OMG, TBISC

We stayed for one night in a hotel on the Oregon coast which seemed inordinately proud of the fact that they give guests clean bed linen. Yes, that’s right, unlike all those other hotels which let you sleep in the same filthy, sodden sheets which have been used by all the previous guests, the Hampton Astoria clean theirs! Regularly!

This poster in the lift (elevator) was accompanied by a photo of a teenage girl excitedly texting this message to a friend, a manic grin on her face, seemingly unable to contain her delight at the prospect of a hotel room which meets basic minimum hygiene standards. Unfortunately I had to crop her out in order to get in close enough to see the small text.

Drink your milk

“Then there was the matter of the milk, a drink I detested however it was served, and at whatever temperature. It made me gag. There was no allowance for such distastes in the home’s régime. This resulted in a great deal of time spent in the dining room, with its sour odours of curds and rotting dishcloths, long after meals had ended and the other children had been liberated to play outside. Matron sat at the head of the table, and I some way down, with the ghastly bluish pillar of milk in a glass in front of me. “Drink your milk”, she would repeat at intervals, in a voice made all the more threatening by its controlled softness. In the end, but only after more than token resistance, I did. “There now. Wasn’t that silly?” What was really silly was my slowness to realise that she didnt want to be there any more than I did. Once this dawned on me, I put it to the test by deliberately knocking over the glassful of milk. It spread widely, in the way that spilt liquid always does, and dripped from the table edge onto the bench. Equally rewarding was the displacement of the soft voice in favour of trembling anger. I was made to clear up the mess and say sorry. But the glass was not refilled and I was not kept in again.”

From “Sift”, a memoir of growing up in my home town of Exeter in the postwar years, written by the poet Lawrence Sail, who was my French teacher at school for four years.

The Cube

I didn’t know anything about The Cube until my wife called me on Friday to say that due to a cancellation there were places free for lunch on Monday. A quick look at the site and my schedule confirmed that I was willing and able, so she booked. This temporary structure seats 18 diners (or lunchers) and the responsibility for the meal alternates each day between Sang-Hoon Degeimbre of L’Air Du Temps, which we visited three years ago, and Bart De Pooter of De Pastorale, where we ate two years ago. On the day we’d chosen it was Degeimbre’s turn. He’d gained his second Michelin star (and a lot of media attention) since then, so we were keen to see how he’d evolved.

We arrived at the foot of the Arc de Triomphe in Parc Cinquantenaire at midday to see  The Cube (although to me it looks more like a trapezoidal prism, but I guess that isn’t such a catchy name) looming over us.

We were escorted to a room inside the top of the arch where a staff member talked at us for 10 minutes about sponsor Electrolux’s innovative approach to developing consumer electronics. She also mentioned that The Cube isn’t actually attached to the Arc, but merely placed on top of it. She insisted that it had been tested in winds measuring 12 on the Beaufort scale and was “perfectly safe, ha ha!” She then left us to marvel at the display of Electrolux’s latest range of white goods nestled incongruously amid the helmets and sabres (this building houses the Royal Museum of the Army and Military History).

Then we were taken up onto the roof and into The Cube itself, or rather onto the terrace in front of it. Here we were each given iPads with which we were encouraged to take photos of the view (and later the meal), view videos promoting the chefs, and email or micro-blog our impressions. Who needs dining companions and good conversation? Here’s the view across Cinquantenaire Park towards the centre of Brussels. You can also see my office from here.

Our patience started to wear thin after 40 minutes of waiting however, when the final four guests arrived, claiming that they’d been confused about the start time. We all went in and seated ourselves, and the meal commenced.

The head waiter apologised for the fact that Degeimbre himself was unable to be present today, which was slightly disappointing. In hindsight, however, I don’t see that it affected the quality of the food at all. He explained that Degeimbre wanted to present a menu which expressed his vision of springtime, even though it was still a little early in the season and not all of his preferred ingredients were available yet.

The first amuse-bouche was a silky smooth liquid combining water and herbs.

Then the bread arrived.

