanese, like many Michelin three star chefs of today. He just integrates what he finds elsewhere in his style of cooking.

In this sense he is more like Pierre Gagnaire.  But his cuisine is not as fussy and overly complex as Gagnaire, in general.

Another reason I liked this restaurant very much is that  the ingredients are astoundingly good:   truly seasonal, truly Spanish, and very good.  The cooking, for the most part, does not mask the greatness of the ingredients.  Unlike the chefs who follow molecular gastronomy (although no one admits it or uses this term—but taking Ferran Adria as the reference point reveals all), David’s cuisine is not geared to post-modern theatricality, but is grounded in a nostalgia for heads to tails type countryside-rustic traditions, which are getting lost in the new global village.

My other reason is personal and relates to this last point. David clearly loves gutsy-fat-gelatinous-rich tastes, and but does not try to lighten these tastes by cutting their edges (in the name of balancing)  as almost all multistar chefs are doing nowdays. 

He gave me the impression that he is almost obsessed with cooking.  This is his way of life.  He cannot help but cook, first, to please himself. I am sure he tastes everything he cooks and does not send dishes to the table if he does not like them. I don’t think he is apologetic about proteins either, as too many of the vegan chefs, who nonetheless learn how to sous vide meat and fish without electrochuting themselves.

Here are the highlighs of our end March meal there.  The descriptions are not perfect as it would not have been possible to concentrate on note taking and enjoy the meal as much as I did.  (There is no written menu.)  I sent my available notes to Rogelio Enriquez who was present at the dinner (together with my wife and Pedro Espinosa), and without his help this write up would not have been possible. 

1^st course.  We started with steamed Edamame beans with yellow aji, a Peruvian chile sauce and their own version of the XO sauce, and also shrimp rice crisps with Jabugo jam mayonnaise.  This was the amuse.

2^nd course.  The fritura came next, which contained frog legs, squid, baby soft shell crab, ancovy bones, and salicornia.

3^rd course.  Next we had pulpitos shabu shabu:  baby octopus the size of finger tips.  You dip them in a hot fish soup made with the same components as the previous dish, and also in a Ponzu sauce.  These were outstanding quality pulpitos.  Pulpitos are traditionally eaten on a skewer with thyme (best were at the unfortunately closed JOAN GATELL) or with sweet onion puree (ETXEBARRI).  But this version also worked and did not overwhelm the sweet taste.

4^th course.  They then brought us tapioca with coconut milk.  We poured the soup that we had used for dipping on top, and added mint, lime and Thai chile. They also added flying fish roe and fresh shiso (a very short season) on top.  This is a very refreshing sweet-hot-sour soup, better than any similar version I had in any Western Thai restaurant.

5^th course.  Sweet fresh sea urchins were served with celeriac and coconut milk mousse and topped with chives. There were also jalepanos and black garlic on the side. I had a conversation with the chef about the dish.  I am not sure about the pairing between coconut mousse and sea urchins.  David and I agree that sea urchins are not fat (like oysters or percebes) and the taste is very sweet, very subtle.  So they may benefit from pairing with something fatty.  I gave the great examples at LEDOYEN, where the chef uses avocado mousse with sea urchin and also cauliflower mousse and cauliflower pieces (separately).  I think they work better as they brought out the saline/iodized/salty tasting component better (cauliflower) or emphasize the inner richness and sweetness of sea urchin (avocado).  I thought the coconut was overpowering.  David did not agree. At any rate, I love sea urchins so much that to me they are best consumed raw.

6^th course.   We had mejillones tigre, a classic tapas dish, i.e, deep fried mussels served in the shell with spicy béchamel.  David served them with a béchamel foam enriched by kaffir lime and Peruvian chilis and croutons.  Good.

7^th course.   The Dim Sum course included milk curd/skin stuffed with caramelized ox meat and topped by enoki mushrooms.  While I may not say that it was memorable,  I should claim that this was the best “pork bun” in recent memory.

8^th course.  A memorable dish followed, which was an oxtail consommé with tomato seeds, smoked angulas (baby eels look like noodles and they don’t tell you beforehand that they are angulas),  some greens (maybe arugula), and crackers made from eel skin.

9^th course.  Next we had fritura/shabu shabu.  They serve the meat from the soup (crunchy ox tail) with angulas on a crisp toast, with some micro greens on  top.  This was also memorable.

10^th course.   We had bonito belly smoked over vines (almost raw). It was topped by quail egg ravioli, bottarga, and kimchi.  It was served with black garlic aioli.  It was not on par with the grilled tuna belly served at ETXEBARRI, but was a very good dish.  The combination looked fussy, but it worked.

11^th course.  We then had Kokotxa Sezchuan:  bacalao kokotxas (jowl of the fish) with duck tongue.  The kokotxas were roasted and served over a cod brandade.  The sauce was thick and very tasty, containing veal jus, sezchuan pepper, black bean puree, and cod tripe.  A slice of avocado was served on the side.  Excellent.

12^th course.  Next we had  spinach cannelloni.  There was no dough. Spinach was stuffed with spider crab, beer mousse, and tomatillo,  and topped with hibiscus flowers and spider crab chips.  This dish was served with a side dish of “quisquilla” or baby prawns, which turned out to be firm, excellent Galician “camarones,” wrapped in algues and sitting on beer foam.  I found this dish a bit too crowded, but the slight bitterness due to the malted barley taste actually worked.  The best pairing for this dish may have been a glass of matching beer.

13^th course.  We then had baby squid cooked in flames in a wok with shaved black truffles. This dish was of outstanding quality and cooking technique.  The sauce was excellent too: sweet onion puree, yuzu and hot pepper.  Memorable.

14^th course.   Next we had salmonetes (rouget, triglia, tekir).  I think it was rock rouget as I am very familiar with this fish, and it is one of my favorites. You have to consume them very fresh. These were very fresh and barely cooked, served with white asparagus braised in “bitter sheep’s milk,” tomatoes, capers, and some micro greens. I also tasted some browned butter, which goes very well with rouget. It was not among the most memorable rouget dishes of my eating career, but a very very good one, with excellent quality ingredients.  The white asparagus, in particular, were excellent.

15^th course.  The next dish was  rape (monkfish-lotte-fener baligi) express glazed, that is, glazed in the wok for only a few seconds to sear in all the juices without losing them.  I believe it was glazed with miso and sake.  The sauce was prepared from the head of the fish and various sweet spices.  The dish was served with baby leeks, purple potatoes and arugula, with some pulverized pepper on the side.  Memorable.

16^th course.   The last savory dish was black cod.  The sauce was wild boar civet.  It was served with wild strawberries, lily bulbs, and chipotle chile.  This dish is a candidate for my top 10 list in the last two years or so.  A classic!

DESSERTS:

1^st Dessert.  First, we had milk curd, marshmellow foam, and galanga root sorbet.

2^nd Dessert.  Second, we had white chocolate mousse, green apple and celery sorbet, black olive puree and caramel.

Both desserts were good, but not memorable.

WINES:

1.  Champange Selosse VO. (I recommend at least one bottle of champagne throughout the meal.)

2. 2007 Keller Riesling-Rheinheser. Kirschpiel.  I had this for the first time.  This is a very good match with many dishes due to the wine’s rich acidity and mineral profile.

3. 2008 Miguel Gelabert. Mallorca.   This is a rich and onctous  New World style Chardonnay.  It did go fine with dishes number 10 and 11.

4. 2010 Pena Caballera from Bodegas Mananones in Madrid provence.  This is a fruity and balanced Grenache (garnacha) and a fine match with the last two dishes.

5. Manzanilla sherry.

Ideally David should offer a wine matching program consisting of sherry, sake, beer, champagne, old world Riesling and Gruner Veltiner, and some creative choices depending on the course.  This is a much easier cuisine to match with alcoholic drinks, than, say Adria followers’ cooking.   A perfect matching program would be a challenge, but it should pay off.  Personally I was lucky because both Pedro and Rogelio are clients of the restaurants and wine lovers, so they chose very appropriate wines which enhanced our overall enjoyment.

EVALUATION: 18/20 (The equivalent of Michelin three stars.)

Spain may well have the richest seafood coming from its own seas  in the world.   Its capital, Madrid, may be considered a particularly privileged location as it is not far from either the Atlantic or Mediterranean Coasts of Spain.  Galicia, in particular, in the northwest of Spain, is especially well endowed with excellent fish and shellfish. 

There are two restaurants in Madrid which offer this wide selection on an everyday basis. One has two locations: the one on Ortega Gasset street is called Sanxenxo and the one on Reina Mercedes street (a less upscale neighborhood than Ortega Gasset) is called Combarro.  O’Pazo is about 50 yards away from Combarro on the same side of the street.

Even if you don’t want to dine in these restaurants, just visit them to see their display of fresh fish and shellfish.  You will never see such a bounty anywhere in the world.

Despite the economic crisis both restaurants are doing quite well.  They are nearly full for weekday lunches, and one can spot quite a few chauffeured limousines in front of the restaurants.

After a five years hiatus, my wife and I visited the two restaurants again.

When we had last visited Madrid before, Sanxenxo used to be called Combarro too.  So my previous review of Combarro is now actually on Sanxenxo.

Memories held at Sanxenxo.  The selection is as outstanding as was the case in the mid-2000s.

The strengths and the weaknesses of the two restaurants are very similar.  I found the same quality of raw ingredients in the two with minor differences.  (They were visited on two different days during the same trip.)  Cooking techniques also are similar, and they have the same weaknesses.  That is, they prefer to boil almost everything (like in Galicia), and, even though the cooking is precise, one cannot help but think that given the incredible raw materials, they should do even better.  Prices are about the same in the two restaurants.  A sumptuous meal will cost you about 300 Euro for two with Galician wine.

SANXENXO

Sanxenxo is a very chic restaurant addressing a business clientele for lunch, but there are also couples who enjoy a tete a tete. The service is friendly and competent.

The boiled percebes were perfect. They were boiled after the order and arrived warm and firm.  The only caveat is that you may find in Madrid the same level of percebes for half of the price in a neighborhood bar, like VILALUA (also strongly recommended for Galician style octopus).

We continued with the small scallops from Galicia, called “zamborinas”.  Galician scallops may be among the very best in the world, together with scallops from Brittany, France and Hokkaido, Japan.  They are sweet and minerally at the same time.  I still recall the perfect zamborinas we had in Galicia at the great restaurant Tiro de Cordel in Finisterre.

The raw material is great, but Galician restaurants have a tendency to overcook the fish and shellfish.  Sanxenxo is no exception, as our a la plancha zamborinas arrived overcooked.  I requested them to cook them again, and they gracefully obliged.  The zamborinas were perfect the second time, the attached roe still pink, proving their freshness. Excellent.

We chose two big cigalas (langousintes) next:  350 grams each.  Galician cigalas are excellent, again among the very best in the world. (Japan does not have them; I have never seen langoustines in a Japanese restaurant.)   The best way to cook them is whole, since they retain the juice.  Some of the very best examples I have had were in Italy (La Pineta and Osteria Cera which cook them whole in the oven in  a salt crust) and France (besides the sophisticated versions at L’Ambroisie and Ledoyen which are excellent, the Pont Aven restaurant Taupiniere also cooks them whole in the fireplace).  In Sanxenxo, they cut them in two before pan roasting (a la plancha) or they boil them whole. 

We opted for the a la plancha version, and they were very good indeed. Yet, given the unbelievable raw material one cannot help but wonder as to why they cannot apply superior techniques to this great crustacean?

Red prawns from Palamos  are very similar in taste to the prawns from Denia in Spain and Rapallo, Santa Margherita, and San Remo in Italy.  They are the most succulent, sweet and subtle tasting prawns on earth.  (One cannot find this quality in France and Japan.)    Sanxenxo also cooked them a la plancha, and they were almost as good as the best version you can get in Catalunia.  (You can find them in Rias de Galicia in Barcelona or Hogar Gallego, but beware.  You may not get the freshest ones if you are not a regular. I prefer Hogar Gallego for consistency.)

I also wanted to try a fish in Sanxenxo and asked for rape con salsa de erizos.  The monkfish was very flavorful, but I did not detect the sea urchin taste in the sauce.

The most disappointing aspect of Sanxenxo is the wine list.  The owner tries to sell his average wine from Galicia, and he does not have the best Galician wines in his list, like Pazo Senorans or Do Fereiro Cepas Vellas.  I detected the great Spanish white Emilio Rojo from Ribeira in the list, but to no avail.  They did not have it!

The recommended Galician 2007 Nora de Neve turned out to be an international style Albarino.  The nose suggested that the wine had spent a good deal of time in high toast French barrels. It had upfront tropical fruit tempered by vanilla scents imparted by the barrel.  The integration of oak was fine, but the wine was uni-dimensional and lacked mineral richness or complexity. I suspect the wines are quite young.  It is surprising that it costs more than Do Fereiro Cepas Vellas:  32 versus 47 Euro. I ranked the wine 85.

O’PAZO

We became really interested in O’Pazo after hearing from trustworthy sources that it was better nowdays than Combarro.  The chef and owner of Diver-Xo, David Munoz, also highy recommended it and called the restaurant to make a reservation for us, giving his name as the reference.  I especially got interested in his recommendation of “turbot head”.

It may be due  to language difficulties, but it was not possible to have dishes which were not on the menu. Instead I went to the fish counter and chose what we wanted to eat:  Galician oysters, Almejas from Carril,  Sea Urchins, Percebes, Huelva white shrimps, zamborinas, cigalas and a whole langosta (spiny lobster or aragosta or langouste) which looked at least 1 kg (turned out to be 1.3).

The variety and quality of shellfish makes it impossible not to splurge there.

Brief remarks:

1. Galician oysters are excellent, as good as  French Belons 00.

2.  Raw almejas from Caril are simply the most profound tasting clam in the world.

3. Sea Urchins may be my favorite raw shellfish. Outstanding. We were served sea urchins with large tongues.  The Japanese will kill to have these…

4. Percebes were served warm.  Percebes from Galicia are amongst the best shellfish on earth. These were the same level as at Sanxenxo.

5. Huelva white prawns were boiled whole. There were good, but somehow I recall sweeter, juicier versions at another great Spanish seafood restaurant:  Joan Gatell in Cambrils.

6. Zamburinas are cooked in the oven with onion juice and a touch of onion puree. Also excellent.

7. The cigalas had the same problem as Sanxenxo.  This is an excellent product, and the a la plancha cooking is correct, with just a drop salt and olive oil. But cutting them in two before cooking is not the best technique that can be applied to them.  The alternative is boiling, which is also sub-optimum.  This said, the quality is beyond reproach.

8. Langosta was boiled and served cool with an average mayonnaise and tartar sauce.  Again the quality of langosta was stunning, but one wonders as to why they don’t at least prepare a homemade great mayonnaise (like great Italian seafood restaurants, like La Pineta or Lorenzo)?  I also think that there are a myriad of more sophisticated and better ways to cook a great Galician black spiny lobster. 

