Text 30876, 103 rader
Skriven 2012-11-07 06:37:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: Gagnaire I 522
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We rose early. No free breakfast, apparently, for platinums
at the IC, and as I don't eat breakfast unless it's free, so
we headed out to see what the neighborhood had to offer. We
walked to Roppongi; we determined that Mike's had been less
than a mile away, though admittedly not by a particularly
direct route. On our way we strolled through a garden
district off by Suntory Hall and saw a small temple or two
and some pretty urban plantings.

Roppongi in the morning wasn't all that interesting - I
figure everyone was out partying the night before and was
still huddled under the covers when we went through. We
did cut through this multilevel mall, which really didn't
appeal, but which was in fact full of people. Instead, we
hustled into the subway and went downtown to the Imperial
Palace, whose East Garden and its small museum of treasures
is one of the gems of the city. Wandering through the
grounds was a couple hours well spent, but eventually it
was time to return to the hotel.

We repaired to the room for showers and a change into our
Sunday best for our reservation at Pierre Gagnaire, which
as luck would have it was a minute's elevator ride from
our digs. It was a weekend, so there wasn't the express
lunch, which allows you to spend $50 and say you've eaten
here, without having actually experienced it. There was,
however, a $100 prix fixe (double it with the wine), which
we jumped on. The menu is called Apinac, after the ancestral
home of the Gagnaire clan.

The service is very suave, as befits a place that gets four
cutleries in the Michelin guide (in addition to its two
stars, which I am not completely convinced it deserves).

Bread - some kind of buttery roll not a brioche, brown
walnut and fruit bread, and a small wild yeast (sourdough
but not quite so sour) wheat loaf. They were very good, and
the sweet butter was very good, but I am not a bread person.

Amuses not on the menu:

a canape of tuna with tiny broccoli bits over cucumber;

something unmemorable and which I thus totally forget, I am
pretty sure it involved fried lotus root and some aioli
type thing;

a dish of popcorn with poppy seeds, also unmemorable
but for the banality of it (Lilli liked it);

"autumn leaf" - fried something in the shape of a leaf
with a blob of strangely intense tomato puree, quite good;

a so-called hazelnut, which turned out to be a nut butter,
sort of like a somewhat less sweet Nutella, with lots of
truffle oil.

In general these things were fun but things that you could
make at home without either working or thinking too hard.
The leafy thing was remarkable for the verisimilitude to
something you'd pick off the sidewalk in October, plus it
actually tasted pretty good.

Small appetizers:

Champagne sorbet with grapes - real pink Champagne made
into a not-too-sweet confection, sided with peeled fruit
that somehow had been transformed so you couldn't tell if
they were a gelatined facsimile of grape or the real thing
artfully carved and transformed. I am inclined to believe
that there were a few of each.

Chestnut soup, Chantilly cream with rum and orange juice -
really good soup, but I thought why tart up the whipped
cream with rum? There also seemed to be a bit of vanilla,
which went well. The orange was a sour, bitter contrast,
and I was not completely convinced by it.

Just sizzling sanma fish, red pepper pulp and mizuna leaves
- the fish looked like a diagonal cut of mackerel. It was
excellent. Lilli had let it be known that she didn't eat
fishy things, and her slice of fish was replaced by a big
fat beautiful cepe, which was hugely savory and went
perfectly substituted in this treatment.

Slices of smoked quail, sour lotus with saffron, gingerbread
powder - very satisfying tastewise if not portionwise; not
a tour de force, but just really nice. The smoke seemed to
have partially been tobacco smoke.

Sauerkraut salad, pork and seaweed flakes - the French
description told a different story with its "oreilles de
cochon"; I waited until Lilli had eaten the dish (no seaweed
on hers, by special order) to tell her; she was not put off,
luckily. The kraut was pretty normal, though to the Japanese
palate it might have been a bit unfamiliar. The pig ears
were julienned very fine and so pretty tender though still
with that cartiaginous crunch. Some very thin nori batons
completed the dish.

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