Then the wine arrived. The wine was fine, but the sommelier’s moustache made more of an impression on me.

The butter, however, was rather special. On the right is normal butter, but the one on the left was flavoured with citrus fruits and was gorgeous.

The first proper course was something of a signature dish for Degeimbre; his famous “kiwitre” (kiwi and huitre, or oyster). I’m not much into oysters but this one was perfectly acceptable, with the croutons adding some welcome crunch to what can sometimes be an unpleasantly slimy ingredient. I think there was some wasabi in the black swoosh too.

In the oyster shell itself is a leaf which somehow managed to also taste of oyster. This was the first of several occasions where Degeimbre has found a herb or plant which contains enough molecular similarities to make it simulate the taste of another ingredient, without needing to artificially flavour it in any way. I wish I’d thought to write down the names of the plants.

While we were eating a couple of kitchen staff were outside on the terrace doing something curious with birds nests, bell jars and smoke. They brought them inside and placed three of them on the table.

Once opened, they revealed a nest containing peeled quail eggs which had been smoked with a small cube of cherry wood. They were accompanied by bacon butter. If nothing else came out of this meal I now have two new spreads to seek out: bacon butter for breakfast and citrus butter for dessert…

Another course, another bell jar, this time containing small jacket potatoes which had been smoked on a bed of moss.

These were then added to a bowl of wild herbs and flowers, and had a cumin sauce poured on top. The success of this dish for me rested on the simple but evocatively earthy flavour of the potato skin. And the moss. I like moss.

Before the fish course came more tiny leaves. One tasted like Granny Smith apples and the other exactly like peas.

As well as being a novelty in itself, this provided a link with the following dish. Cod cooked at 40°C with a cool broth of…Granny Smith apples and peas.

Despite the tepidness it was tender and tasty. Next came what was, in one sense, one of the simplest dishes, as it contained only three ingredients: duck, red onion and red cabbage. The waiter explained to us that the colours had been enhanced simply by changing the pH (i.e. by adding something acidic). Whatever they did, it was by far the prettiest dish of the day. Yummy, too.

And so to dessert. This was a Generation Game-style affair, with one of the kitchen staff providing us with our own ingredients and asking us to copy him as he plated up.

I think mine turned out pretty well. He came around and added a transparent blob of gel containing saké at the end.

All that was left then was a sweet crumble with carrot foam and violet liquid…

And some choccies.

The meal would have been pretty spectacular in any setting, but obviously sitting in a precariously balanced trapezoidal prism atop a nineteenth-century monument on a beautiful day enhanced the experience. Why don’t more restaurants offer that?

The Cube will be in place until July, at which point it will tour across Italy, Russia, Switzerland and Sweden.

Update: later we went back to try Bart De Pooter’s menu. Read about it here.

Fine dining, Futurist-style

I can’t resist – another excerpt from John Dickie’s history of Italian cuisine, “Delizia!” (see here for the first).

The Taverna del Santopalato was opened in 1931, following the publication of the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, which aimed, among other things, to abolish pasta. “For the Futurists, pasta was ‘Italy’s absurd gastronomic religion’. It was too weighty and bulky for the speed and dynamism of modern life”.

One of the plates was a proto-Heston Blumenthal multisensory extravaganza called “Aerovictuals: Black olives, fennel hearts and candied bitter orange (on a single plate set down to the diner’s right). Sandpaper, red silk and black velvet (on a rectangular pad to the diner’s left). Wagner (issuing from hidden speakers). Each customer was instructed to bring the food directly to his or her mouth with one hand, while repeatedly stroking the rectangluar pad with the other and having perfume applied to the back of the neck by the head waiter.”

See this article for more details of the wacky dishes.

Dream

Night. Aliens are invading, but they are nowhere to be seen. Instead, they are using some kind of ray to weaken the population first by robbing them of their senses. I run out into the street to find many people milling around, going blind. I find a woman who used to work with me as a police officer. I test her sight by asking her to tell me how many fingers I’m holding up. She gets it right, but I can tell that she’s just guessing. She knows me well so she knows how many fingers I’m likely to hold up. I draw the outline of a top hat-wearing snowman in the air and ask her what it is. She says “Snow…”, but again I’m not convinced – she’s going blind, like everyone else.