The wine list at O’Pazo is better than Sanxenxo.  We ordered a 2010 Do Ferreiro Cepas Vellas.  The wine is not subtle or elegant, but it has character. It has an intense and slightly grassy nose, multi-layered tropical and agrumes fruit, intervowen with stony richness on the palette, a full mid-palette and a long stony-salty minerally finish.  Obviously the vines are old.  I ranked it 93.

The service was excellent at O’Pazo.  They paced the courses really well, and they never interfered with the romance.

We did not want dessert, but the owner insisted that we try homemade crepes filled with fresh cream: “filloas relleno de crema”.  They then brought not only the crepes, but also rice pudding to the table.

I rarely find a dessert outstanding and worth finishing.  I took a bite from each.  They were above average.

Unfortunately the meal ended with a sour note. When the bill came I noticed that we were charged for both desserts.  Normally when a restaurant insists that you try something, they do not charge for it.  This was the case with the crepe. But since I accepted it, I can see that they can charge for it too.

But it was not correct to charge me for the rice pudding that I had not ordered.

Moreover there was a charge for a glass of tomato juice that we had never ordered. When paying with my card I pointed out the wrong charge to them, but they still charged me for something I had never had.

These three charges together amount to only 1/25^th of the final bill.  So it may look cheap to complain. But this is the point. Normally when you spend more in restaurants, they are more likely to make small favors, such as offering a dessert, not charging for an aperitive, a digestive, or a cup of coffee.  O’Pazo seems to do the opposite, and it hurt me emotionally,  not financially.

It hurt me because I recalled my 2005 meal there, when the founder of the restaurant Signor  Everista was at the helm.  We had a much smaller and wonderful meal at O’Pazo, and he was a most generous and friendly person, despite the language barrier.  It looks like his heirs do not share the same values.

Still, I would like to go back to both of these restaurants, because I don’t live in Madrid, and when I go to these restaurants and see the selection and the freshness of the products, I feel like somebody who just came out of a year long boot camp and suddenly found himself in the Ottoman Harem.

Irressistable!

SANXENXO: 4 STARS/5

O’PAZO: 4 STARS/5

We are living in an interesting gastronomic crossroad as far as restaurant evaluation is concerned.

We are witnessing an increasing DISSOCIATION between taste and status.  High status and top rankings are accorded to chefs who use liquid nitrogen as casually as a sprinkling of salt, who love to thicken sauces not naturally but with xantham gun, and who are awed by  meat and fish pieces  wrapped in plastic so that they can turn everything into the same mushy-cardboard tasting mess via the so called sous vide cooking.  (They now call it slow cooking which is a metaphor for sous vide.)  Young chefs do not have to learn how to cut the best fillets from the whole fish or how to butcher a carcass.  Learn how to operate a sous vide machine, pulverize-dehydrate some grains,  assemble in the last minute various components of a dish, and utilize the least ergonomic platter to paint a nostalgic natural scene, and then you are called a genius.  Restaurants in the States (like Alinea), in Spain, Basque country (like Mugaritz), and Italy (Osteria Francescana) are now cooking some inedible and malconceived dishes, but their respective chefs are called “genius” by the establishment that controls entry to the high altars of gastronomy.

This sad situation of affairs is certainly creating the wrong incentives and giving the wrong signals to the chefs. For example, the three chefs in the restaurants I mentioned, Achatz, Aduriz and Botturi are actually all very good and talented chefs.  But the absurd state of affairs and the increasing polarization between the preferences of  those who love to eat and those so called “professional gourmets” are pressuring these chefs to move away from their respective roots and towards a synthetic-artificial-overly fussy cuisine.  They would like to think of themselves as experimental artists, telling a “story,” and creating a feast, like a theater.  I think of them as artists, mostly skilled in presentation and plating, at the expense of integrity in cooking.  They “create” dishes with the “photo” of the dish in mind.  It is the “photos” that sell, and they substitute for the real taste, ingredient quality, and true talent in combining ingredients.  The dissatisfaction of an amateur client is not an issue, it is the food professionals and trade journals that count.  Their model is not the lonely artisan laboring before the stoves and spending years trying to perfect a dish.  The model is the scientist working for big industrial food production companies, developing scaleable-industrial food products.

It is also an Orwellian world.  The more we move away from the romantic ideal of unity between the food and its environment, the harder the new alchemist-genius chefs try to evoke naturalist images (wet forests, rocky sea shores) in their plating.

In times like these it takes real guts to come forward and defend a restaurant like Viridiana in Madrid.  It is not a fashionable address. It has apparently lost its Michelin star. It is not in Rafael Garcia Santos book ( a bible for post-modernist cuisine, although it also possesses some very useful information on good products and classical regional restaurants).

But chef Abraham Garcia cooks (or oversees cooking, since he is in the dining room and is very happy to interact with clients) for a full house almost everyday.

Who are these clients? I can only make wild guesses.  They look well heeled, but not snobbish Madrilenos.  They eat with great gusto and order a number of dishes.   Some of them look like the “habitués.”  Probably most of these people are respectable citizens in high walks of society, who will not call themselves a professional “gourmets,” but who have distinguishing selective palettes.  Chances are that they have been at “Sergio Arola” and “Terrace of Casino” too and thought that the food was “interesting,” but self consciously too serious and not always on target.  They are happy to let Michelin devotee Americans fill these restaurants, but when they want to have a great time they choose somewhere else.

Like Viridiana.

Taste, generosity, good will and good food all come together at Viridiana.

Abraham does not speak English or French, but we understand each other. I can read the menu in Spanish. We choose five dishes from the menu.  We said that we would share all of them, so this amounts to 2.5 portions per person.

Clearly Abraham is as passionate about good Bourgogne as I am.  We choose a 1985 Volnay from Leroy.  For 150 Euro, it was not a steal, but this was more than a fair price.

It turned out that the wine was at the perfect point of drinkability.  Tannins had melted, but the elegant red fruit was present and was beautifully kept lively and vibrant by just the right acidity.   Elegance.  Elegance.  Elegance. Don’t expect a huge intense wine with a long finish. But expect a full-mid palette and subtle spices in the medium finish.  I ranked it 93.

The amuse consists of round and puffy “pan de Yuca y gueso.”  They are round and puffy and delicious, much more tasty than similar breads that we were served at Mugaritz last October.

Then, upon learning that I am of Turkish origin, Abraham offered us a lentil soup.  I told him that I never had such a good lentil soup in Turkey. This is not meant as a compliment. It is true. He used some very zesty spicing in the soup and included two meat balls from rape de toro (oxtail), that is, real oxtail.  Delicious.  Why doesn’t anybody include some spicy kofte in lentil soup in Turkey?

I pair this soup with cava and not the delicate Volnay.

The first course I ordered was next.  It was cold Gazpacho soup with Sardinian flatbread. (Gazpacho de tomato raf con pan crujiente de cerdena).  It was a perfect gazpacho and whetted my appetite.

I would have preferred this before the more hearty lentil soup though.

Next we have another appetizing light dish:  octopus salad. But it is not the classic version with olive oil, peppers and onions.  This one was inspired more by a trip to Peru, and it says “Polpo, del que ‘fala galego’ (Rogelio told me that ‘this is a joke, saying that the octopus speaks gallego, meaning that it comes from Galicia) al estili Nikkei cocido al dente y frioj servido sobre exotica salsa de Ajies  peruanos com Maracuya, Jengibre, cilantro, y acompanado de Cebolla morada, Aguacate y Maiz Tierno”. 

Exactly.  This was nice Galician octopus, firm and juicy, and paired with exotic-tropical fruits. There was a sauce made of Chilian peppers, passion fruit, ginger and coriander. The dish was accompanied by fresh corn, red onion, avocado and yam.  The sauce was really tasty, hot and sweet.  At gun point I prefer a top example of classic potato-paprika Galician octopus, but this is also well thought out, and the different ingredients blend well, despite being maybe too numerous.

At this point our wine had not been touched. I was expecting to start it with the next “bone marrow” toast.

Surprise!  Signor Abraham brings a saucepan with fried eggs and wild mushroom coulis, and then sets out to shave a good amount of Teruel truffles (melanopsorum) on the eggs, together with a sprinkling of sea salt. 

You cannot beat these combinations.  I tasted the wine again and noticed the secondary earthy aromas.  The food brings the “wild-iron-earthy” component of the 85 Volnay to the foreground.  Truffles and  good Bourgogne is a great combination.  One bite.  One sip.  Majestic.

Abraham Garcia is a specialist in cooking offals and internal organs. So we ordered bone marrow with toast. 

There is not much to do to one of the best tastes on earth.  It was cooked neither too much nor too little, lots of gelatinous bone marrow in the two pieces that we were served.

Can you think of an ideal wine with bone marrow?  My guess is a not too elegant, but intense, Chardonnay, with a pain grille/hazelnut nose, maybe a Meursault Charmes from Lafon?

Mero, merou is a fish I love. It’s a rock fish, and deep tasting.  I saw that they serve it with sauce Romesco, and I am always nostalgic about sauce Romesco.  (The best I have had is in Cambrils at JOAN GATELL. Sadly Joan Petrer, the owner, is now retired, and the restaurant closed.)

Merou was served in thick cubes, and it is sautéed with eggplant, tomatoes, leeks, and new potatoes from Mallorca.

The fish was quite good, and the romesco sauce made from hot pepper, tomatoes, and hazelnuts was very good.  But I noted that the most memorable part of this dish was the new potatoes from Mallorca. They were as good as the great restaurant L’Ambroisie’s new potatoes that they serve in late spring with lobster.  The common element is the sweet-saline taste in the potatoes.

I guess Meursault can be a good match with this dish too, but Volnay did not detract from my pleasure.

But our Leroy Volnay also danced well with the last dish:  veal snout or morone.  It was pan fried and served with cooking juices, hot pepper coulis and an excellent potato puree. Abraham shaved, again, a good dollop of truffles on the potato puree.  To me the “snout” was a masterpiece.

We still had one third of the bottle left, so we took our time before desserts. Actually I didn’t ask for desserts, but he brought them anyway. (No, he did not charge for them, as they did in O’Pazo.)  I recall an outstanding ice cream made from a very intriquing Polish vodka:  Bizon vodka!  There was a tiramisu-like dessert with orange infusion which my wife liked.  But perhaps what we most liked was the fresh fruits: papaya, raspberry, strawberry. 

Abraham also offered a dessert wine that I tried for the first time:  1980 Fondillon Gran Reserva, Salvador Poveda, from Alicante.  I first thought that it was fortified, but I was wrong. The nose reminded me of true Vin Santo, and it tasted like an aged Madeira.  It has 15 percent alcohol and was not chaptalized.  I especially liked its hazelnut dominated scents, silky texture, and its steely-acid backbone, which kept the wine in balance and prevented it from tasting cloyingly sweet in its aftertaste, as most sweet wines do.   You should try it if you find it.  It has character and may be the best match for tiramisu and rich and buttery almond-hazelnut cookies.

Viridiana is the embodiment of pleasure.  It is not the cerebral approach to cooking. It is the visceral approach. It is instinctual-spontaneous cooking.

The great Bunuel, one of the great artists of the century, would have loved it.

I would love to go back and give a hug to Signor Abraham when I see him.

EVALUATION: 4.5/5

Imagine some perfectly gelatinous bone marrows sitting on top of the world’s tastiest dark jus (long cooked bones and vegetables) and three pieces of thickly cut and perfectly marbled Galician beef from the sirloin, served as the side dish.  Yes, the quality of the beef is higher than anywhere else in my experience, save the best quality wagyu.

Had El Bulli served such a dish in its heydays, the news would have travelled faster than lightwaves.

But no.  Nowdays “celebrity chefs” are cooking  for 800 or so “distinguished palates” who make up the “50 Best Restaurant Academy” or Michelin inspectors and who are more awed by artificial edifice erected with chemicals and liquid nitrogen than by pure and deep taste, while remaining silent in the presence of the affront to the taste buds by the cooking of all kinds of fish and meat “sous vide.”  (Probably they cannot tell the difference between sous vide and good roasting.)

Sure it takes guts to elevate a component of a dish, like bone marrow, to celebrity status and to downgrade the meat to a supporting role.

But why not? Chef Sacha Hormaechea at the Madrid bistro Sacha is not looking for fame or originality. He has no intention to get on anybody’s top list, and given that his restaurant is already full and hard to get a reservation in,  I doubt he would personally worry about favorable reviews by the guides.

He is basically cooking the food for himself and accordingly he is driven by his own taste buds. 

This is the single reason for placing bone marrow and the deep-thick sauce in the center of the final dish, a true grand finale with a crescendo effect.

Sacha is a quintessential bistro, and it serves comfort food in the best sense of the term.

The food is rich, tasty, and soul satisfying.

Ingredients are impeccable and the meal begins simply.  That is, chef Sacha Hormaechea offers abundant simply cooked dishes in the beginning of the meal, including perfect berberechos (cockles), expertly fried baby artichokes with no drip of oil, and unbelievably plump and flavorful anchovies.  These are paired with homemade crisp tomato bread.

One dish is especially noteworthy among the appetizers:  oyster escabeche, i.e. pickled oysters. Apparently it is an ancient recipe, but it is not for everybody.  You have to tolerate acidity to enjoy this dish.

The meal changes gear and moves up another notch with the serving of spider crab ravioli seasoned with sweet sea urchins and a touch of hot jalapeno oil.  The name of the dish is “falsa lasana de erizos” (fake sea urchin lasagna).

I guess one does not have to paint the sea on the plate by using artificial emulsifyers or by mimicing the sound of the waves to create theater.  Seafood is at its best when it is fresh, least cooked, and served without denaturing it.

We were then served a truly outstanding skate, one of the most flavorful fish.  It was not “swimming in ice or snow,” but swimming in a good dose of excellent Arbequina olive oil amidst Mediterranean bounty: tomato, potato, onion, avocado, and cilantro.   This dish is called “raya en vinegreta templada de guacamole,” as he uses the same ingredients as guacamole in the warm vinaigrette.

Is it original? No. Does it have to be?

Neither is the tortilla with chorizo and potato original!  But, it is simply outstanding:  puffy, very juicy and prepared with great eggs.

Memory may play tricks, but the only other tortilla which I give 10 out of 10 was in Galicia:  Restaurant El Manjar in La Coruna.

But don’t fill yourself with tortilla.

Leave room for the bone marrow!

Desserts?

The flan with egg yolks and sugar (Tocinillo de cielo) is good, but coffee granita is my choice as the appropriate finish.  But it is not as extraordinary as the rest of the meal.

Wine?

