| rev:text
| - I went here for dinner this past Saturday. The decor was nice, and service was very friendly and accommodating.
The food:
Brussels sprouts with bacon: good balance of flavors; the correct ratio of brussels sprouts to bacon. However, texture-wise, was a little too mushy (i.e. brussels sprouts were overcooked, and bacon had lost its texture from, perhaps, sitting too long).
Japanese-style tuna salad: very nice sculptural visual presentation, and a variety of complementary textures. However, the sweet ginger dressing tasted generic, like what you might find at any japanese restaurant.
Miso glazed black cod with soba: tender and supple cod, with appropriately subtle miso glaze (i.e not too sweet or overpowering). Soba were firm. The flavorful broth seemed to have some sort of citrus in it, which made the dish a little more interesting. This was probably the best thing I had here.
Chinois Duck: this had a lot going on, up to and including crunchy (I think sesame-covered) peanuts. But the result was muddled. They went overboard with some sort of ranch-like white sauce which caused the whole thing to evoke a cafeteria chicken wrap. It wasn't horrible, but it could have been much better; this was definitely lousy execution of a good idea.
Dulce de leche + lemon sponge + raspberry ice + caramel + sea salt: frozen raspberry kernels with puffed rice and a bit of fleur de sel sat on top of a dulce de leche parfait with the sponge cake at the bottom. I quite enjoyed the spoonfuls where I managed to combine all the ingredients in the right amounts; however, this did not happen all the time. Nevertheless, this was an ambitious, visually attractive, and interesting dessert, and was better than my other dessert (see below).
Citrus + curd + meringue + coconut + mint: curd was a little too sour, citrus fruit made it even more sour; combined with the meringue, it was all too sweet. In greater quantities, mint might have saved it a little; coconut cream was also too subtle and lost in the sweet-and-sourness. I would say this was the worst thing I had here.
Drinks:
(I don't usually drink, but they had some interesting-sounding cocktails.)
"Spearman Sipper": bourbon, some local microbrewed beer involving grapefruit, cinnamon, cardamom, pineapple juice. Pleasant, flavors meld nicely, though I could not actually detect the cardamom (which I would have liked to!)
"Seafarer's Sanctum": Rum, orange pekoe, blueberry syrup, spruce. Very sprucey; probably too sprucey. With my nose several inches above my glass, I can close my eyes and imagine myself in the middle of a vast spruce forest. Ultimately, it was drinkable, as the spruce seemed to taste natural (rather than synthetic), which made the idea of imbibing a liquefied spruce-tree seem okay. I can imagine some people would send this drink back though.
Overall, it was interesting, however, there were too many howevers. I was disappointed since their menu has potential, but in practice they seem unable to really pull together and successfully execute anything ambitious.
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