Sunday 26 November 2006

Martin Wisharts, part 2

The desert menu had one of my favourite options on it. A clever insertion into any dessert menu, but a brave one to say the least.

Tasting of desserts. This is fantastic for the diners, but in the kitchen your workload increases ten – fold! You have anything from four to eight desserts to prepare for each guest instead of the traditional one per guest, and when the whole table goes for this option as we did, well I’ll leaved the pastry chef’s comments to your imagination!

Before taking dessert however, we opted for a cheese course. A well-informed French waitress took us through the huge cheese trolley; we had about twenty cheeses placed on three plates in the centre of our table to digest. The waitress knew them all by heart, I’m sure, if we had asked, she could have told us the name of the animal that had produced the milk to produce them! She told us the order in that we should sample the cheese due to their intense flavours, and a fantastic accompaniment to the goat’s cheese was a small dot of truffle honey. To be honest it looked a little understated on a small plate also in the centre of the table, but once tasted it was obvious why we only needed such a small amount, it’s pungent flavour packed a punch like Evander Holyfield holding a fistful of bolts!

Mark, once again not to let the group down, chose a fantastic bottle of Maury, a sweet red dessert wine that I would never have thought to accompany cheese, but it worked perfectly.

Cheese polished off it was time for dessert, and another bottle of dessert wine, this time a Riesling. Unlike some restaurants where a tasting of dessert comes as one course and you must rush your way around it to prevent soufflés dropping, parfaits and jellies melting, these courses came separately, which was a refreshing change.

After dessert came the compulsory coffee and petit fours, a very good cup of espresso for me which was served in the traditional way, with a shot glass of water. Something I feel is very important but how many restaurants do you visit who have taken the decision to omit various traditions like this?

Next was the final part of dinner but as always by far the bitterest and hardest to digest, the bill. Dinner came to £620.00 for five of us, which I felt, was very reasonable indeed. After all we had eaten our way through seven courses including the canapés, amuse, cheese course and coffee and petit fours! Not to mention the consumption of 1 bottle of champagne, 1 red wine, 1 white wine, 1 Maury and a bottle of dessert wine!

Bill settled and cab on it’s way to return us to the digs, we bid farewell to the waiters and waitresses whom had all made our evening so pleasant and brought to a close the latest Chefs Eat Out dinner, but not the event for their was the time honoured tradition of drinks back at the hotel to contend with before we would turn in for the night!

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