Emilio Rojo Ribeiro is a very interesting wine.  It is clean, pure, and has laser-like acidity and a noticeably minerally finish. It is not a fruit bomb and is not recommended for the lovers of oaky New World or Spanish Chardonnay.   But IMO it may be Spain’s best white wine.

EVALUATION: 5/5 STARS. (INFORMAL CATEGORY)

I have very fond memories of this restaurant which was the subject of a previous gastromondiale review (“Da Vittorio – Revisited”: http://www.gastromondiale.com/2008/10/da-vittorio----revisited.html#more ).  Since then, unfortunately, the great Vittorio passed away, and now his children are at the helm.  They also moved the restaurant away from downtown Bergamo to Brusaporto, which is about 20 minutes away by car.  The restaurant is now located in a luxury country style hotel-spa, but since we preferred to stay in old town Bergamo, I cannot comment on the hotel.

If you are staying in Bergamo Citta Alta, I recommend the restaurant VIA SOLATA.  It is a tastely decorated ground level place.  The chef certainly knows cooking and has the help of three young assistants.  I especially liked his “risotto with apples and 20 years old Pedro Ximenez,” and his excellent baby pigeon breast with mint and licorice.  The wine list is impressive and fairly priced.  The chef, himself, is very serious about wine and is generous.  (He offered us an excellent 2009 Tramin Gewurztraminer “Roen” which was a perfect match with one of his foie gras dishes.)  If I rank this meal, I would give 16/20.

We have visited Da Vittorio three times since the new generation took over, and the results are convincing.  Those who know the old restaurant should remember that this place was not among the most generous restaurants in Italy. It was THE most generous.  Typically your meal started with three flights of amuses, and in each flight you had five to six small dishes.  In addition, the chef often came to the table with his cooking pan to shore up your pasta.  Generosity and quality went hand in hand, and you always ended the meal truly satiated and satisfied.

Now the restaurant has adapted to modern times.  They are not as generous as they used to be, but the quality remains the same.  The cooking may have a slightly more modern twist, but overall it is still very classical in the best sense of the term.  The cooking is very grounded in the traditions of Northern Italy.  Raw materials are of excellent quality, and most dishes are unashamedly rich.  The service is still very very good.  (But I should say that in our last meal when the great maître d’ Nicola was not present, the team did not work in unison, and although our tall blond captain and the assistant sommelier were both excellent, one assistant maître d’ bordered on being rude.)

If you can visit the restaurant only once in a year, make it during the white truffle season.  I let them cook for me different dishes with pico magnatum, and my head still spins when I think of the homemade brioche with fresh goat butter and generously shaved, very aromatic, best quality truffles.  You are not likely to find this level pico magnatum in Alba, unless you have special connections.  We ended the meal with excellent baby becasse-woodcock and risotto.  The chef handled beccaccia extremely well, and overall the meal was one of the most memorable of 2011.

In March we had another excellent meal at Da Vittorio.   One drawback of the restaurant is that there isn’t a proper bar room to relax before or after the meal. Yet we sat in the entrance of the hotel by the lobby on a sofa, and they brought us some small tables for our glasses of champagne.  Some nice amuses were served:  mini burgers, mini hot dogs, mini croquet monsieurs (very good), and some stuffed parmesan cones and chips.

But I have one word of advice. Ask for the menu  in Italian, because some specials are only written in Italian.  You can also order the seafood platter for two (which feeds four and is most memorable), a seafood only menu, a salumi-cheese menu, or a special degustation menu.  These are all worth trying (we have tried almost everything over the years, except the salumi-cheese menu) and are only written in Italian.

We were toying with the idea of eating all fish, but we gave up after spotting “cerf en croute de pain parfume au pin, sauce a la biere brune” on the French menu.  (I usually ask for menus in French because I understand the fish selections better.   English translations for Mediterranean fish mostly don’t make sense to me.)

This restaurant serves some of the best pastas and risottos in the world. Our first course was “Paccheri a la Vittorio melangees avec Grano Padano.”  This is a very old recipe of the house, and a true Grano Padano is as memorable as a three year aged reggiano from the red cow.  It is cheese and tomato pasta, and it may strike one as too simple, even vulgar.  But there is a good reason as to why this combination is the world’s most popular sauce for pasta, and Da Vittorio’s version is the ultimate expression of the classic, which can be used as the yardstick against which to compare similar pastas.

The risotto dish was equally satisfactory, but more luxurious:  an excellent carnaroli risotto with marsala wine, crisp scampi-langoustines, and foie gras mousse. Foie gras sits in the middle of the dish, and you should let it melt and mix it in.  Excellent.

We followed with a thick piece of “turbot avec pesto d’anchois au  miel, meringue a la morue”.  This is one of the new style dishes, and I was not as convinced, as the sea bass is cooked inside bread crust.  They took the edge off the anchovy by adding a touch of honey, but the combination worked. However, I did not think that bacalao/morue meringue added anything to the dish. Both morue and anchovy repeat the same theme and add a little salty taste. The turbot itself was fine, but basically it tasted like a fine lumpy white fish, rather than the complex, gelatinous, excellent fish turbot is when presented whole or cut from the bone and served with the bone.

The cerf, on the other hand, was OUTSTANDING. It even beat the excellent chevreuil at the great restaurant LEDOYEN.  (I ranked my last February meal there as 19.5 which was the highest of the year, but never got around to writing a review.)  The slight malt taste imparted with the beer emphasized the gaminess of the excellent wild cerf.  The chef paired the dish with crumbled cauliflowers, walnuts, blueberries and bacon.  Crunchy and sweet and fruity and enchanting…., different components perfectly blended into a great whole to create a memorable gustatory experience.

Da Vittorio continues to excel in desserts.  The chocolate and bonbon trays are a treat for the eye, sorbets are outstanding, and desserts are quite modern, but well conceived. We shared  a “Zen garden: different variations sur la theme du sois bois, crème de fromage et crumble”.  Well, the dessert did not remind me of the various temples’ gardens in Kyoto, but the combination of berries, white chocolate, meringue, smoked tea, and the very light mascarpone like cheese was well balanced and light.

We paired the turbot with a half bottle of white 2007 Mas Daumas Gassac. The nose was quite subdued, and I sensed less Viognier and more Chardonnay compared to the earlier millesimes of this wine.  It is still a very good wine with crisp acidity, metallic minerality, and is quite elegant with white peach and pear notes.  It has a good clean and long finish.  It paired well with the anchovy-turbot dish. I ranked it 92/3.

We paired the cerf with a wine from Siena:  2004 Podere Forte from Petrucci.  This is the second time I have had this wine with consistent notes.  The emphasis is more on elegance than power, and it reminds me of the Soldera Case Basse style, which I like very much.   The nose is already expressive and I value the creamy texture and blueberry liquor notes underlaid with good acidity and a complex finish, with earth (wild mushroom) notes. Tannins are well integrated, but persistent.  I rank it 95.

My general evaluation of DA VITTORIO is the arithmetic average of the last two visits. I ranked it 19 last November and 17 in March for the meal I described above.

EVALUATION: 18/20

Osteria Cera is about 20 minutes from the Venice airport (in Campagna Lupia), and it  is heads and shoulders above the quality you find in Venice. It is not only better than other Venetian seafood restaurants, but it is a great seafood restaurant.  I should say that our meal there in late March of 2012 was even better than the February meals at LORENZO and ROMANO.  The only seafood restaurant in Italy which may be at least on par with OSTERIA CERA is LA PINETA in Marina di Bibbona.  I consider La Pineta to be one of the world’s best seafood temples.

Osteria Cera is not cheap.  There are two menus: 140 and 150 Euro. We chose the expensive menu and also added fresh scampi to the menu.

Chef Lionello Cera excels in  raw fish.  Italians are at least as adept in handling and presenting raw fish as the Japanese, and the raw fish platter in Osteria Cera was a highlight of the meal.   It is called “colori del mare” and is composed of 12 pieces.  Each piece is handled differently and paired with different ingredients which are judiciously handled:  wild sea bass with caviar and dill;  sword fish with capers, eggplant, sun dried tomato, parsley; mackerel with burrata cheese and corn…  The olive oil which is served is Furgentini from Avola Giorgio farm in Sicilia.  Outstanding.  The bread basket is excellent too.

The tasting menu has one pasta dish: “cappesante, cacio pepe, cozze”.  But before the cacio pepe, they served us another seafood pasta with large juicy prawns, fresh baby calamari, triglie (rouget), and pistachios from Sicily.  Cappesante (scallops) were barely cooked and their roes were still attached, proving their impeccable quality.    The two vegetables from their garden, green beans and radicchio, also exploded with taste.  The overall balance and composition of the two pasta dishes made a statement.  One cannot easily subtract one ingredient or add another without impacting the overall balance and quality of these dishes.  Great Italian pasta is rare, and is a gustatory experience.

Cassopipa is basically a fish/shellfish soup.  It is a slowly simmered fish soup.  Our ration consisted of mantis shrimp, baby scampi, mussels, clams and John Dory. It has a rich broth with tomato, garlic, ginger, bay leaf, an orange slice, red onion and capers. The broth was particularly noteworthy, and different components of the dish were not overcooked, as is usually the case with fish soups.

The risotto was outstanding.  “Risotto della laguna ed erbette” is not a dish to miss.  It had mantis shrimp (canocchie), outstanding baby calamari, mussels,  and herbs.  The chef used cooking juices to bind the carnaroli risotto.  Barely noticeable candied lemon peels imparted a zesty component to the risotto.

I liked the fish soup and got it again in a ravioli dish: “Ravioli di zuppa di pesce”.   I like those ravioli  filled with fish stock (my favorite is Colatura di Alici with burrata at ALL’ENOTECA in Canale, Piemonte), and Cera’s version was flavored with tarragon.

Next we had the scampi, which was not on the tasting menu.  We had two big scampi from the Adriatic (Ancona), cooked in salt crust with thyme.  The chef baked them whole and did not lose the juice.  They were alive when cooked.   Outstanding. I cannot think of a better more satisfactory langoustine-scampi preparation.  At 120 Euro a kg, the price was better than what I found in Madrid (170 to 200 Euro in O’Pazo and Sanxenxo), the quality was as good as Galician scampi (cigalas), but the cooking in Cera was superior.

The only dish I did not care for too much was the last course: fish of the day. It was wild sea bass simmered slowly with outstanding olive oil, sage, clams, herbs, hazelnut pieces and crusted with toasted sesame seeds.  The seabass (branzino) may have been wild, but it tasted like farmed sea bass. My best guess is that most  branzino is now eating the foodstuff that is given to farmed fish (branzino flock near the farms to devour what is intended for the farmed fish), or quite a few fish escape from the farms and are caught right afterwards and are sold as “wild”.  At any rate, it is very difficult to find truely wild seabass nowdays.  Farmed sea bass is raised to just get fat, and the meat is quite bland.

Cera also gives importance to desserts, and both desserts were very good.  The first was a meringue with passion fruit, white chocolate, and sage. The second was pistachio granita, almond mousse, almonds, and cocoa crumbles. If I understood correctly, they bring the granita from Café Sicilia in Ragusa, Sicilia.

The wine list is also satistactory and a bottle of champagne goes a long way and is a very good match with the food.  (We had Billecart Salmon brut.)  We also tried 2008 Livio Felluga “Terre Alte”. A blend of pinot bianco, sauvignon and friulano,  I can attest that this wine always achieves a certain level.  It is quite aromatic, fruity, reasonably elegant and sexy. The apple-pear-apricot fruits are ripe, but not jammy, and the finish is quite long with nutty notes.  It was a good match with the fish soup containing ginger and garlic. Ideally I thought that, besides champagne, a fine Chablis would be a good match for Cera’s cuisine.

Our last visit to VENICE was in 2008.  Memories mostly held, and we ‘discovered’ a new place. Here is a very brief summary.

1. OSTERIA ALLE TESTIERE

It is still good, and is my first choice in Venice.  Luca is a great host, and he has a great nose for good wine. It has fresh market-based cuisine with some nice twists. This time Luca made me discover two intriguing wines: 2009 Kante from Vitovska grape (a very straight and angular wine with a metallic-mineral-vegetal finish and a very good match with shellfish) and 2010 Manzoni Bianco, a blend of Riesling and Pinot Bianco  from Trentino (a successful example of a bio wine, reasonably complex and with good acid-fruit balance).  All the shellfish was excellent (canestrelli, capesante, moeche, moscardini, baby scampi).  Homemade ravioli with ricotta and pumpkin, topped by mezzancolle, was very good, and the rombo filet, with white wine, capers, sage, and rosemary, was light and satisfactory.  Highly  Recommended.

2. AL MASCARON

This restaurant is also recommended for fresh, market-based produce and shellfish.  The vegetables are very good, but overcooked.   Make sure you try moeche fritti and classic bigoli in salsa.  The house wine in carafe is OK, but they have some bottles, which are not bad if you ask for them.  Try this place to see what Venetians really eat when they go out.

3. ANTICHE CARAMPANE

I like this unassuming osteria with Venetian classics.  Try the Venetian mixed appetizer, scampi in saor,  cuttlefish in its own ink, and white polenta.  Say no to whole fish if it is branzino, because it looked farmed. The wine list is also good and fairly priced. I opted for a very fresh, screw cap Nikolaihof  Riesling.  Try this place. It will not disappoint.

4. DA FIORE.

This restaurant still has a Michelin star. I don’t want to say too much about this restaurant, because I have respect for their historical achievements.  In the ‘90s it was a great seafood restaurant. In the early 2000s it was still very good, and in 2008 we had a good meal which lacked spark.  Now they seem to have lost passion and interest.  I guess restaurants are like people.  Maybe it is time to retire…..

5. VENISSA

This one is just the opposite of Da Fiore.  It is a restaurant in its youth. Passion and love are apparent in the cooking.  The tasting menu is composed of all the dishes on the menu in smaller portions, and the quality is very high. Dishes are refined, focused, and bursting with flavor. I still savor their slow cooked farm egg with wild asparagus and summer truffles, the pink and creamy fegato (veal liver) which was served as the amuse, the cappeletti with excellent ricotta, raw gamberetti and lettuce salsa, fusilli cacio e pepe with incredibly tasty garlic shoots from their own garden, and a super “rombo chiodato,” which is turbot with buttons, just like the one we have in Turkey from the Black sea.  (The turbot was served on the bone, which is the best part, since the bones contain the gelatin.)  The less successful dishes were fritto di Anguilla e Moeca (the soft shell crab was good, but the eel did not have much taste when breaded and fried) and the main dish, veal filet with scampi.  The veal was cooked “sous vide” and it tasted like cardboard.  Since the chef is young and is cooking a very refined cuisine, my fear is that she may evolve in the wrong direction (molecular gastronomy and sous vide cooking) to garner recognition from international gourmets.

I hope not, because this is a very promising and exciting restaurant.  They also have a few rooms if you want to spend the night.