Later we’re queuing inside a rather dingy, run-down burger bar. People are docile and zombie-like, and although the alien-sense-stealing crisis is still going on in the background, we need something to eat. One man in the queue is talking to an old, rather stern woman who works there. He challenges her on the healthiness of the food they serve. She points out that they have a couple of salads on the menu, but he laughs this off as tokenism.

Later, back outside, most people are now blind, and many are now deaf too. I wonder whether they’ve also lost their sense of touch, or taste. Then a man walking towards me stops in his tracks and falls forward flat onto his face. The end is coming. People everywhere start collapsing, although I and one other person remain unaffected. Then I and this other person find ourselves pulled along the road by an invisible force, as if we’re being collected by a hovering alien mothership while the rest of the population perishes.

Then I wake up.

A prediction of the impending Rapture? Or simply the result of seeing a couple of apocalyptic science fiction movies (Knowing at the cinema and The Day The Earth Stood Still on the plane back from Mauritius) recently?

Only 4 senses

We had a lovely dinner last night. Take a look at my photos! The starter:

Here’s the main course:

And check out the dessert!

No, I don’t have a problem with my camera. This is dining in the dark, first launched in Paris in 2004 at Dans le Noir. Similar restaurants have opened up in several other major cities around the world since then, and now it’s Brussels’ turn.

It’s a fascinating concept. While other restaurateurs try to involve as many senses as possible, this restaurant removes one: sight. You can’t eat the dish with your eyes before you take a bite, as the whole meal takes place in pitch darkness. Dining in the dark has two aims – one is to focus your attention on your remaining senses, so you concentrate on the flavours and textures rather than being distracted by the colours and shapes on the plate. Secondly, it gives you a small insight into the lives of the blind (all the waiters are blind) who eat this way every day.

So we arrived in Galeries St Hubert at 7pm and were lead down into the basement. We sipped aperitifs while the other diners arrived (about 30 in total). TV Brussel were there filming - they didn’t interview us, but we might be in the background of a couple of shots. One by one our names were called and we were escorted to the entrance to the dining room, where we met Freddy, who was to be our guide for the night. We lined up behind him, our hands on the shoudlers of the person in front, with another couple behind us, and he lead our five-person conga through three sets of thick velvet curtains and into the darkness. We shuffled along until we reached our table where he guided us to our chairs and described what was on the table. Once seated, our fingers skittered over the table like nervous spiders, locating cutlery, charger, glasses and bread basket.

The first dish arrived shortly afterwards, and appeared to be some kind of fish and crab salad. The strongest flavour was the rocket. In fact it seemed to have more flavour than usual, while the fish had less impact. Several things struck me. One – when you lift your fork it’s often hard to know whether you’ve actually picked anything up or not. Sometimes you’ll just get a mouthful of fork, other times you’ll have an enormous lump of food, but you don’t put it back down for fear of not being able to find it again. Finally you start to learn by the weight of the fork whether there’s anything on it or not. Two – I held my head much closer to the plate than usual, so as to avoid messy accidents. Three – it’s hard to know when you’ve finished, although I solved that one by simply running my fingers around the plate in search of any remaining morsels.

Pouring the wine was less fraught with peril than I expected, as I already knew the blind technique of hooking your finger over the edge of the glass to feel the level of the liquid. I still managed to spill a little, but that was probably more to do with the amount of wine I consumed affecting my judgement. Throughout we chatted with the other couple. The darkness had less impact on our conversation than might have been expected. Admittedly we couldn’t judge facial expressions or body language, but anyone who’s used a telephone is used to that. What I did find was that my head moved a lot more. Normally I’d sit fairly still, moving my head from side to side as necessary, but freed from the gaze of others I waggled up and down and back and forth like Stevie Wonder on a sugar high. I kept my eyes open most of the time, as it was difficult to overcome the instinct to try to see what was going on, even though I knew there was no chance of making anything out. Closing and opening my eyes made no difference – it was absolutely dark either way. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced so complete an absence of light before.

