Skyline
For the first restaurant in my Feed Report Top 50 series, I’ve chosen to return to the place where it all began. I’m at Skyline, at the Rydges hotel, at the intersection of South Terrace and West Terrace. One night, six months ago, after going to the same place for months on end, I decided to try somewhere new, just once. I posted a picture of my main course and a few lines of text to Facebook, and the feeding madness set in.
After going to well over a hundred of Adelaide’s top restaurants, my tastes have changed enormously. I’ll be interested to see how this place holds up to my now finely-honed snout.
White semolina gnocchi, wilted kale, tomato essence.
This is mostly just a large piece of white fish. I try it without the glass of “essence of tomato”, then I add a dash of the essence, and it tastes the same. I add the whole glass of the tomato, and the taste doesn’t change. I them sip the essence straight from the bottom of the glass, and can taste a very mild tomato flavour. I puzzle over the white powder on my plate for a while. It has a faint taste of Horlicks, but isn’t listed on the menu. It turns out to be a kind of an olive oil “snow” (frozen and powdered), that’s supposed to be eaten with the fish. The results are the same as with the tomato essence – there is almost no taste difference, even when I gather great shovels of snow.
I wouldn’t identify the slabs of gnocchi as such, were I not told what they were. They’re softer than gnocchi, and have something of a boring Parmesan taste.
The kale is nice and salty and buttery, and is probably the best part of the meal.
Layered with chocolate anglaise, sticky orange, chocolate ganache & shards.
Tearing up a blood orange with a spoon and fork isn’t particularly easy, but its taste is certainly worth it. It has a very sweet yet sour taste, and retains a lot of the flavour of the raw orange, despite being caramelised.
The cake itself is very dense. It has many layers of chocolate, interspersed with tasteless light-coloured layers of crepe. The crepe doesn’t dissolve in my mouth at all, and just breaks up into smaller and smaller cubes that long outlast the chocolate.