Anatolian land is among the oldest terroirs where vines were planted, but Turkey is not a country known for producing quality wines.  Up until the ‘90s there were only a handful of producers in the country which produced occasionally drinkeable but mostly oxidized and astringent wines.  Things changed for the better during the 2000s when new actors, especially wealthy business people, entered the field, and established big producers, such as Kavaklidere and Doluca, upgraded facilities and brought in foreign consultants.  Today there are about 140 registered producers in Turkey.  45 producers are large and will known.  The four biggest producers, Kavaklidere, Kayra, Sevilen and Doluca, produce around six to eight million liters each.  The average per capita consumption remains a little more than one liter per person, as most Turcs do not drink wine either for religious or economic reasons.

Given the limited competition in the market and heavy taxation on imported wine, the wine pricing in Turkey is outrageous.  This is one of the main reasons that wine consumption is limited.

In recent years wine producers in Turkey started sending their wines to prestigious international competitions, such as the International Wine Challenge in London and the Decanter World Wine Awards also in London. In addition, during the last few years, a Turkish entrepreneur and wine educator, Yunus Emre Kocabasoglu, has been inviting some Masters of Wines (MA) to Turkey.  The MAs hold meetings which are open to the public for a fee and rank Turkish wines by using the 100 pointer system.  Almost all established wineries send their best wines to this event for a fee.  Last May the MAs who came to Istanbul for this event included Christy Canterbury, Peter Mc Combie, Tim Hanni, Tim Atkin, Sarah Abbott, Shari Sauter Morano and Ned Goodwin.

I decided to evaluate the same wines and invited Mr. Umay Ceviker for a blind tasting of the wines which were crowned by prizes and high rankings.  Mr Ceviker is an architect and a wine enthusiast who holds a WSET Advanced certificate.  He has recently consulted on Turkey for the “7th Edition of The World Atlas of Wine,” to be published in 2013 by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson.

For this event, we decided to add four more wines to the list of four white and 22 highly ranked red wines.

Below you will find a detailed evaluation of each wine.  I have written the description, and Mr. Ceviker has written the detailed context. 

Our evaluation is a simple arithmetic average of the two grades we gave in the blind tasting.  You will notice a serious gap between our ratings and those of the MAs which were invited to Turkey.  It is hard to speculate on the discrepancies, but our best guess is that the MAs genuinely wish to support a young and struggling industry in an Islamic country where government heads publicly denounce wine consumption and very few restaurants outside Istanbul and coastal-touristic regions can obtain an alcohol license.

Yet there is a problem with exaggerated ratings. Most expensive-high ranked Turkish wines today are higly macerated, overextracted, high alcohol, low acidity, overoaked hot climate wines, which lack fruit, freshness and balance.  They tire the palette and lack elegance and complexity. In addition, with a few exceptions, the winery owners do not know how to set up appropriate benchmarks for their wines. Hence exaggerated ratings create the dual dangers of creating both complacency and a premium for glib marketing over a search for wines expressive of terroir.

Both Umay Ceviker and I are truly hopeful about the future of the wine industry in Turkey.  Turkish terroir is especially well suited to the cultivation of local white (Sultaniye, Emir, Narince) and red (Okuzgozu, Bogazkere, Kalecik Karasi) grapes, and the gradual lowering of tariffs on imported quality wines is bound to increase competition and shake up domestic producers.  Today the Turkish public may think that a wine made from a high yielding clone of a French grape, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, which smells like single malt scotch, is great wine, but as Turks travel and drink good wine, they will eventually search for terroir-driven wines. 

If our constructive criticism, with Umay Ceviker, contributes to the upgrading of the industry, our hard work will be justified.

WHITE WINES:

2010 LA. Chardonnay-Chenin Blanc. VM/UC: “88.5”. DWWA 2012 “Gold”.

Elegance is a rare quality in Turkish wines, but this is an exception, with rather dark yellow hues exhibiting early maturation. The bouquet is quite complex with ripe peach, apricot, white blossoms, and chamomile. It has a nice silky texture, well integrated oak, and a medley of tropical fruits on the palette.  It has a medium finish and low acidity.  It is now at its peak, and should be consumed in a year.

CONTEXT: In 2010, Lucien Arkas of Arkas Group, Turkey’s largest shipping company, bought the former Idol and renamed it LA Wines, with the object of making high quality wine at affordable prices. 

110 hectares of the vineyards in Torbalı, İzmir are planted on alluvial soil, with loam dominating certain parcels, while eight hectares with similar soil are located in the Hona Mountain pass, in Menderes, also near İzmir, planted in 2006 with 17 different varieties.

Although their basic wines are managed at yields as high as 16 tons per hectare, it is a mere 2.5 tons per hectare for the upper premium “Consensus” and four tons per hectare for the “Mon Réve” series.      

“Ecocert” of France consults on organic farming since the early plantings.

Lucien Arkas, a wine collector himself, knows his personal style, favouring freshness and elegance over ripeness. He will, by all means, be after similar qualities in his own wines.

2011 SUVLA. Grand Reserve Roussanne-Marsanne. VM/UC: “85”. IWC 2012 “Silver”, DWWA 2012 “Regional Trophy”.

This is an international style wine from a newcomer.  The nose is rather restrained, yeasty and oaky.  The wine made me think that I was drinking a Chardonnay, and I could not detect any varietal Marsanne character.  It has a pleasant golden apple and ripe pear component on the palette and the mid-palette is noteworthy.  The medium finish is overwhelmed by oak, and the high alcohol is not in tune with the low-medium acidity.  There is potential here. Better lees treatment should result in a more nuanced wine in the future.

CONTEXT: The debut vintage of the producer, Suvla, made an impact on the Turkish wine scene when the Grand Reserve Roussanne-Marsanne 2011 received a Regional Trophy at the Decanter World Wine Awards 2012 and a Silver Medal at IWC 2012.  71 hectares of land in the Bozokbağ family vineyards are located in the Kabatepe region of the Gelibolu peninsula in Thrace, all planted with international varieties and managed with good agricultural practices.

The state-of-the-art winery is run by gravity flow and consulted by French and Bulgarian oenologues.

2010 KAVAKLIDERE COTES D’AVANOS.  Narince-Chardonnay. VM/UC “ 83”.  IWC 2012 “Commended”, DWWA 2012“Bronze”, MOW 2012 “91”.

It has pale yellow, vanillin oak, tropical fruit and a high alcohol nose. On the palette there are orange marmalade-like ripe-jammy flavors.  It is heavy, with high alcohol and low acidity. The oaky component is not well integrated.  The structure of the Narince grape is similar to Chardonnay and together they don’t complement each other. Typically in Turkey Narince is blended with Emir, but Narince may also do well with Semillon in a coopage.  This is the type of wine the Turkish public likes, and it costs around $100 in restaurants.

CONTEXT: Kavaklıdere, founded in 1929 by Cenap And, quickly became the leader of the private wine sector and maintained its position ever since. They are the largest producer of wine in Turkey, and 20% of their production is exported. Their grandeur enables them to lead the way in investments and innovation, while they also are pioneers in their support of art and culture.

Their consultancy agreement with Derenoncourt Consultants seems to have opened new prospects for the winery. This particular white is made with grapes from the Cotes d’Avanos Vineyards (177 hectares planted with Narince, Kalecik Karası, Emir and Öküzgözü, and also with Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Tempranillo, maintained with a low yield of one to four tons per hectare, with 4 to 19 years old vineyards) in Cappadoccia at a 900 to 1000 meter altitude on which is mainly loose, volcanic soil, calcerous and poor in organic matter.

2010 KUP EPIC Chardonnay. VM/UC “81”. MOW 2012 “91”.

This was a disappointment, with aggressive use of high toasty oak dominating the palette.  One can only talk about different shades of cedar in the bouquet.  The acidity is low, and this may be due to the “sur lie” treatment.  On the palette one still detects some classic ripe apple-pear chardonnay-type fruit. Possibly the winemaker had access to good fruit, but due to overly manipulative winemaking, this has become a “carpenter’s wine”.

CONTEXT: The early production of Küp, founded in 1959 by Hasan Altıntaş in Bekilli, Denizli, was made in ancient 700 liter clay pots (“küp” in Turkish). Until the early 2000’s, the company was best known for their sour cherry wine. Today, managed by the second generation, Asım Altıntaş, Küp produces 3,500,000 liters of wine, both from grapes and other fruit.

The company is recently in a state of change, particularly with a new emphasis on their premium line, the “Epic” series.

RED WINES:

1. 2011 KAVAKLIDERE ANCRYA Okuzgozu. VM/UC “87”, MOW 2012 “86”, DWWA 2012 “Bronze”.

This is the cheapest and possibly the most complete wine in the group, made from Okuzgozu grapes purchased from Elazig.  On the nose, it is slightly vegetal-herbal, but also pleasantly fruity, especially juicy cherry and cranberry.  The palette is predominantly red fruits. Tannins are soft, acidity adequate, and the wine is balanced, but a tad diluted.  This wine has freshness and a lively fruit character which is missing in many much more expensive Turkish red wines, an honest wine which is also true to varietal character. (At its best, Okuzgozu reminds us of the Spanish Mencia grape from Bierzo.)

CONTEXT: “Ancyra” is a label between the basic offerings and the premium level for Kavaklıdere, featuring mostly monovarietals of black and white grapes, native and international. The reasonably priced “Ancyra Öküzgözü” is made with Öküzgözü grapes from their native Elazığ province, enjoying a continental climate benefiting from the moderating effect of the Keban dam on the river Euphrates.

2. 2009 DOLUCA SIGNIUM. VM/UC “86”, MOW 2012 “90”. 

It has ruby color with a garnet edge, with sweet vanilla, soft spices, cinnamon. and blueberry on the nose.  The entry of the palette is pleasant.  The predominantly red raspberry and cherry fruit is well integrated in the wine (which is a rare quality in Turkish wines). The mid-palette is slightly lacking, but the finish is not too short, and there is adequate acidity to give a lively-bright character to the wine. This is not a complex wine, but it is rather elegant and balanced, the best Signium to date from Doluca.

CONTEXT: The history of Doluca, one of the most prominent wineries in Turkey, is laden with milestones for the wine scene in Turkey. Established in 1926 by Nihat Kutman, after his return from Geisenheim, the winery started with native varieties, but disappointed by the results, reverted to international ones. Today, run by the third generation, the giant company is still pioneering in matters like branding and marketing, focusing more on the quality of their own fruit, rather than sourcing from other growers throughout the country.

Signium is their upper premium wine made with the best available grapes in a given vintage, without depending on a particular region or variety. The 2009 Signium is a blend of 45% Shiraz from Denizli, 34% Öküzgözü from Elazığ, and 21% Cabernet Sauvignon from their own Alçıtepe vineyards in Gelibolu, Çanakkale.

The wine went through a 12 day maceration,  was aged “sur-lie” for six months in oak, both French and American, and then was blended and aged for a further four months in barriques.

3. 2009 KAVAKLIDERE PRESTIGE Okuzgozu. VM/UC “86”, MOW 2012 “90”,  DWWA 2012 “Bronze”, IWC 2012 “Bronze”.

It is made from grapes purchased in Elazig and has a very dark colour. On the nose it displays spicy wood-cedar, ripe black mulberry, and dried but not cooked blackberries.  This wine is a touch overextracted, and is quite concentrated, but it lacks complexity.  The palette reminded us of black mulberry syrup.  The tannins are soft and well rounded, but unfortunately the acidity is low, and therefore the wine lacks freshness. This one is very different than the cheaper Ancyra Okuzgozu.  This one is more concentrated and more in the international style, but the Ancyra is a more interesting and balanced wine.

CONTEXT:  The “Prestige Öküzgözü” is one of Kavaklıdere's many bottlings from this variety, making medium bodied red wines with savoury red fruit aromas. This label uses grapes from its homeland, Elazığ, in Eastern Anatolia, around the River Euphrates. This particular wine was one of the 15 wines presented by Jancis Robinson in last year's Wine Future event, held in Hong Kong, as opposed to Robert Parker's list of 2009 Bordeaux. “Öküzgözü” translates as “Bull's Eye” due to its uncommon berry size.

 4. 2009 KAVAKLID ERE PENDORE Syrah. VM/UC “86”, MOW 2012 “92”. 

This wine has an inky colour with garnet edges.  The nose is complex and unusual:  bitter chocolate, white pepper, slightly cooked black fruits, earthy wild mushrooms, black olives, and tomato sauce. This wine has a better backbone and acidity than most Turkish wines.  On the palette, the dark-forest fruits are ripe and concentrated, but they are not too jammy or overcooked.  The finish is long, with soft and persistent tannins.  The slight heat in the finish, which is due to high alcohol, is the main reason that we did not give a higher score to this wine.  We also noted that the finish is not too dry and astringent, like many wines that we tasted.  One can call this wine opulent and very much like an Australian style Shiraz, despite the touch of the consultant-winemaker Monsieur Derenencourt.

CONTEXT: “Pendore” is Kavaklıdere’s latest project, a 190 hectare vineyard in Kemaliye, Manisa, with altitudes varying between 190 to 450 meters above sea level. The vineyard is planted with Muscat of Bornova, Öküzgözü, Boğazkere, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Alicante, Syrah, Carignan, Grenache, Montepulciano and Sangiovese with an average yield of four to seven tons per hectare and ages varying between 4 to 11 years.  

Pendore wines are monovarietals of Syrah, Boğazkere and Öküzgözü, all three with the second vintages released. The wines are made and aged in the Pendore Winery, built in 2005, with the same principles as the Cappadocia winery to enable a chateau style production.

5. 2010 PASAELI SERENA Syrah.  VM/UC “85.5”

The 2010 Paseli Serena Syras has a very dark, inky color. The nose is quite oaky, but once you get past it, one detects clove, tar, ginger, and blackberry.  The palette is also compromised with woody-bitterness, but beneath this, there is ample overripe, nearly cooked black fruits for the lovers of this style. This wine has fine structure, a good mid-palette, and a medium long sweet finish.  But the tannins are on the dry side.  This wine is more in the style of a mid-range  Australian shiraz.

CONTEXT: With a growing reputation for quality and diversity, this unassuming winery run by Seyit Karagözoğlu, one of the leading importers of wine in Turkey, is also pioneering in its effort to revive some rare local varieties. Paşaeli has vineyards in two different regions of Turkey.  In the Aegean, the vineyards are located in Kaynaklar, near İzmir, while in the Thrace, they are in Hoşköy, Tekirdağ.  In both vineyards, where Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, and Petit Verdot dominate, yields are kept at 35 hl/ha.  In the Hoşköy vineyards, there is an additional variety, the native white “Kolorko.”

A female winemaker, Funda Yayla, is responsible for the production, while Andrea Paoletti, from Italy, is the consultant.  With 15 tons of purchased grapes, in addition to their own grapes, Paşaeli makes full use of their 54 ton capacity.