The main course arrived – some kind of fish (my wife thought it was swordfish, based on the texture) with mashed potatoes and chopped onion. Nice enough, but not spectacular. I guess the organisers feel that the experience of dining in the dark is original enough that anything you eat will be fun, but I wouldn’t have minded something a little more tasty and complex. It could have been worse – I’m just thankful they didn’t serve spaghetti, or a piece of meat that needed cutting up with a sharp knife.

The dessert was a delicious crème brulé, with a glass of coffee-caramel-vanilla liqueur called “After” (they were the main sponsor and also provided drinks and a free recipe book in the bar afterwards).  And then we were lead, blinking and stumbling, back out into the light. It had dragged on far too long for what was a relatively simple three course meal, but it was a fascinating experience which I’d recommend to anyone.

L’Air Du Temps

L’Air du Temps has been on my restaurant list for a little while now. I’ve read reviews in magazines, seen the recipes on websites and drooled over the photos in the book. Last night we went to see if it could live up to expectations.

After a forty minute drive from Brussels into deepest, darkest Wallonia, we sat down in a smallish, understated, light grey room. As seems to be de rigueur at the moment, I could peer into the kitchen from where I was seated and watch the chef at work. Not that I spent the whole evening gazing at him as he plated up, you understand. I had a lovely dining companion with whom to exchange bon mots. However I did notice that instead of a notice board, they simply write in marker pen on the white tiles on the walls (click photo for a larger version on flickr).

 

I liked the textures of the tablecloth and the cracker slotted into a little stone stand.

 

So we went, as usual, for one of the tasting menus. Our first amuse-bouche was a fennel gel with winkles, topped with a Granny Smith apple foam. Sharp and refreshing – a good start.

 

Next – smoked eel with a slice of some kind of tomato I’d never heard of before, razor clam and a blob of strawberry goo (look at me, using all the correct gastronomical terminology!).

 

Then a small, sweet cone filled with foie gras mayonnaise. Yum.

 

Finally a soft-boiled egg, with passion fruit, an artichoke foam, and a spicy bread “soldier”. This one was slightly disappointing, the flavours kind of getting lost in each other.

 

The first “proper” course was a salad, but in fact it was one of the most distinctive and successful dishes of the evening. The green swoosh is rocket, the brown blob at the top is a “caviar” of aubergine, the small orange flowers were surprisingly flavoursome, and there were also a couple of mushrooms hidden underneath.

 

The first fish course: a cube of salmon; crusty on top, cooked in the middle, raw at the bottom. Plus a tartare of minced salmon in a roll of cucumber. The black swoosh is squid ink mayonnaise, the crunchy teardrop shape on top of the tartare is beetroot and juice from a Japanese citrus fruit called yuzu was drizzled on top. Interesting juxtaposition of textures in this dish…

 

The second fish course was lobster, and this is the first time when I felt that Monsieur Degeimbre had come a cropper. My wife disagreed, claiming that the combination of lobster and cherry worked well, but…well, it just didn’t work for me. I liked the vanilla jus, the lobster itself and at one point I took a mouthful of cold cherry ice cream and warm rice together and that was a surprisingly pleasant combination. But I get the impression that some chefs these days, in search of wild and wacky new combinations, simply throw random, or even deliberately incongruous ingredients into their dishes. Degeimbre in particular never seems satisfied with a savoury dish unless he’s plonked some fruit on top. I think it’s also partly a question of fashion, the same way that at recent points in the past everyone was making Ferran Adria-style ‘foams”, or adding a dab of wasabi paste.

 

The first meat course. The disc on top was saffron-flavoured, but it had an unfortunate polystyrene texture which made it rather difficult to chew. The langoustine underneath it was fine, but the sauce contained far too much dill. The fried sweetbreads were nice though, and this time the blob of fruit compote on top added something.

 

The second meat course. The Porsche-desgined steak knife was a nice touch.

