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2016-02-22
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Bibo has been on my radar since it opened up, but I never really found the impetus to go there. It's always seemed rather strange to me with the large, rotating art displays, fake train station exterior, and for a while a seemingly unnecessary number of doorpeople. Though admittedly, they probably had to pay people to stand out front because it doesn't look like a restaurant from the street you can enter it on (i.e. Hollywood). The price of art is indeed steep.We came here "for Valentine's day",
We came here "for Valentine's day", though not on that day, because dining on that day is ridiculous, even in HK where it's less popular/ commercialized than where I'm from. That was the impetus I needed.
You can order a la carte at Bibo, but online there are three tasting menus posted, Le Menu Trouffe Noire $1,388, Le Menu Gourmand $900, and Le Menu Plaisir $1,200. When we showed up, the menu we were handed had only the latter two tasting menus on it, so if you're obsessed with truffles, I can't for 100% sure say they have them, so call ahead, you mushroom-pig you.
We each got Le Menu Gourmand, with a pairing of 4 wines for a total of $900 + $550 = $1,450 each. Not pocket change that's for sure. At three points in the menu there's a choice, and they let you as a party of two pick both and split them. So you wind up getting to try a lot of things.
The amuse bouche was carrot puree with mushrooms and one particular herb. I want to say oregano, but I can't really recall. It was pretty tame. The mushrooms weren't super-rich, the carrot wasn't super sweet, it was a subdued dish. OK.
First course was L'Oeuf Mayo, "slow cooked organic Taiyouran egg, homemade mayo." From wavespacific.com, a Hong Kong supplier of Taiyouran eggs, we find that "Taiyouran Japanese eggs have a natural sweetness and rich, thick orange yolk. Chickens are reared on a special diet of Stevia leaves, a natural herb which is 300 times sweeter than sugar."
Wikipedia says Stevia leaves are "up to" 150 times sweeter than sugar, so somebody's fudging here. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what those numbers mean. It looks like a taste thing, because Stevia leaves "have a negligible effect on blood glucose" (Wikipedia again). But how attuned are chickens to that taste, and does that even matter? If you feed chickens artificial sweeteners, do their eggs become sweeter? By what mechanism?
Anyway, the egg is fine. Runny and orange-ish with a ring of tangy yellow mayo and some crispy bread bits. I wish I had not eaten the pre-dinner bread, but instead saved it for this dish. Although there was of course more bread to be had, I didn't want to fill up on the first course.
Next came the foie gras "homemade terrine of foie gras, orange brioche." Here on the menu you have a choice between this and the raviolis, but since we were two, we got both. This is terrine, so really dense and rich, and personally, though I only had half the amount pictured, it was way more foie gras than I wanted to eat at one sitting. Not more than I'd ever eaten at one sitting, of course, because sometimes there's just a pile of foie gras that needs to be eaten and you're the one called upon to do it, but still, I apologize for being insufficiently French. Apres foie, le deluge. Sorry, that's probably not even funny.
My wife believes that sugary bread is what's supposed to accompany foie gras, and I won't say that's wrong. I'm not saying the empereror has no clothes, just that his clothes are 300x sweeter than normal clothes. I guess what I mean by that is that really, I wish I had saved the original sourdough bread on the table, which was fantastic and sour, for the foie gras as well.
Les Ravioles - "mushroom duxelle, lobster, shaved cauliflower, confit potatoes, and foie gras sauce." The shaved cauliflower was mostly a garnish. The confit potatoes were a short cylinder of crispy fried potato, with nothing of the flavor the word "confit" typically incites within me. I liked the ravioli though. They had good, al dente wrappers and a nice flavor. They were fair enough.
"Slow cooked Sagabuta pork, confit turnip, maple syrup, star anise and apple jelly."Again, it's not like Bibo lists their distributor on their webpage, but after googling "Taiyouran egg" and getting wavespacific.com as a top hit, and a HK distributor, I googled "Sagabuta pork" and got the same thing. Let's hear the product description:
"Our Japanese pork is a cross-breed of Duroc, Yorkshire and Danish Landrace pigs, raised in the mountains of Kinboshi, Japan. In this picturesque environment, pigs can pursue natural behaviours and gain weight naturally without hormones or GMO-feed."
Wikipedia doesn't even have a page on this, so who knows. I do know, without intending to look it up, that "Duroc" sounds like a scary kind of pig-monster.
Anyway, the pork was fine, if a little plain. Not super fatty, so good on that front. "Deliciously marbled," says someone at TripAdvisor. One of the sauces, the star anise one, we were particularly fond of. Again the "confit" turnip was just fried turnip. Not knocking it, but that's what it was.
"Pan-fried lamb fillet, puy lentils, baby carrot, and calvados." Puy lentils, which I did not know, are peppery green French lentils. Calvados is an apple brandy. I was a fan of the lamb. I thought it was reasonably tender and meaty. They asked us how we wanted it and I asked the chef to decide, that being the clearly most sensible option, when the chef knows more about food than I do. Which is almost always.
At this point we got pre-dessert, which-- alright, whatever. It was like a tomato snowcone. Shaved ice with tomato pulp/ flavor. Not as sweet as a snowcone, thankfully. A little strange though.
First dessert was a pile of cheese. I ate some of it. Middle one was favorite; stinky bleu one was only mildly stinky and mildly chemical-tasting, but I have a chronic case of Americanitis and unfortunately, it's not for me. The other thing was a thing, not too exciting.
Thousand-fold thin chocolate pancake: tastes like cardboard. I'm not even trying to be facetious.They do indeed serve food here, and none of it is bad. None of it really impressed me either. I probably insufficiently appreciated the plating or whatever, but art pays its way in aesthetic plaisir, if I may borrow a phrase from the menu, and there was only a limited amount of that on offer.
I guess there's art in the building. There was a motorbike with Chinese characters written on it. Under normal circumstances I wish I read Chinese, but I'm sure I'd rather do without the artist's message. The object seemed designed to have overdressed people sit on it and take their picture, somehow like the reverse of this object I encountered in Pingyao:
It's a rickshaw you sit in and take tourist photos in. Hard to feel like all the Frenchiness and art wasn't just there to provide a space for people to take pictures of themselves inhabiting that space. The selfie-density-per-second was definitely on a par with, say, Amah Rock. Bibo was like a disco with everyone's camera flashes going off rhythmically. Hey, good on them that they're doing well, and great for them that they can charge $1500 a head, but I wouldn't recommend it.
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