Paşaeli has 12 different bottlings without any quality classifications, most of which are red blends, like  “Paşaeli,” “K2,” and “Serena.”  They use native varieties, Papazkarası and Karalahna, each blended with Merlot. They also make a rose with Çalkarası, and their monovarietal whites, with the endemic Yapıncak and Kolorko grapes, are the first of their kind. 

 The Serena Syrah is made with purchased grapes from Alaçatı in the Çeşme Peninsula.  

6. 2009 VINKARA MAHZEN Kalecik Karasi. VM/UC “85”, MOW 2012 “91”, IWC 2012 “Commended”, DWWA 2012 “Commended”.

The Vinkara Mahzen Kalecik Karasi has a light and bright ruby color, and a very pleasant nose, which is dominated by sweet spice and red berries.  Unfortunately the fruit on the palette is not as bright and sharply focused as we had expected from the aroma.  Low acid and high alcohol are a problem, given the lack of concentration in the fruit.  Yet this is still a nice and enjoyable wine.   Potentially Kalecik Karasi should reach a higher level of quality and if it is produced from low yielding old vineyards, and if it is vinified correctly, it resembles a fine Gamay from Morgon or Fleurie.

CONTEXT:  Despite purchasing land in the Kalecik area near Ankara in late 1960’s, it was 2003 when the giant construction company behind Vinkara Wines decided to invest in the wine business, starting with a 9 hectare plantation. Since then, 43.8 hectares of land have been planted at elevations of 650-700 meters, in uniform soils of gravel mixed with loam. The basic varieties are the native Kalecik Karası along with more Turkish varieties:  Öküzgözü, Boğazkere, Emir and Narince. There is also some Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and Riesling in their vineyards, responsible for one quarter of the grapes processed in the winery located in its close vicinity.  The river Kızılırmak and the 2,000 meter surrounding mountains provide better conditions for viticulture in what is otherwise severe continental climatic conditions where the daily temperature difference in the growing season is a minimum of 15°C.

All winemaking processes are lead by Mr.Tuna Laçin, and since 2008 Mr. Marco Monchiero of Piemonte fame is their consultant.

Vinkara produces mostly varietal wine with four different quality segments, ranging from a basic table wine to their highest tier, the “Mahzen” series, which includes barrel aged versions of Kalecik Karası, a Cabernet-based blend and a Chardonnay.

The 2009 Mahzen Kalecik Karası is made with the grapes from the own vineyards of Vinkara in Kalecik, aged for 14 months in 225 liter French barriques and further aged in bottles before release.

7. 2011 YAZGAN MAHRA Cabernet Sauvignon ve Syrah. VM/UC “84.5”, MOW 2012 “90”.

The Yazgan Mahra cabernet sauvignon/syrah has a very dark color, with dark ruby edges.  The aroma is dominated by toasted oak, licorice, coconut, fennel, and wild blackberry.  The fruit on the palette is too jammy, but fine acidity prevents the wine from becoming monolithic and boring.  Unfortunately, the mid-palette is weak and the fruit goes into the background too fast on the palette.  The finish is quite rustic and vegetal, dominated by green-unripe tannins.

CONTEXT:  Established in 1943 in İzmir by Hüseyin Yazgan, this leading producer planted their own vineyards only in 2005 in the village of Çepnidere, close to the town of Turgutlu in Manisa. After the recent handover of management to the 3rd generation, the winery is in a constant state of change, which the young French oenologist Antoine Bastide d’Izard supervises full time.

Yazgan has a wide range of labels using both the grapes from their own vineyards and purchased grapes. The recent Mahra series includes their Premium wines, with red and white blends of native and international grapes.

8. 2009 DOLUCA TUĞRA Okuzgozu. VM/UC “84”, MOW 2012 “92”, IWC 2012 “Silver”.

The color is incredibly dark, which is unusual for the Okuzgozu cepage.  There is a pleasant dusty minerality to the nose, combined with dried black fruits, especially cassis and blackberry.  The extremely toasty oak detracts from the rather complex aroma.  Despite the impression of dark forest fruits on the nose, the first impression on the palette is cranberry and pomogranete, which is the typical fruity character that one expects from Okuzgozu.  This wine has soft tannins and a nice texture, but it lacks concentration and the mid-palette is also lacking.  After the initial impression of savory fruit, the palette is dominated by bitter tannins and the finish is astringent.

CONTEXT:  The “Karma Öküzgözü” is made with the grapes that come from Doluca’s own vineyards in Denizli in the inner Aegean, rather than the native land of this variety, Elazığ, in Eastern Anatolia. The grapes are harvested as late as early October, fermented in cool temperatures after a cold maceration is applied. The resulting wine is aged in 70% French and 30% American oak for a total of 12 months, five months of which is on its lees.

9. 2009 KAVAKLIDERE PENDORE Okuzgozu. VM/UC “84”, MOW 2012 “92”, IWC 2012 “Bronze”, DWWA 2012 “Regional Trophy”.

This wine has an extemely dark color for Okuzgozu, which makes one think of overextraction. The aromatic profile is interesting, with herbal-vegetal green tomato, freshly cut straw, red-black forest fruits, and medium toasted oak. We detected a touch of volatile acidity.  On the palette this is a rather simple wine, with a dried, slightly stewed fruit character, which reminded us of plum jam.  There is heat in the finish due to high alcohol which is not balanced by high acidity.  Clearly the vines are still too young to produce Okuzgozu on par with the vineyards near Elazig which also has a colder climate.

CONTEXT: “Pendore Öküzgözü” is one of the three monovarietals made with the grapes sourced from this vineyard establishment in Kemaliye, near Manisa, in the Aegean region, where the Mediterranean climate clashes with the continental climate. The Öküzgözü parcel is managed with 50hl/ha yield, and the grapes are harvested by hand.

The gravity flow winery is in close vicinity to the vineyards. The 2009 is only the second vintage bottled.

10. 2009 KAYRA VINTAGE Shiraz. VM/UC “84”, IWC 2012 “Bronze”.

The Kayra Vintage Shiras is very dark, inky-black.  The nose is quite rustic, with coffee, garrigue, burnt rubber, tar, wild berries.  Unfortunately, the palette is not in tune with the nose, as it is dominated by  herbal and vegetal notes, despite the presence of ripe and dark forest fruits.   The mid-palette is weak, and the finish is dominated by dry and bitter tannins.  We don’t think that it will improve with age, as the fruit lacks concentration.

CONTEXT: Kayra is a new brand, established only in 2005. Despite the clumsy image of their predecessor Tekel (former a state monopoly), that has never been the synonym for quality, Kayra won instant recognition for creativity and dynamism. Their former relationship with the Texas Pacific Group and the current one with the British giant, Diageo, has contributed much to their understanding of marketing and communications. Kayra is a undisputed pioneer in creating a market for their products with unusual methods. The “Kayra Wine Academy” is the sole program provider of WSET and is an active institute for wine education for both enthusiasts and members of the wine sector.

Despite the magnitude of their offerings and their position in the market, they own a rather minor and young vineyard area in two different locations: the Thrace and Elazığ, in Eastern Anatolia. They source most of their grapes under long term contracts from vineyards in the Aegean, in Eastern Anatolia, and in the Thrace.

Kayra has two facilities located close to their own vineyards.  The Şarköy winery is used for the vinification of all styles of wine offered by Kayra. The Elazığ winery, on the other hand, is used only for red wine production.

Both viticultural decisions and winemaking activity is overseen by full-time consultant, Daniel O’Donnell from Napa Valley.

The “Kayra Vintage” series, at the premium level, includes monovarietal wines made from the best available grapes from each vintage. The 2009 “Vintage Shiraz” is made with the grapes sourced from vineyards in Denizli and Manisa, both in the inner Aegean, aged for 11 months in American oak.

 11. 2011 KAYRA TERRA Kalecik Karasi. VM/UC “83”, IWC 2012 “Bronze”.

The Kayra Terra Kalecik Karasi has dark ink, ruby edges and is overextracted for a thin skinned delicate grape. The nose is primarily herbal and green tea. On the palette one can find raspberry and black mulberry, together with dry mushrooms,  but the fruit does not last and is overtaken by bitter-dry tannins.  It is overoaked or under-fruited, a bit monolithic. It leaves an impression of heat in the earthy-spicy finish due to high alcohol.

CONTEXT: Kayra has 11 different labels, under which there are more than 80 offerings for each vintage.

The “Terra” series have four different types:  France, Italy, California and Anadolu. Apart from the “Terra Anadolu,” these are imported wines under the Kayra label with different regions and styles of wine for each country represented. “Terra Anadolu” is made from mostly varietals of either native or international grapes grown in Turkey.

The “Terra Kalecik Karası 2011” is made with grapes sourced from Denizli, a prominent wine growing region in the inner Aegean, at altitudes over 800 meters above sea level. The Kalecik Karası grape is native to Kalecik, a province 50km northeast of the capital Ankara, in Central Anatolia.

12. 2010 URLA Nero d’Avola-Urla Karasi. VM/UC “83”, MOW 2012 “90”.

The Urla Nero d’Avola-Urla Karasi is dark and inky with purple edges. The nose is a bit closed, but intriguing with tobacco, licorice, dark berry, chocolate and tar.  It is overoaked. The palette is less complex and is dominated by jammy mulberry, kirsch, and blackberry.  The mid-palette is lacking, and the finish is quite vegetal and astringent. The acidity is low, but the alcohol is quite high. The wine is enjoyable in first sip, but it gets heavy and tiring fast.

CONTEXT: Back in the turn of the century, the accidental encounter of Can Ortabaş with the remnants of ancient vineyard terraces in his 200 hectare farmland ignited a dream that resulted in the venture called Urla Şarapçılık, named after the town where the vineyards are located. It was the perfect spot for the initiative to give life to a heritage that has slowly faded away. 

Urla vineyards, located in two different areas: in Urla, around the winery, 1km inland from the Aegean Sea (Boğazkere, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah with relatively less Urla Karası, Gaydura, Muscat of Bornova, Nero D’avola, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc and Sangiovese) and in a relatively new vineyard in Kavacık, 25km east of the winery at 1000 meter altitude on a steep slope (Chardonnay, Viognier and clone selected Muscat of Bornova, Petit Verdot and Nero D’avola).

Urla Sarapçılık is constantly working on the revival of varieties indigenous to the Urla region. They have managed to recover “Urla Karası” and use it in this blend:  Nero d’Avola-Urla Karası.

 13. 2010 PRODOM Petit Verdot. VM/UC “82.5”, MOW 2012 “91”, DWWA 2012 “Commended/Bronze”, IWC 2012 “Commended”.

The Prodom Petit Verdot is extremely dark color with purple edges. The aroma is burnt cedar wood, menthol, and black olives, with an intriguing burnt butter component in the aroma. On the palette, the fruit component is well overripe, almost cooked.  It is like drinking a kirsch syrup and eating black Turkish olives. There is an interesting salinity in the short to medium long finish.  The tannins are ripe and soft, and the acidity is quite low.  The wine lacks structure and complexity, but gives pleasure.

CONTEXT: Prodom has put the province of Aydın, better known for the quality of its figs on the Turkish wine map with the success of its debut red blend back in 2006. 

The Prodom vineyards are located near the Savrandere village, 16 km south of Aydın in an extreme Mediterranean climate, where the mean July temperature is an astonishing 28.4°C. At only 40m above sea level, there are plantings of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot and Syrah.

Early Prodom bottlings were made at the Sevilen winery.  After 2010, all Prodom wines are made in their own gravity flow winery at the same location with their vineyards. Frenchman Florent Dumeau is their consultant.

14. 2009 PAMUKKALE ANFORA Cabernet Sauvignon. VM/UC “82.5”, DWWA 2012 “Regional Trophy”.

The Pamukkale Anfora Cabernet Sauvignon has a very dark color.  One can smell high alcohol and overipe, jammy fruit along with a meaty/animal fur aroma (and a touch volatile acidity?).  The entry on the palette is fine, but it is quickly overwhelmed by toasty oak, cassis jam, and a bitter and astringent finish.  The wine lacks complexity.

CONTEXT: Pamukkale was established in 1962 by Fevzi Tokat and his four brothers. Since 1972, the winery is run by the youngest of the brothers, Yasin Tokat,  who has a reputation for a passionate commitment.

Pamukkale owns vineyards in three different locations around Güney, planted with Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Narince, Muscat, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Shiraz and Merlot. Continental climatic conditions reign, with snowy, hard winters and summers with day and night temperature differences as high as 15°C.

The “Anfora Cabernet Sauvignon” belongs to the “Anfora” line, the premium label offering monovarietal and blended wines of both native and international grapes.

15. 2010 URLA Tempus. VM/UC “82.5”, MOW 2012 “91”, DWWA 2012 “Bronze”.

The Urla Tempus has an extremely dark color.  On the nose there is licorice, tar, and overripe black forest fruit.  On the palette one detects jammy black and red berries. The wine tastes more like a generic port, but the finish is dominated by dry tannins. There is ample oak, but the use of oak is more sophisticated than many other wines in this group of 26 wines.

CONTEXT:  Urla has six different labels without any attributed difference of quality. Nevertheless, “Tempus”, a blend of Merlot, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc is their flagship label. The winery, where all Urla wines are made, is at the same location with the Urla vineyards. The state of the art facility is equipped with temperature controlled stainless steel tanks, and most wines are aged between 6 and 12 months in French oak in the underground cellars.  Winemaking is overseen by Davis graduate Akın Gürbüz and consulted by Gerald Lafont of the ICV Group of France.

16. 2009 PAMUKKALE ANFORA Merlot. VM/UC “82”. DWWA 2012 “Gold”.

The Pamukkale Anfora has a dark ruby color with dark pink reflections, with black olives and red berries in a not too expressive aroma.  The impression is of red and black berries, especially cranberry on the palette, but the alcohol level is way too high for the acidity and fruit concentration.  The heat is disturbing in the medium finish.

CONTEXT:  Pamukkale is one of the pioneers in Turkey in making monovarietal Shiraz wines and has helped to unearth the potential of this grape in the Anatolian soil. They are also responsible for bringing the potential of the high altitude region around the province of Güney in Denizli to light.

The Pamukkale winery where the “Anfora Merlot” is made is located just 10 km away from the outermost vineyard. French oenologist, Jean Luc Colin, with years of experience in different Turkish wineries, consults the winemaking.

 The “Anfora” series is branded under the upper premium “Nodus” line and the premium “Anfora Rezerv” labels, which are considered to be dependable wines with a good price/quality balance.

17. 2009 BARBARE Syrah-Grenache-Mourvedre. VM/UC “81.5”. MOW 2012 “90”.

