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2013-07-27
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摩登南意菜式;時尚裝修。服務好。食物設計很有心思,視覺享受比味道更好*Contempoary Southern Italian cuisine.Nice view. Good service.Impressive food presentation and concepts;but average taste at above average prices.TOSCA:My dear readers might already know my views on "contemporary cuisine" in general. So suffice to say that my wife choose this for her birthday. I'll try to be positive and brief about this one. Booking: Being a Michelin 1 start restaurant, booking is mandatory. The restaurant will give the table to others if you'r
時尚裝修。服務好。
食物設計很有心思,
視覺享受比味道更好*
Contempoary Southern Italian cuisine.
Nice view. Good service.
Impressive food presentation and concepts;
but average taste at above average prices.
TOSCA:
My dear readers might already know my views on "contemporary cuisine" in general. So suffice to say that my wife choose this for her birthday. I'll try to be positive and brief about this one.
Booking: Being a Michelin 1 start restaurant, booking is mandatory. The restaurant will give the table to others if you're late for 15 minutes.
Decor: Extremely high ceiling with dark, classy decors. Decent space between tables.
Menu: Choose from the traditional menu (2-3 courses - $1,000 and $1,300 with wine pairing), the classical menu (which covered most of their signature dishes - $1,300 and $1,900 with wine pairing) and other items with black truffles. ($280 – about $500 if I remember correctly). A number of antipasti, pasta, fish, meat and poultry are available from the a la carte menu.
We chose a “Classico” menu without wine pairing and I ordered something I thought might be more orthodox, namely, sea bass gnocchi and lamb chops.
Breadbasket: All of those were cold and hard. However, the one that looked like a puff pastry tasted pretty good.
Being messy with breads as usual, I left some breadcrumbs on the table. I was expecting the waiters to clean it up before the starters arrived. However, everyone ignored it until I almost finished the whole meal. Not what I’d expect from a 1 star fine-dining restaurant.
Starters:
Mackerel, baby onions and risotto with squid ink.
The mackerel was good. Like what we get at decent Japanese restaurants, only much smaller. The baby onions were fresh. The risotto was bad. The rice was too hard, which left a bad taste when mixed with the pungent squid ink. We did not like it.Chocolate tomato: Essentially it’s chocolate which did not taste like chocolate with tomato which did not look like a tomato.
The chocolate tasted like tomato and the tomato was turned into foam. All these were placed on a bed of salad and a piece of almond cookie. Visually interesting. Squid with green pasta (again, I’ve simplified the name somewhat): The presentation was nice. The few slices of squid were decent. However, my wife thought the green pasta was too salty. I thought the same. Perhaps the imagery is a squid swimming in the sea (the salty pasta being the sea).
Roasted Pork Ribs with basil seed:
I was tempted to order this when I first looked at the menu...
...but was glad that I didn’t. I was expecting something similar to an old-fashioned roasted suckling pig (similar to Chinese style or Portuguese style.) This, being the contemporary version, wasn’t crispy at all. It was actually quite gooey. It was remotely similar to a Chinese braised pork belly but not as tender. They might have used lean meat instead of pork belly. It was rather bitter because of the basil seeds. Not spectacular.
Zucchini with chickpeas...etc.
The top left item was essentially burnt spagetti wrapping some sort of meat. The spagetti was not crunchy. It was too hard. The small block of chickpea was interesting. The zucchini was visually impressive. The tomato was good.Lobster Ravioli with black truffles: This was complimentary so perhaps I shouldn’t be too harsh on this.
I could find no trace of lobster in the big ravioli wrapped with a lot of cream and cheese sauce. The ravioli had more cheese and some spinach in it. The generous black truffle shavings were very aromatic. My wife and I thought this was just so-so. But cheese lovers might appreciate this.Sea bass gnocchi: Gnocchi is one of my favorite types of pasta. After having a very good piece of fried turbot at Limehouse, I was looking forward to a simple pan-fried sea bass on a bed of gnocchi when I ordered this.
Again, my culinary horizons expanded (in other words, my hopes were dashed.) This time, part of the sea bass was transformed to a thick cream and some fried gnocchi. The cream covered the untransformed part of the sea bass. Some fried gnocchi were placed on the cream. To be fair, the taste was not bad at all. The texture of the sea bass was interesting; it felt more like pork than fish. If I had to choose, I think this was the best dish of the night.
Lamb chops with lamb belly:
Finally, something I could recognize visually.
Nevertheless, the much anticipated lamb chops were a bit of a disappointment. Notwithstanding the outer crust with herbs, the lamb chops were bland and not very tender (I ordered medium). The one small piece of belly had more taste. All in all, those at Hugo’s were much better. Not worth $600 odd. Service was good but slightly more intrusive than I had expected it to be. Everyone was friendly though.
My wife had “fruit gnocchi”, which was essentially chopped fruits on a bed of what seems to be panna cotta. I had a glass of lemoncello. This brand was a lot more bitter than the one I’m used to.
The whole meal came down to HK$5,500 odd. It definitely burnt a hole in my wallet. I wasn’t too happy about the quality of the meal. Luckily, we had a HK$1,000 gift certificate which sweetened the dinner somewhat –
much better than my lemoncello.
Other Info. :
*即【好睇唔好食】。
(The above review is the personal opinion of a user which does not represent OpenRice's point of view.)
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