Autumn Restaurant Week 2016 Part 1

The first of May was the end of Restaurant Week which I had the greatest pleasure of being a part of. By being a part of, I mean that I logged onto the site, made the reservations and eagerly waited for the dates to come.

In the most relaxed moods ever, my first booking was to A la Bouffé in Linden. This is a quaint and cosy French Bistro nestled in one of the best parts of Linden. Being a supporter of small businesses, I was excited to find out that this place is owned by World-Traveled Chef Romuald Denesle and this restaurant boasts an atmosphere of Little France in South Africa.

Seated in a romantic corner, my fiancé and I sipped our wine as we anticipated the evening’s cuisine. Having the choice of 3 starters, I opted for the Trout and my Fiancé for the Pork Terrine. Anyone that screws a trout recipe deserves to die. This, fortunately, was not the case with my trout. There was an elegant balance between the smokiness of the trout and the accompanying sauce which had elements of cream cheese.

The same cannot be said about the port terrine. Not to be confused with paté, terrine is ground meat and herbs molded into a “meatloaf”. I have tasted different terrines before and never have any of them relied on chutney to create flavour to the dish. I would assume that a meal such like this would not need to rely on one element to carry the dish. Sadly, this was the case with this meal and it did not impress.

The pork terrine did not sway us from our experience as one meal does not ruin an entire evening.

For the mains, from 3 choices, I opted for the poached kingklip and my fiancé for the braised beef blade. Let’s start off with the braised beef blade. I have never tasted such bold flavours in a dish and such tender meat that easy to chew and full of flavour. It did not need any seasoning as the chef clearly knew how to flavour it. On to my meal the kingklip. First, what you need to know is that I have been experimenting with poaching fish for a while now and the main goal is to obviously seal as much seasoning and flavour into the fish by adding it to the poaching water. Although I am not completely happy with my results, I still managed to get a little more flavour in to the fish than that of A la Bouffé’s. I was terribly disappointed with this meal. It lacked seasoning or flavour. All I had was bland, overcooked, flaky fish. I proceeded to create my own flavour using salt and black pepper that took me 10 minutes of waving down the waiter to secure.

So far my starter was amazing but my main was bland. His stater was average but main was excellent. So we’re 1 for 1. The deciding round was the dessert.

Not to be critical but until now I was expecting a little more for a restaurant that’s highly recommended on Zomato. So I was a little disappointed at this time. But to be fair, I might have built up the hype in my mind and my expectations weren’t met.

By mistake I ordered the ginger cake for my fiance instead of the chocolate mousse. I will not even beat around the bush about the lack of effort in the dessert.The cake tasted like it was made days ago and re-heated on the night. It was hard. It was a mission to get my spoon into the cake, so we basically just left the cake as is. Then there was the tarte tartin which was okay but nothing huge to rave about.

The start to restaurant week was a bit of an upset. This set menu is meant to highlight the restaurant’s cooking ability but it just deterred me from coming back.