The Barbare Syrah-Grenache-Mourvedre has a very dark color, with garnet edges.  The nose is pleasant with spicy oak and red forest berries, but one can smell the high alcohol.  The acidity is actually fine in this one, but overoaking and the lack of concentration in the fruit (young vines?) make this wine flat and heavy. The wine lacks structure and the mid-palette and tannins are quite dry and vegetal.

CONTEXT: Barbare aims to make Southern Rhone style wines in the Thrace in their organically grown vineyards, where Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, Grenache and Mourvedre are planted. They plan to go biodynamic soon.

Xavier Vignon, with Châteauneuf-du-Pape experience, consults the winemaking.

Barbare released their debut vintage, the 2009 reds and the 2010 white and rose, early in 2011. They make a Sauvignon Blanc and a rose blend from Merlot and Mourvedre. There is no quality classification system, and the red wines are either Bordeaux or Chateauneuf-du-Pape style wines, labelled according to the choice of oak usage and the parcels from which the grapes come.

The 2009 Syrah-Grenache-Mourvedre is their basic red, along with a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Only 10% of this wine was aged for 12 months in new French oak.

18. 2010 TURASAN SENELER Cabernet Sauvignon-Merlot-Syrah. VM/UC “81.5”. DWWA “Silver”.

This wine is very dark and overextracted.  The overripe-cooked blackberry aroma is combined with licorice, tar, coke, asphalt, cinnamon and sweet spice. On the palette, this is like drinking a well oaked coke, combined with cassis syrup. It leaves a metallic and bitter aftertaste.

CONTEXT: Established in 1943, Turasan is one of the forerunners of the modern winemaking in Turkey. Now run by the 3rd generation, Hasan Turasan, the winery enjoys the breathtaking setting, history, and tourism potential of Cappadocia, where they are located.

Turasan has two different vineyard areas. The 20 year old “Turasan Vineyard” is located on the lower slopes of the volcanic peak, Mount Erciyes, while their “Zeynep Vineyard,” at 1,050 meters altitude, is among the highest vineyards in Turkey and is 10 years old.

The young Frenchman, Edouard Guérin, is their winemaker, while Bordeaux-based Stéphane Toutoundji consults since 2007.

Turasan has a wide range of offerings for each price segment.  Their premium wines are labelled as “Seneler;” two monovarietal whites with Chardonnay and Narince, along with three red offerings:  an Öküzgözü monovarietal and its blend with Boğazkere, both with grapes sourced from their regions of origin, and a Cabernet Sauvignon-Merlot and Syrah blend. They are aged in oak for 10 to 12 months.  

19. 2010 KAVAKLIDERE PENDORE Okuzgozu. VM/UC “81”. MOW “92”. DWWA 2012 “Regional Trophy”.  IWC 2012 “Bronze”.

The Kavaklidere Pendore Okuzgozu has a dark ruby red color, which is way too dark for this grape.  It has an oaky and jammy aroma, with caramel, black mulberry, vanilla notes, and a disturbing acetone smell.  On the palette, this wine is quite pruney and jammy, especially black cherry jam.  It has high alcohol and is heavy.  The wine lacks freshness and clarity.

CONTEXT: “Pendore Öküzgözü” 2010 is the third vintage of this monovarietal bottling from the Pendore vineyards of Kavaklıdere in Kemaliye near Manisa. This is one of the very few wines in Turkey where one can make vintage comparisons since the origin of the grapes is the same each year.

20. 2011 SEVILEN PLATO Kalecik Karasi. VM/UC “81”. MOW 2012 “90”.

The Sevilen Plato Kalecik Karasi has an incredibly dark color for a Gamay-like delicate grape. It is over-oaked and has a vegetal nose with Napoleon cherry and cassis  accents.  On the palette, the wine is simple and uni-dimensional.  Over-oaking detracts from the focus of the fruit, which is especially cherry and strawberry.  It lacks character.

CONTEXT: “Plato Kalecik Karası” is the brand new label of Sevilen, founded in 1942 by İsa Güner, and run today by the desirous 3rd generation. They have moved to their sleek new Magnesia winery this year while celebrating their 70th anniversary.

The “Plato” series also consists of a Chardonnay, a Sauvignon Blanc, and an Öküzgözü-Syrah blend, with grapes coming from high altitude vineyards in Güney, Denizli.

 21. 2009 SEVILEN CENTUM Syrah. VM/UC “79.5”. MOW 2012 “90”. DWWA 2012 “Silver”.

The 2005 of the same wine was one of the best Turkish Merlots ever made. Unfortunately the 2009 is disappointing. It is an incredibly dark wine, which is not very expressive on the nose, but one can detect some wet metal and toasted oak, along with green pepper and dark plum. The palette has been compromised by the heavy and awkard use of oak.  The entry is not unpleasant, with chunky, plummy flavors, but it slips very fast and finishes with dry and astringent tannins.

CONTEXT: Sevilen has two vineyard areas in the Aegean. Their older vineyard is in Menderes in İzmir, while the vineyard in Güney, Denizli is younger, with plantations completed 10 years ago.

 “Centum,” a 100% Syrah from Güney, is the upper Premium label for Sevilen. The wine is aged for 14 months in French oak and for a further 12 months in the bottle.

22. 2010 KUP EPIC Merlot. VM/UC “79”.

The Kup Epic Merlot has an inky purple color.  The nose is like visiting a carpenter’s workroom with unfinished furniture.  It is also slightly oxidized and and one detects acetone.  The wine is chunky and jammy on the palette, with some dried cherry flavors, together with bitter chocolate.  The oak has not been integrated into the wine.  The finish is vegetal and medicinal.  This is a heavy wine which exemplifies the prevailing style in Turkey.

CONTEXT: Küp has its own vineyards in Denizli, planted with both native and international grapes. Since 2000, 90% of the vineyards are farmed organically in close collaboration with Ecocert. The Merlot used for the “Epic” line is sourced from the Bekilli vineyards, and the wine is aged for 14 months in a mix of French and American oak, a policy applied since 2010.

23. 2009 VINKARA MAHZEN Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot/Syrah. VM/UC “79”. MOW 2012 “92”.

The Vinkara Mahzen Cabernet Sauvignon has a very dark color.  The nose is burnt charcoal, but if you insist, you may smell some spice, black olives, and plum jam.  On the palette, there is some red fruit character, like cranberry, but the overdose of very toasty oak has destroyed the potential in this wine.  The finish leaves a medicinal taste on the palette, which unfortunately lingers.

CONTEXT:  Vinkara has made crucial contributions to the Turkish wine scene in many areas. They run one of the most sophisticated research and development branches in the sector and have a growing reputation for quality, diversity and innovation. These include the first vintage based traditional method sparkling wine, the soon to be released “passito style” varietals of native grapes, along with the use of 25 cl bottles, and an entertaining range of labels.  

The 2009 Mahzen Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah is made with the grapes from the vineyards of Vinkara in Kalecik and in Güney, Denizli. The wine is aged for 14 months in 225 lt French barriques and further aged in bottles before release.

24. 2009 DOLUCA KARMA Cabernet Sauvignon/Okuzgozu. VM/UC “78.5”. MOW 2012 “93”. IWC 2012 “Silver”.

This wine was disappointing.  The nose is jammy, with cooked black fruits, especially black currants and plums, but also with black olives, licorice, and tar.  On the palette, it is like a fifty-fifty mix of blackberry fruit and cheap port.  There is also slight oxidation.  The aggressive use of toasted oak tires the palette, but there is a the sweet and jammy finish.  The wine is overextracted and diluted.

CONTEXT:  “Karma” is the label where native grapes are blended with international ones, a pioneering style initially introduced by Doluca in 2000 along with a “Merlot-Boğazkere” and a “Gamay-Boğazkere” blend.  Today the range includes a “Boğazkere-Syrah” blend and the white “Narince-Chardonnay,” while the Gamay version is not made anymore. The “Cabernet Sauvignon – Öküzgözü” blend is made with grapes sourced from the Thrace and Eastern Anatolia. The wine is aged for 12 months in 225lt French oak.

25. 2009 URLICE Cabernet Sauvignon.  VM/UC “78”.

Umay Ceviker and myself have tried some promising bottles from this small producer, but this bottle possessed many vices of modern Turkish winemaking.  The nose is jammy, but also has licorice, tar, rubber, olives.  This high alcohol-low acid wine is tiring on the palette.  This is a monolithic and heavy wine characterized by syrupy sour cherry flavors on the palette.

CONTEXT:  This is a tiny producer in the popular Urla region within close proximity to the Çeşme peninsula.  Owners Reha and Bilge Öğünlü run the whole operation, without money-making concerns, focusing on making the most of the tourism potential of the area.

On four hectares of land, there are plantings of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, and Chardonnay, with 9 to 15 years of age.  At 80 meters altitude, the vineyard enjoys the strong breeze  from the Özbek Bay which is just 2 km away, helping to prevent some diseases in the organically grown vineyard.

26. 2008 MELEN REZERV Okuzgozu. VM/UC “77.5”. MOW 2012 “90”.

This is a a disappointing wine from an erratic producer who sometimes produces wines with character.  The nose is off, with easily noticeable volatile acidity.  There is some oxidation.  The wine is overextracted and unbalanced, with low acidity and high alcohol.  There are rasberry jam flavors, combined with the awkward use of oak.  Despite all of these problems, we noticed good potential in this vineyard for this native grape, “okuzgozu,” which may resemble the Spanish “mencia,” if vinified properly from old vines.

CONTEXT:  One of the oldest wineries in the Thrace, Melen was founded in the early 1920’s, just before the young Turkish Republic. Today, run by the 3rd generation Cem Çetintaş, “Melen” is one of the most widely known niche producers in Turkey. 

Melen, based in Hoşköy near Tekirdağ, has a wide range of labels classified according to the origin of the grapes used. The “Reserve” series are monovarietals of both their own and sourced fruit with some ageing in oak.

Evaluation: 18/20

Sportsman is a great restaurant, not just possibly the best in England, but also one of the best in Europe.  It is the equivalent of a Michelin three star restaurant when Michelin used to be THE “correctly discriminating” guide. 

I doubt Stephen Harris, chef and owner of Sportsman, has ever been in a culinary school, and this may be an advantage.  It is an advantage because, while he seems aware of what is happening in the pinnacles of the culinary scene, he does not adapt any fashionable technique (no sous vide machine in the kitchen!) or buy texture changing chemicals from Texturas (owned by the King of molecular gastronomy, Feran Adria) as many Michelin three star chefs do.

Let me also say that I am not necessarily a fan of locavorism and the farm to table movement.  Well, if you have a restaurant in Catalonia or Galicia, you may fare much better in finding high quality ingredients than in London and New York.  But even then, you have to bring some ingredients from outside your immediate periphery if you want to achieve a certain level of complexity and richness in cooking.  What matters most is the relationship you build with suppliers and how much you care and are willing to spend for transportation for perishable products.

This said, I have dined in quite a few restaurants, especially in France and Italy, where young chefs are true advocates of locavorism, and they offer very high quality products (Chez Panisse in Berkeley, USA also is an example, although they bring some shellfish from Massachusetts).  More often than not, one eats well, but not memorable meals in such restaurants.  The problem with such meals is that one cannot help but compare the local product with the best example of the category.  Local shrimp, asparagus, beef, potato, tomato, onion, etc., may be good or very good, but it is nearly impossible for any region of the world to have the very best of all……

I don’t know if Mr. Harris will agree or disagree with me regarding such claims.  But his cooking is based solely on local ingredients and by local I mean really “local”, i.e. within a few miles of the Kent coast of Seasalter with a population of 6,899.

Despite such constraints, Stephen Harris creates a memorable cuisine due to four factors.

1. There is sufficient high quality seafood, meat and greens in the environment.

2. There is tremendous hard work in the kitchen, and the chef prepares everything from scratch.  I doubt he has a freezer in the kitchen.

3. Taste combinations are very clever.  But the chef never loses focus on the main theme, and he does not complicate his dishes to satisfy his ego. 

4. Each ingredient shines in the dish.  The cooking stays clear and focused.

Sportsman is not for everybody.  It is not for people who do not like internal organs and intense flavors. In this regard too, the chef goes against the current trends, and he is not shy about using proletarian ingredients worthy of an English pub of the 19^th century (in my imagination!).

The best way to enjoy a meal in Sportsman is to drive during a week day for lunch and request the chef’s menu for the table. This is what we have done with a group including my wife Linda, friends Lydia Itoi (who wrote and excellent academic article on the restaurant entitled: “Pub Grub: The Sportsman”) and her husband Alberto Torres, and Ceren Sungu.

It took me five months to write these notes due to my extremely busy schedule.  The meal took place on Thursday, the 24^th of May, 2012.

The meal began with 3 sets of amuses.

a.  First, we had little tarts with greens and asparagus and asparagus soup with Jersey milk foam.  They were excellent, fresh and appetizing, and light.

b.  Next, we had a tart made from soda bread with cream cheese spread, pickled herrings, and some pork rind or cracklings.  I has such pork chicharron only in Mexico City (street food), and I begged the chef to bring a little more……

c.  Then, we had skewered and juniper berry smoked duck hearts and lamb kidneys glazed with mustard and spices, served with a herb coulis dip.  They were outstanding.

The chef’s homemade three breads (focaccia, soda bread, and sourdough) and churned whole milk Jersey cow butter are not the best I have had in England, but possibly anywhere.

After the three sets of amuses, our meal continued with local oysters in two versions.

a.  One was baked with Jersey cow cream and served with seaweed and rhubarb granita.

b.  The other was poached and presented on sea shells with a light beurre blanc, herring caviar, and pickled cucumber.

The quality of oysters was outstanding (on par with Cancale) and both versions bring out the deep sweet taste of oysters and complement them with salty, crunchy, refreshing components.

The next course was the best fish soup of 2012 to date.  The chef calls it “rockpool”. He prepares his own dashi from dried mackerel and local kelp and uses turbot stock in the soup. Various cockles, crab, oyster and herbs found wild in the local beach (sea purslane, sea beets, salicorne…), all add sharp, bitter components, complement the sweet taste of the shellfish.   I should say that Stephen succeeds in giving depth to the dish by knowing how to prepare a dashi from scratch.  This dish is a masterpiece.

Next came the juicy, fresh, clean tasting crab dish. Stephen knows how to prepare a velvety light Hollandaise sauce (unfortunately since the popularization of agar agar and xantam gum, most starred chefs have forgotten how to prepare great sauces on the basis of REAL BUTTER).  In Sportsman’s version of the Hollandaise, the chef uses carrot juice to refresh the dish.  He adds coriander and fennel seeds and dusts it with paprika. Some homemade cole slaw at the bottom (which cannot be seen in the photo) adds a pleasant crunchiness to the dish.

Following the crab, we were served both the slip sole and the turbot.  The local slip sole was outstanding, and the chef pan fried it with seaweed butter.  Bitter, sweet and tart flavors danced on the palette and achieved overall harmony.  This is a memorable dish.

