Press Food and Wine

Press Food and Wine on Urbanspoon

This place is in the $$ category on Urbanspoon, but comes highly recommended. (Update: At $57, this is clearly miscategorised.)

After a few minutes of standing around, I’m given the end seat on a bench.

Duck & walnut boudin
6/10

With duck breast, blood orange & witlof.

Sounds zany and random.

There’s a lot going on on thus plate. The duck cakes at the end have a strange and un-meaty taste, but they’re light and fluffy and pleasant. The tartare sauce here is unusual, but perfectly compliments the cakes.

The central slices of duck are chewier, and have a tiny amount of balsamic-vinegar based sauce on them. I eat one of the pieces of this duck with the seemingly-random blood orange and witlof salad, and discover that this random assortment of flavours tastes as random as one would expect. I eat the remainder if these chewy, salty pieces of duck on their own. Blood orange in the salad is fine, but it just doesn’t go with the witlof. The amount of witlof here was also very large. The meal was almost a witlof salad with duck.

Lemon soufflé
7/10

With Chantilly cream.

The soufflé itself isn’t actually all that good. It’s more like a slightly-airy egg custard. It doesn’t have any strong taste (or have any lemon taste at all), and doesn’t have a particularly-delicate texture.

The dob of Chantilly cream tastes amazing. Its density is surprisingly low, without being at all airy, and it has a strong vanilla bean taste. As nice as it is, one still does not just eat a dollop of cream. I mix it with the sweet lemon coulis underneath, and then add the unexciting soufflé in for some bulk, and all together, it’s quite nice. The soufflé outlasts the smallish smear if lemon, however, so at the end, I’m just eating bland soufflé again.

Time for some ninja covert photography. Ahh crap. Left the flash on. Will try again in a moment.