 

Carpaccio of beef with a hijiki seaweed sauce (surprisingly peppery). The white blobs are “ravioli” of puréed potato and ginger, which delicately burst in the mouth. Very pleasant.

 

Now this was an interesting twist on the traditional cheese course: soft brie on a biscuit base, a bubble of balsamic vinegar and a white cheese and rose-flavoured sorbet. Lovely. Oh, and the crumbs in the middle? Space Dust, of course. That’s the third time we’ve had Space Dust in a restaurant. I spot a trend…

 

The first dessert: strawberries and cucumber ice cream. Pleasant enough, but not spectacular.

 

The second dessert. Raspberries on gelatine (meh), and a gorgeously creamy agastache ice cream. With Space Dust underneath. Ok, you can calm down with the Space Dust now, please. I was half expecting them to serve it with the coffee too, instead of sugar. By the way, here‘s how not to eat Space Dust.

 

Test tubes full of fruit and flowers. I think the waiter referred to this as a “vertical garden” or something.

 

The final dessert: apricot purée, peanut-flavoured maccaroons, and a creamy pistachio cake. All very nice, and it was good to end with something light and flavoursome. Many Belgian restaurants go overboard with tonnes of creamy, chocolatey, heavy gooey desserts, leaving you feeling heavy and bloated, but after this meal we were sated but not stuffed.

 

So, some very interesting dishes, a few (in my humble opinion) honourable failures, and some disappointingly bland wines. To my taste he’s too keen on acidity and sharp fruit, but I’d certainly go back at some point as he obviously has talent and a lot of ideas.

In the swim

The other day I took my daughter to the swimming pool. We stayed in the small, splashy-fun pool, but I could see (and, more importantly, hear) the main pool.

I hate swimming pools. I always have. I didn’t learn to swim until I was 12, and I’m still a fairly weak swimmer now. Before that, swimming lessons at school were mostly exercises in humiliation, as I bobbed about squeezed into various flotation aids, clinging to the side of the pool, watching enviously as the rest of the class dove and darted through the water like minnows.

Even now the blueish light, smell and taste of chlorine, slippery surface underfoot, sharp sounds of shouts and laughter echoing off the hard walls and floor make me slightly nervous. The sea, whose uneven bed makes it easy to slip out of your depth, and whose currents can suck you backwards and downwards to a salty grave paradoxically feels safer and less threatening to me than the cold, antiseptic surroundings of the pool.

Besides, you’re less likely to find a corn paster floating in the open sea.

Eating Japan

Food, like many things in Japan was both familiar and unexpected. Brussels has a decent selection of restaurants offering different styles of Japanese cuisine, but eating in the country itself is always going to be a different experience.

Firstly, the bad: I was disappointed by the kaiseki cuisine I tried. Some of it was lovely, but much of it was either so subtle and delicate as to be almost flavourless (or is that just because of my over-stimulated palate having been spoilt by years’ worth of rich French sauces?), or was strangely and unpleasantly gloopy, slimey, twappy or gelatinous. They use way too much tofu, usually in a very soft, semi-liquid form. Textures in food have always been important to me, sometimes just as important as flavours. My wife can’t understand why I can enjoy a particular type of fruit juice, and yet not necessarily want to eat the fruit itself. Yes, it tastes the same, but the “mouth feel” makes it a completely different experience.

 Visually, it’s all exquisite stuff, and I’ll happily browse through pictures of it in my book, but it was very rare that I put any of it in my mouth and went “Mmmmm!”

By the way, in our ryokan in Hakone I almost turned vegetarian one night. As we sat down to eat, a small gas stove was placed in front of us, ready to be lit to cook one of the starters. Nothing unusual there. In the pot on top of the burner was what looked a little like an oyster in its shell, but probably wasn’t. Maybe something in the sea cucumber family? Anyway, what disturbed me wasn’t the fact that I couldn’t identify it, but that it was moving. Gently pulsating, occasionally lurching in one direction or another. Then the waitress came and lit the gas. As it started to bubble around the edges its movements became more frenzied, and this oleaginous blob started to try to squirm and shiver its’ way out of the pot. All that was missing was a pair of doe eyes looking pleadingly at me and a small voice squeaking “Help meeeee!”.  Raw, I wouldn’t have eaten this thing. Boiled alive in front of me, I couldn’t even bring myself to look in its direction. I needed a few moments before I could bring myself to eat anything at all that night. Normally I’m fairly adventurous and not too squeamish when it comes to food, and I’m more than happy to eat many things raw. I do, however, insist that my food be dead before it’s placed in front of me.