Equally memorable was the turbot. Cut from a 8.6 kg turbot, my thick piece was cut from the bone and braised in butter.  It was served with a beurre blanc sauce, sharpened with apple cider and balsamic vinegar, its own roe, and crunchy asparagus tips.  The turbot was not flakey and brittle, as it is in too many starred restaurants, but it was fat and gelatinous.  It was outstanding.

The chef prefers to cook lamb and pork, and not the favorite meat for the English, i.e beef, to end the meal.  The local lamb from the Monkshill farm was actually very very good, as the lambs are fed with iodized grass next to the sea, and as such, they are reminiscent of the taste of French Normandian salt marsh pre-sale lamb. My best guess is that the lambs were about four to five months old. They were served in two versions.  First the breaded lamb belly was glazed with mustard and served with a mint vinaigrette. And, secondly, the roasted shoulder and fillet was served with their own jus, green onions, beans, and celeriac puree.

My wife Linda was too excited to have good lamb (she misses it in the States), so she forgot to take the second photo.

The desserts were also very good and incredibly modern in conception. I liked the rhubarb popsickle served in a condensed milk pool, but the memorable dessert was the meringue ice cream topped by crystallized seaweed and sprayed with unsweetened sea buckthorn juice.

Even the petit fours after the dessert were fresh, obviously prepared daily.  I was especially intrigued by the Turkish delights with lemon, an excellent accompaniment with coffee.

This type of cuisine is the best with Bourgogne, both white and red (with the rustic lamb).

We had the following wines.

1. 2000 CHABLIS ‘CLOS’ WILLIAM FEVRE

Secondary aromas have developed. Sesame seed, grilled corn, dried herbs, and a slight fuel aroma (like aged Riesling) on the nose is followed by a palette with great texture, richness, and viscosity.  The finish is very long and leaves the impression of summer pit fruits.  Grade: 96/100

2. 2004 NUITS SAINT GEORGES “AUX MURGERS” PREMIER CRU SYLVAIN CATHIARD

This wine is quite rustic, with earth, smoke, wild fungi and eucalyptus on the nose.  The palette is complex and dominated more by black than red fruits. It became softer and sweeter over time, and can be called elegant.  Grade: 93/100

SPECIAL THANKS: I would like to thank my friend Michael Glasby of the Premier Cru Wine Merchant in Berkeley for bringing Sportsman to my attention. Michael and Stephen are school buddies, and I can see that whatever school that may have been, the students graduated with the right set of priorities from that school!

Evaluation: 18/20

It is quite tempting to title this review: “Noma: Best Restaurant in the World?”  But I will resist the temptation for three reasons. Firstly, I think it is a disservice to a young, promising, and exciting chef to call him “the best”. Such a classification will place an undue burden on anybody’s shoulder, and I am afraid will cut a great career short. Suppose you are not selected as number one in the next year or the year after the next.  You are now number two.  Are you then unsuccessful?  Where do you go from there? Do you follow Adria’s foodsteps and form companies to sell jellied chemicals to the marketplace?  I think we are all better off if we take some pressure off Rene Redzepi’s shoulders.

Secondly, the Restaurant Magazine’s Methodology is as flawed as ex-President Bush’s “WMD” nonsense.   I am not talking about the possible venality of some jury members. I hear that some jury members are calling restaurants to introduce themselves and asking for free meals. But some others I have met are beyond reproach. This is not the issue. The problem is that jury members are selected to represent some regions, and they are casting the majority of votes for that region.  Like it or not, like the best wines, the world’s best restaurants are still in France in the Western World.  (Of course Japan is AT LEAST an equal and Spain is where I find the best products.)  Scandinavia is still a gastronomic wasteland. It is normal that Scandinavian judges will all cast votes for Noma and English judges for the Fat Duck, but French judges will all disagree when at least 15 great temples of cuisine are located in France.

Thirdly, there is the problem of taste, subjectivity, and composition of the jury. The jury is selected mostly among professionals.  I have the impression that both in the wine and restaurant worlds, trade professionals are more easily awed by the “in” techniques and aesthetics than gustatory values.  In blind tastings, the so called professionals and Masters of Wine, whom I criticized in my review of Turkish wines, favored high alcohol and sweet wines, but could not notice the flaws in these wines (dilution and green tannins and astringency), because they tasted them too fast and their palates may not have been too sharp. In the restaurant world, too, there is a parallel. So called professionals seem to favor tasting menus composed of 20-30 teeny-tiny tapas a la Adria over a proper meal composed of four plates which have all been perfected to a point that one cannot fathom any improvement for each dish.  I heard that at Noma, before it became so famous, one could eat like one does in France’s top addresses, but nowadays this is, unfortunately, impossible.  So when courses appear and disappear with a dizzying speed and when the whole performance is conducted like a ballet, the cinematic and aesthetic aspects come to the foreground at the expense of a proper analysis of gustatory dimensions.

All this said, Noma is a great and very exciting restaurant.  The staff of 45 outnumbers the 35 to 40 diners.  All staff members are very very well trained, and they are all able to answer detailed questions if you ask them.  The sommeliers are excellent, and the wine choices are very appropriate for the food.  The dining room is both chic and casual at the same time, and you cannot help but admire the juxtaposition of rustic wooden furniture (no table clothes) with elegant porcelain and  crystal glassware.

Meeting Rene Redzepi himself at the end of the meal sheds light behind all these factors.  Behind his soft spoken and easy going manners and impressive globe-trotting resume, there lies clearly a man possessed by a puritan work ethic and self-discipline.  He handles a wild venison which was hunted by an arrow 15 days before (and since then hung in the kitchen to be cooked for the very lucky diners that night) with the intense focus of a brain surgeon preparing for a surgery.  When he asks a question (about Turkish food and where to go in Istanbul), it seems like he is genuinely interested in the details.  Clearly he would have been a very good attorney had he chosen this profession.

This is a serious, no nonsense man, and his cooking is serious.  He is not a temperamental artist like Gagnaire.  He may not be as spontaneously creative as Adria.  His aesthetics (plating) may not be compared with Ishihara-san of  Mizai in Kyoto.  His perfection of certain techniques and saucing may not yet be on par with Robuchon or Pacaud or Le Squer. And he may not come up with an astonishing herbs/vegetable dish, like Michel Bras’ gargaillou.

Yet there is something about his cuisine that brings to mind these greatest chefs.  The beauty of dried sea scallop shells painted with squid ink and stuffed with nuts, grains, and greens will not look awry as the “hassun” course of a Kaiseki meal.  His simple combination/variation of white asparagus roasted on pine wood with green asparagus puree, and with all possible edible extractions from the pine tree, should please the naturalistic Bras. His “cook your own” duck eggs with greens is not only tasty, but it is also spontaneous shared creativity, a nod from the chef to the diner.  His “beef tartar” is not only the best beef tartar one is likely to savor in ones life, the perfect balance and harmony and symmetry of the dish should please any chef, like Robuchon, steeped in the Cartesian tradition.  The light beurre blanc which accompanies perfectly roasted pike perch should make happy the likes of Pacaud or Passard who are not only the greatest roast masters at present, but who can also lighten classical sauces without compromising intensity.  His turbot roasted on the bone will make LeSquer curious, who is also a  Breton like Pacaud and Passard.

Redzepi is often characterized as a forager, an ecologically grounded locavore, who forages woods and the seacoast for edible plants.  There is some truth in this, but, frankly, compared to say the Eastern Black Sea region and the Western Aegean region of Turkey, the edible greens at his disposal are very limited.  Certainly Rene Redzepi is making the maximum and optimum use of what is available (fresh in season but often frozen), but what impressed me most in his cooking was the overall harmony and progression of the meal and the precision in cooking.  For the most part, the taste was not sacrificed in favor of the display of technique, and the kitchen was able to create a false sense of “easy and simple” cooking when clearly almost all of the dishes were the products of substantial conceptualization work and experimentation.  I was also impressed by the balance between fat/creamy elements and sharp/acidic components and soft/crunchy textures in many courses. At the end of the meal I felt light and good, but also reasonably satiated. Overall it was a joyful, enchanting meal.

Here are the courses and the wines of our four hour long lunch on May 26^th. (I starred the ones I think are particularly noteworthy).

SMALL BITES

1. Jungle boat: malt flatbread, edible greens, crème fraiche, and ants (tart taste).

2. Bonzai: moss and de-hyrdrated and pulverized ceps/porcini (sponge like texture)

3. Crispy pork skin (normally chicken, but as we don’t eat chicken, the chef substituted the chicken with pork) like Mexican chicharrones and black currants*

4. On algae: edible mussel shell, de-shelled mussel, and pickled celery

5. Little tarts or cookies with cheese, rocket, and edible stems*

6. Crisp string potatoes, ceps mayonnaise, black trumpet mushroom powder (a bit repetitive, too much powdering/dehydrating and becomes a trifle boring when repeated)

7. Crisp and cruchy double rye sandwich filled with creamy lumpfish roe and smoked cream cheese (I always thought that Adria loved sweet flavors which made his cuisine appeal to Americans.  Redzepi likes crunchy textures and powderized/dehydrated and smoked components in most of his dishes, which make his cooking a bit too trendy and repetitive at times.)

8. De-hydrated carrot sitting on hay ash served with an excellent sorrel emulsion.

9. Monkfish liver sitting on string or thread-like caramelized milk, topped by kelp powder (This is very good, but frankly some Japanese chefs in Tokyo, such as the Michelin two stars Kodama, create more intriguing masterpieces with ankimo.)

10. Smoked and pickled quail eggs sitting on hay.

11. Flower pot: radish, edible soil and grass (This is a good example of the now very trendy edible soil, with more powdering/de-hydrating.)

12. Fried donut stuffed by small fish and crunchy honeyed cucumber (You can eat the head and tail as can be seen from the photo.)

13.  Crispy veal fibers/strings drizzled with seaweed oil and sour cream.

14.  Crispy duck skin toast stuffed with cod fish roe and herbs*

 COURSES

15.  Peas: fresh and fermented with pea leaves and chamomile infusion (This is very good, but the best fresh peas I have tasted remains Ibai’s of Donostia.)

16.  Caramelized and dried/dehyrdrated scallops cut thin and painted with squid ink, served with beech nuts, grains and watercress

17. Brown stone crab, egg yolk and painted herbs. The nasturtium flower on top was used in the excellent broth.

18. Steak tartar: topped with fresh wood sorrel leaves, onion rings, horseradish, mustard seed oil, with painted tarragon sauce and juniper berry powder*

19. Asparagus and Pine:  White asparagus roasted on pine wood, scotch cone, pine needles,  with green asparagus puree* 

20.  Pike Perch and Cabbage.  The pike perch is brushed with dill oil and wrapped with cabbage during roasting, served with a foamy beurre blanc with fish bones, white wine, and lemon verbena*.

21. Cook yourself duck egg: you cook it in a heavy whole cast iron pan with hay oil by adding chervil, watercress, thyme, sorrel, ramps, and potato chips.

22. Turbot roasted on the bone with bitter greens, turnips, and mushrooms.  The turbot is basted with grape seed oil and butter when roasting. It is roasted over tea leaves, dried mushrooms, and dried berries.  Cep/porcini oil is added later, before serving I believe. This is a very successful example of land/sea with excellent ingredients*.

DESSERTS

23. Bitter greens sorbet with a coulis of same greens

24. Pear treat: pear grilled in acquavit and topped with pine needles, herbs, flowers; a pine parfait*

25. Milk curd sorbet and rhubarb coulis.

DRINKS:

1. 2010 Gruner Veltiner “Hochrain”. Peter Veyder-Malberg.  Wachau-Austria.

2. 2010 Chardonnay “Les Boutonniers”.  Les Dolomies. Jura-France.

3. 2011 Riesling Spatlese Kroneberg-Terrassen. Peter Mentges. Bullay-Mosel

4. SA “La Bulle Gamay” P-U-R.  Maconnais-Bourgogne.

I would like to give my special thanks to the sommeliers for one of the best food-wine matchings in recent memory.

Vedat Milor

Date visited: October 7, 2012

Grade: 3/20

Piazza Armerina is a little town in the middle of Sicily known for the remnants of outstanding mosaics of an ancient Roman Villa (Casale).  Busloads of tourists flock there almost daily throughout the year.

Al Fogher is a refined restaurant, just outside the town, off the highway.  It has quite high rankings in Italian guides, like Gambero Rosso and Espresso.  Guide Michelin too must like Al Fogher, as it is a prime candidate to receive a Star in 2013.

I don’t take the Italian guides too seriously, because they are not incognito and I doubt they pay their own bills in the restaurants. Unfortunately Guide Michelin too has been on a roller coaster going steadily down in recent years.  Nowadays one hears rumors that a well known NAPA VALLEY boutique hotel wined and dined the Michelin director and received three stars.  (I ate there. The food merited a star and the desserts were inedible.)  Many average restaurants are starred.  Some of the best seafood temples hardly receive a star or are not even mentioned in the guide. Moreover, the guide cannot distinguish between truly great innovative cooking and fussy, confused cooking.  They rush to give a second star to promising restaurants which are far from perfecting many dishes, and they punish restaurants with a classical bent.  (This is a very large topic, and I am planning an article with concrete examples.)

All these said, I feel truly offended when I see in my Michelin guide that a restaurant like Al Fogher is being considered for a star.

If I can summarize my lunch experience in Al Fogher with three words: OVERREACHING, DISCRIMINATION and TREADMILL.

The cuisine is a prime example of a sad trend today: overreaching. Very few chefs have the resources, knowledge, ability, and kitchen personnel of chefs like Pierre Gagnaire or Frederic Anton, who can present a dish with three to four components, all handled differently, but cooked to perfection and assembled together without a missed beat.

Take what the chef calls “Mouthfulls of Omega 3” in Al Fogher.

You are served in the following in the same dish.

a. Dried overcooked scallops in their shells with galloppy creamy leek sauce and an overdose of ginger.

b. A bland tasteless piece of salmon wrapped in bacon and placed on a confetti of overpowering and too sweet candied peppers.

c. Tuna tartare with capers and citrus, with a tuna mayonnaise.

d. Champagne granita.

The different components of the dish are assembled haphazardly from inferior ingredients, except for the tuna. Unfortunately, it gets lost in the mess.

Now take another appetizer.

There are three elements in the dish.

a. Umbrina fish placed on a chickpea pancake.  The fish is overcooked, dry.

b. Gambero Rosso (red prawns) marinated in citrus with a hot sauce containing pepper and anchovies.  I love gambero rosso. Unfortunately these gambero have seen much better days.  There is no juice when you suck the head.  The hot sauce is totally overpowering, sucking out any taste you may derive from the prawns.

c. Pomegranate and champagne granita. This is fine granite, but it is hard to understand how it ties the two above mentioned elements together.

These two antipasti have been followed by two pasta dishes.

