Esca
Down at Glenelg tonight.
I ask the waiter what's popular from the menu, but it's his first day on the job. He fetches the other waiter, who's happy to give extensive information about the various dishes on the menu.
With confit garlic, caponata.
The fish is crispy and nicely cooked, but it's just regular salmon, and doesn't seem to vary much.
I decide to use the yoghurt sauce to adhere various components from the plate to the salmon. However, I discover that none of them have more than a mild flavour, and they don't add anything to the fish. The yoghurt sauce is just yoghurt, and the clumps of diced vegetable (caponata) just have a very mild pickle flavour.
I scoop these components up in various ratios, but each mouthful tastes the same.
I'm not sure that salmon and yoghurt go together, but here it made no difference either way. :)
Chocolate soil & sauce.
I really want to order the honey and orange blossom panna cotta, but if I gave in to the lure of panna cotta, I'd be eating it every day. :)
My parfait arrives, and it looks suspiciously like a panna cotta. I confirm, and it is indeed. Panna cottae can be sneaky like that.
The panna cotta itself has an amazing flavour. It has a tea-like quality, and the honey and orange blossom go together to make an almost caramel-like taste.
The paste around the panna cotta is a kind of citrus stuff. It has a slight grain to it, but is otherwise uniform. It's like a citrus custard. The problem is that it's too sour. Not awfully so, but too sour to be pleasantly eaten, even when combined with panna cotta.
The citrus-custard-paste is also intermingled with the fruit on the plate, which just makes the fruit taste like sourer fruit. Without the citrus custard, the fruit is just regular fruit, which is boring, but I eat it anyway. I stop suddenly, tasting something fairly sour. A few pieces of lime have been added to this fruit salad for some reason.
I've never had a dish with such delectable and distasteful components on the one plate.
Update: sour fruit was grapefruit, not lime.