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2014-06-13
2710 瀏覽
This ranks among the worst meals I have had in my ten years in Hong Kong (and I have had some seriously bad meals) both in terms of the food - its taste, composition, preparation, idea and presentation - and, of course, in terms of value. This place is basically a local Hong Kong restaurant which serves extremely pricy, very odd and mostly inedible dishes. It has nothing whatsoever to do with fine dining, other than the price which, accordingly, is outrageous.I should have listened to the review
I should have listened to the reviewers here, and gone with my gut feeling, but I chose to trust a friend who is as picky as I and who apparently did have a good dining experience two months ago.
That must clearly have been an outlier.
We chose the 8 course meal. You are not told what it is other than the main course, which tonight was pigeon, so you are at the mercy of the chef. That creates an obligation on the side of the restaurant which it could not even begin to honour. Poor us. We had no idea what we were in for.
We started with an amuse bouche presented as a "free extra" by the waiter whose English was basically incomprehensible throughout the meal. That has been described in other reviews, and it hasn't changed. A tiny piece of endive with salmon roe (?), a sort of dry cheese cracker the size of a nickle, and a tiny olive chip with an even smaller fraction of olive on it. Unremarkable.
The bread was good but the butter was sprinkled with cinnemon and lemon zest. Why would you do that?
We then had rubbery cubes of welk, blended with green apple and served on a bed of mayonnaise! Inedible.
Then came a cold pea soup. The special thing about this pea soup was that it was mixed with ground fisherman's friend. Yes, fisherman's friend, the pastil. Need I say more?
Next came a risotto with three raw oysters, and then they couldn't help themselves in the kitchen so they had to splatter some more mayonnaise on that, too. Inedible.
By this time, had my wife and I not brought my two very well-mannered and cultivated friends, I would got up, refused to pay and left, possibly after telling the chef (if that is what he is) why. As it was, I felt compelled to stay.
We then had a smoked lobster draped in parma ham. Not inedible but weird. And not good, certainly.
Somewhere in here came a pallate cleanser, a mint sorbet which tasted industrial.
Then came the fish - rainbow trout which was poached, then pan fried ("so it is really juicy inside"). It was like any other trout I have ever cooked on a pan. Just nothing special. Not inedible like most other dishes, though.
Then came the one decent serving - which like all the other servings were dainty and tiny to the point of ridiculousness, and no, that does not make it delicate - which was pigeon breast (1 half) wrapped in cabbage, but again, they had to do something strange and so they made a little moat for the sauce out of a avocado-lemon paste. It had a taste of lemon. The sauce was ok, but not the walnut sauce that they plopped on the side. Again, the meat was ok, but the composition was just straight out of a mental institution. Or maybe they were playing a joke on us.
He certainly did with the cheese dish, which was grated cheese, apparently prepared with grated white chocolate and a few drops of low-quality balsamic vinegar. I have no idea why anyone would do something like that. It was left on our plates. Inedible.
We then had two desserts, one a pear (the waiter called it a "pier") which was watery and supposed to have been preserved. With it came a quite decently tasting hazelnut ice cream, the appearance of which, however, was rather wrong.
The second dessert was a chocolate mousse with a simple chocolate disc on top, the size of a HK 5 dollar coin. The disc was so hard that you could only press it through the mousse which then nicely arranged itself around the plate. Taste was chocolaty, not refined, not terrible.
Petit fours were two bars of salty chocolate (ooh, very special) of low quality, wrapped haphazardly, and four tiny lemon meringue the size of a finger nail.
We brought a bottle of wine, corkage 300 HKD, had some water on the way, and the total came to 5000 HKD! Incredible. Again, I would have refused to pay had I not been with my friends. Moreover, I couldn't hold my tongue and said what I thought somewhere through the meal, and I made my friend feel bad for having recommended the restaurant.
This restaurant will not survice, at least I hope it will not. I will now write Akrame in Hong Kong and in Paris and demand a refund and, more importantly, an explanation. For the rest of you potential goers, please do not tempt fate.
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