One pasta “sfilateddi” was actually the best of the four dishes. It was homemade pasta from grano duro, and the chef basically cooked his own version of Sicilian Norma (eggplant, tomato, basil, very fresh ricotta). It proved that when he does not overreach, the chef can cook traditional recipes with a twist.

The other pasta was unfortunately a mess, maybe the worst pasta in our week length Sicilia trip.  The chef filled three big raviolis with a puree/mush obtained from the remnants of leftover fish and topped them with overcooked, dry, tasteless and boneless triglie (rouget or red mullet—a great fish when fresh  and cooked properly).  The best thing about this dish was the fresh green zucchini sauce with basil and mint.

All of these may be excused had it not been for bad and the discriminating intention of our pony tailed waiter.

DISCRIMINATION relates to what we were allowed to order.  We heard some specials, which were not on the written menu, recited to a table of Italians seated behind us.  Among them, I heard the chef’s famous black maialino (Pork) with Bronte pistachio and tuna roe (bottarga) sauce and some daily fish/seafood.  When I asked the waiter about this, he told me that “they had ordered pork in advance.”  I quipped: “If somebody orders some specials in advance, he is told that they have the portion reserved for him. You don’t give it as a choice among the specials.”

As bad as experiences of discrimination are, what was worse was having to go through a TREADMILL experience, as opposed to eating at a slow pace befitting a refined setting.

The restaurant has a good selection of Sicilian wines, and I was going to examine the list for some gems.  The waiter literally took it away from my hands. He wanted me to trust him and match dishes with his choices, which were open bottles sitting in the middle of the room.  Sicilians usually like heavily oaked white wines and overripe/jammy Nero d’Avola wines, which are anathema for me.    So I did not quite trust him and wanted to seek out some interesting minerally white (such as Carricante) and Nero Mascalese from Etna.  He did not give me time to peruse the wine list, and he recommended a Carricante from Planeta and a red Cerasuolo.  (This was Carricante all right, but as I was afraid, it turned out to be a modern style harmless wine, a far cry from Benanti’s great Pietramarina from the same variety.)

I reluctantly acquiesced, but I requested him two things.

1. Open the red with the first main course, which was a sepia (cuttlefish) dish. I wanted to try both the white and red with this dish.

2. Bring first the sepia and then the lamb main course. I said that we would share the two courses, and we want them ONE AT A TIME.

Guess what?

The pastas were whisked away from us, and a second later BOTH mains came at the same time.

At that point the red wine was NOWHERE near the table.

We told the waiter about the fiasco.

His immediate reaction was to grab the sepia to take it to the kitchen.

We were then left with the lamb in the middle of the table with no extra plate, utensils, and still white wine in our glasses.

No apology was given.

No attempt was made to rectify the situation.

No offer was made to cook the two dishes again and serve them with the appropriate wine.

We waited for a few minutes, but our table was ignored.

I ended up taking the lamb to a nearby table myself to give the signal that we would not touch it.

Then I asked for the bill!

PAOLO PERELLA:  A great trattoria which deserves five stars.

We visited Cagliari in early October and our meals in the recommended restaurants turned out to be disappointing. On the other hand, an hour away from Cagliari, we ran into one of the last surviving great trattorias.

Specifically:

1. SU DOMUS SARDA

This restaurant has mediocre meat and salumi. The pastas are OK.

2. LUIGI POMATA

We were served a candidate for the worst fish dish in Italy in recent memory. It was reheated, overcooked, and inedibly fishy. We were told it was cernia fish, but it was from the tuna family, palamut or bonito.  It had seen much better days. The sushi had the quality of sushi in an American mall, with heavy batters.  The redeeming feature was the pastas.

3. SEMPLICIMENTE

This is the best restaurant that we tried in Cagliari. This restaurant has passionate cooking from a young team and great service.  The Crudo di Mare Elite for two people deserves a star.  Pastas and the main course were not on par, but definitely above average.  We had good wines and champagne.

4. LA TAVERNA DI CASTELLO

This is an average restaurant in the old town, with one waitress and one cook. They have good intentions. I enjoyed their culurgiones filled with potato and cinghiale sauce.  They have a very weak wine list.

5. SA CARDIGA SU SCHIRONI

This is a seafood restaurant. The dishes are hit and miss, as the freshness of the shellfish varies.  Tourists are not likely to get the very best (like most other seafood restaurants in Italy and Spain), and we did not. We liked the grilled baby anguillas, the quality of the bottarga, triglie (rouget), and the grilled calamari. Unfortunately we did not fare well with the rare goodies: gambero rosso and scampi (langoustines).  They have a nice wine list.

The real surprise awaited us at Villasalto, an hour away from Cagliari.

The restaurant’s name is Paolo Perella.

This is a very small restaurant in a tiny town.  When we arrived for lunch a little earlier than the reservation time, the restaurant was closed. We toured the town and when we came back, a man in his 60s, dressed in traditional garb with a fez-like hat and sharp features welcomed us into the dining room.  There was a table set for 12 and another for my wife and I.

While Mr. Perella was in the kitchen, I looked at the photos on the wall. The impression one gets is that Mr. Perella is a descendant of an aristocratic family and has been a well celebrated cook.

Of course the true test of aristocratic heritage is not in the blood but in the behavior. Mr Perella struck us as a true gentleman, who is at the same time very proud of his profession and his kitchen, but also is genuinely friendly and eager to make his clients happy.

It is really a pity that the table of 12 never showed up and did not even phone the restaurant out of courtesy.  Probably any other person would have felt frustration and shown it to the clients.

No. Mr. Perella never showed his disappointment, and he treated us, literally, as guests in his house.

He offered his house wine and I grabbed a few other bottles from the Carignano del Sulcis appellation to try.

Our dining table was set with several antipasti and others kept coming. Honestly this made me worry, because in the South of Italy the culture of food in trattorias is based on feeding you with scant regard for quality…

Quantity instead of quality, but…

Not here.

The homemade ricotta di capra and mozzarella di capra were outstanding, and I believe this level can now only be found in some farms away from the big towns in Sardinia.  The 40 months aged prosciutto was a masterpiece, one of the very best I have tried in Italy.  Homemade breads were stunning, and all of the vegetables (eggplants, raw fennel, cherry tomatoes, red peppers) burst with flavor.

We were also impressed by the local pancake made out of pumpkin, goat cheese, and dried carube pepper.  It was not fried but cooked in the oven, and it was very light.

The pasta course was equally simple, but outstanding, due to the quality of products.  Clearly artisanal durum wheat pasta and very fresh cheese and tomatoes came together in a giant ravioli filled with ricotta di capra and herbs with a flavorful sauce of the sweetest imaginable cherry tomatoes.  Perella used a kind of wild pear (the size of a berry), marinated in liquour, as a condiment to the pasta, and he sprinkled some pecorino and decorated the pasta with fresh basil leaves, which tasted like basil.

This was the pinnacle of comfort food.

The secondi was spit roasted baby goat.  Since the heydays of Da Cesare in Piemonte, I have not tasted such a flavorful baby goat, seasoned  with wild thyme and served with roasted potatoes on a wooden platter. I guess we were lucky that the big table did not show up as we devoured the shoulder and the ribs, which are the tastiest parts.  Goat is a lean, flakey, and flavorful meat.  The best part of it is the crunchy skin and the baby fat attached to it.

The dessert was also light and excellent:  a homemade local hazelnut gateau/cookie dipped in natural, juniper berry honey.

Frankly such a feast requires great wines.  The wines of Sulcis are not bad, but many wineries prefer a heavy, oaky, and international style wine.  The Mura Carignano del Sulcis, available here, is not bad, but I am sure if you take a bottle of fine Bourgogne or aged Barolo/Barbaresco, you can have a complete wine/food matching experience.

Dining in this restaurant is like journeying in a time capsule and going back to a time when you could eat very flavorful and simple food for a good price.  It rarely exists today in Italy (or elsewhere), the birth place of the osteria and the trattoria.

I will try to rush there again before it closes its doors.

We are witnessing a very interesting moment in history today, regarding food and wine criticism.  On the one hand, there is a proliferation of bloggers, some with very good taste and the capacity to shape customer preferences. On the other hand, the established professional critics/judges are losing ground and credibility.

This is for good reason. Let’s leave wine critics aside and focus on restaurant critics.  (I have previously argued that many established MWs, including Ms. Jancis Robinson have grossly exaggerated the quality of Turkish wines, and I have myself blind tasted and ranked the same wines in this blog.)  The MICHELIN Guide nowadays primarily ranks presentation skills and not what is on the plate; RESTAURANT Magazine’s Top 50 list is more like a self-serving crusade in favor of molecular gastronomy; Italian Guides such as ESPRESSO and GAMBERO ROSSO are obsessed by what they call “creativity” at the expense of ingredient quality, etc.

Maybe the common disease is that many critics may be able to tell good from bad ingredients, but they do not know about nuances and relative ingredient quality.  Hence they focus more on techniques applied to transform ingredients, and they are in a constant search for “novelty”.

This constant search for novelty is especially misleading for food criticism, because cooking is not primarily an art form. The best chefs are above all great artisans and connoisseurs of great ingredients.  They should be able to butcher a carcass or tell the difference between a farmed fish and wild fish.  Many young chefs today buy ready cuts of meat (and sometimes fish) in a vacuum (to be cooked sous vide), and they know more about the chemical products marketed by Feran Adria’s two companies, than how to make a good  jus and how to prepare a correct béarnaise.

To add salt to the injury, the Michelin Guide often confers a star or two to young chefs who have not mastered proper cooking skills, but primarily focus on presentation skills.  On the other hand, true artisans of classical cuisine keep dropping out of the guide. (Most recently I noticed the absence of Villa Mon Reve near Nantes.)

The situation is not getting better, but worse.

There are even critics who may not know the difference between veal and pork when they eat it…

Such as Mr. Palling of Wall Street Journal.

I read his review of IBAI in San Sebastien in the Basque Country, Spain, with awe and disbelief. This article was published in the Wall Street on October 25, 2012, and you can read it from the internet.

It contains some minor and major errors such as the following.

1.  The meal begins with warm “Chorizo” that the restaurant gets from a great artisanal producer in Rioja. It is slightly different from “Chistorras,” as Mr Palling says they serve.  But this is a minor issue.

2. He says that he has eaten kokotxas of merluza or hake cheeks.  Kokotxas is actually not cheeks, but the so called “double chin” under the mouth.  What makes them so special is their gelatinous texture.  You either love or hate it. The cheek, on the other hand, has a more firm texture and a different taste than “kokotxas”.  Mr Palling also adds that they are served with a “spicy green sauce.”  The restaurant normally prepares them with “pil pil” sauce, which is olive oil, garlic, and fresh parsley.  I don’t believe they add the small hot peppers to make it hot/spicy in Ibai.  But maybe they did for Mr. Palling, if he asked for it, though I would be surprised.   Or it is possible that a sauce with garlic (without pepper, cinnamon, ginger, etc.) can be called “spicy” and I am missing something here. I don’t even think that in Ibai they add garlic to the sauce, not to mask the quality of the super fresh kokotxas that they use.

3. What made me particularly awed was Mr. Palling’s claim that he ate “slow cooked pork with a mild curry sauce” as the last course. Slow cooked, all right, BUT IT WAS VEAL TENDON that he ate, not pork.  The restaurant has never served a pork dish other than the chorizo amuse, and they never will.  I also doubt that the chef Alicio has ever heard of “curry,” and, even if he did, I can assure the reader that you will never see a curried meat or fish preparation at Ibai.

Ibai, as I have previously reviewed in Gastromondiale, is among the best restaurants in the world. It is a product restaurant.

Mr. Palling also calls it “Simple Perfection.”  I would not use the term “simple,” but this is a debatable issue on which reasonable minds can disagree and debate.

My problem with Mr. Palling is his mischaracterization of the dishes. I also don’t think that the distinctiveness of the restaurant, and, why it is perfect, can be understood from his article.

Let’s consider my last meal there about one month after Mr. Palling.

We started with the chorizo.

Secondly, we had Galician oysters, which were briny, intense and meaty, the very best of the category, like the great Belons of Brittany in France.

Next, we had percebes, which were not pre-cooked.  They were big and meaty, the best of Galicia.

Then we had lobster salpicon with its own eggs in the sauce.  The texture is the opposite of the farm raised small Maine lobster.  It was cooked alive, and is an outstanding lobster dish.

The next dish was artichokes, borrajas, and cardoons, which were super fresh.  Go to Ibai in the end of March or early April and you will have the world’s sweetest and tiniest peas.

Next, we were served sauteed ceps.  This level can rarely be found in a three star restaurant, and they were probably picked in the early morning.

Then we were served kokotxas al pil pil.  Ibai uses the chins of the freshest merluza, and its own gelatin is used in the pil pil.  It is not spicy. I don’t think there is garlic, either.  To me, it is one of the best courses on earth.  Elkano’s version deserves 10/10, and this one is 10+.

Next we had chipirones en su tinta, stuffed with its own tentacles, cooked with its own ink. This dish is a classic.

We finished with sole fish deboned at the table, baked with olive oil and vinegar.  This is much better than any Dover Sole or Sole Meuniere you can have in the best seafood brasseries of France.

We had a fine Albarino to accompany this seafood feast: 2011 Davido Albarino. It was quite fruity (especially with citrus and tropical notes) with underlying acidity.  A touch of minerality in the finish kept this wine well in balance.  The grassy, smokey aroma complemented the sweet shellfish, and I did not detect any oak to compromise the fresh aroma and flavor. The wine was quite intense, despite its 12.5% alcohol, which made me think that it came from reasonably old vines.  I ranked this wine 92/100. (For the very best Albarino Rias Baixas, try Do Fereiro’s “Cepas Vellas,” which has stunning minerality, due to low yields from 100+ years old vines.)

I still do not comprehend why restaurant critics err so much nowadays. One possibility is that they are influenced by the reputation and behave like “sheeps.” Another issue is that they get special treatments, as many starred chefs primarily cook for the critics and give the assembly line treatment to the public.

But I think the most salient factor is the misguided search for novelty. Mr. Palling writes:

“There has not been a great deal of change or innovation in the higher realms of the Basque gastronomy in the past few years.”

Alas. Yes and no. (Andoni Aduriz of Mugaritz is rowing towards a no man’s land and cooking bizarre concoctions, not eaten on this earth, since his break-up with Martin Berasetegui.)

But the lack of “innovation” is not a problem.  Today we have extinguished Japan. Tomorrow starred chefs will discover Mongolia and Patagonia.  Feran will come up with a new alginate, and somebody will “discover” a new morphing technique so that the jaded palate of the critics may once again be titillated and their aesthetic pleasures satisfied.

In the meantime, critics will probably mistake sole fish for chicken.

This would be really “innovative”!

Vedat Milor

December 2012