Secondly, I’m sorry, but I can’t get my head around Japanese desserts and sweets. Personally, I expect my sweets to be, you know, sweet. Rice cakes and red bean paste and purple potatoes (see below) may have many admirable culinary qualities, but when it comes to dessert I want sugar, cream, chocolate and fruit, please. Is that narrow-minded and culturally blinkered of me? Sorry.

Thirdly, and still on the topic of irrational prejudices and preferences, I have a problem with breakfast. At any other time of the day I’m willing to try anything, no matter how outlandish, but breakfast is different. First thing in the morning is a special, delicate moment, and I want to eat something comforting and familiar. The rice and smoked fish (and sometimes pickles and eggs) and green tea the Japanese often eat in the morning are lovely and tasty, but I need some sugar and caffeine to start my day. This is why, to my shame and embarassment, many mornings were spent grabbing a quick cappuccino and croissant in the nearest western-style café (usually a Starbucks). There often comes a moment during a foreign holiday when I give in and say “Give me something western to eat!”. It usually comes towards the end: for example in India during the final few days in Delhi, after two weeks’ worth of delicious, mostly vegetarian home cooking, we caved in and visited the local McDonald’s for a “Maharajah Mac”.

Green tea? Something of an acquired taste (in the sense that I did acquire a taste for it, eventually). Very bitter. The “sweets” on the plate next to it are stamped with the image of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, in whose grounds we stopped for this little light refreshment.

Coffee-in-a-can, from one of Japan’s ubiquitous vending machines. Tastes every bit as good as you’d expect vending machine coffee-in-a-can to taste.

 

Fake plastic food, as diplayed outside most restaurants. Incredibly detailed, realistic, and apparently very expensive to buy. Sometimes more appetising than the actual food served inside.

I find the name “One Cup” on a can of saké unbearably sad.

Now for the good: the fish (both sashimi and cooked dishes) was every bit as fresh, flavoursome and melt-in-the-mouth as expected. The tempura was as deliciously light and crispy as any batter I’ve ever tasted.

Okonomiyaki. This was one of my most pleasant discoveries in Japan. It’ll never win any awards for sophistication or presentation, but my goodness it’s yummy. Our hosts in Tokyo made it for us at home one night, and as they sprinkled bonito flakes on top of the freshly cooked pancake they waved and danced in the rising heat (the dried fish flakes, not our hosts). Generally the home cooked, unpretentious, or “street food” dishes were the ones I enjoyed the most.

So, a mixed bag, but plenty of deliciousness, and the beer wasn’t too bad either.

 

Kodò

On Friday night we saw Kodò in concert in Antwerp.

At first I wasn’t sure if two hours’ worth of drumming would hold my attention, and yet I found that whenever they broke up their set with something different like a dragon dance, or a geisha song accompanied by a shakuhachi, I found myself thinking “Well that’s all very nice, but can we have the drums back, please?”

This clip should give you some idea of what we saw and heard, but it doesn’t really get across the gut-trembling thrill of seeing a small, muscular, almost naked Japanese man, drenched in sweat, beating the shit out of the largest, loudest drum you’ve ever heard. The liner notes on the cd we bought gently suggest that, in order to best replicate the effect at home, you should turn up the volume as loud as you dare, neighbours be damned, until the noise loosens your bowels.

And yet for me the most impressive moment came early in the first half when seven men sat in a row at the front of the stage, tapping rapidly yet delicately on small drums placed on stands on front of them. Perfectly synchronised, the subtle variations of speed and volume created a galaxy of sounds which called to mind everything from crickets chirping in a field to the approach of a thunderstorm.