Celsius Restaurant and Bar
No tables here. Everything booked out all night. No chance of anything opening. Eventually, I'm told I can wait at the bar, but there's no guarantee of anything.
After about ten minutes, I'm seated. :) A group has failed to turn up.
The menu here is famously abstract and minimalistic.
Vegetables are "persinan" and flat beans.
The squid has a nice peppery taste, and a hint of the ash that's on the plate. I'm interested in these vegetables, but neither of them, nor the white sauce has any taste. There's nothing unpleasant about these pieces of battered squid.
That's the whole description.
The base of this dish is the little marshmallow-shaped pieces of pan-seared polenta. They have a slight crisp, due to the searing, but no strong texture or flavour. The "Parmesan custard" as I'm told it's called, is like a strong, melted cheese sauce. It overpowers everything. It's somewhat sickly, and seems really over the top and low-quality for a place like this. This sauce needed some Bi-Lo macaroni to go with it.
The variety of unrecognisable vegetables here are fine, but nothing special. It's mostly zucchini, and other mild or similar vegetables.
If only it tasted as good as it looked.
This has about a zillion components.
Once I get shards of toffee and tiny dobs of sour cherry out of the way, the sticky chocolate goo goes nicely with the very crumbly pistachio cake. A tiny bit of sour cherry can overwhelm this.
The lighter brown chocolate at the top has a slight coffee flavour, and is more like ice cream, and less sticky. It's accompanied by a crispy chocolate biscuit.
The red goo is much nicer. It has a strong cherry taste, and its crunchy chocolate soil gives it a bit of texture, though I almost never find that chocolate goes well with red fruit.
Nothing on this plate was amazing. It was interesting to eat a variety of gelati-type things, and various types of crispy chocolate geology. The concentrated cherry invading other spoonfuls was a bit of an issue, but overall, this dessert was perfectly passable. I would much rather have had five times less components that were twice as good as this, however.