A Cristal clear evening

Pin It

It has been months since that relaxing Friday lunch at Cristal Room by Anne-Sophie Pic, and once again an invitation came from B Bestie - for dinner this time. The vibe would be totally different at night, and with memories of how the room is decorated, I worried whether my camera would get enough light in the romantic setting to deliver good photos.

I need not have worried. The restaurant has these light stands ready to make sure diners can see what they're eating, and for anyone wanting to showcase the dishes on social media to have all the help they need.

And speaking of help, old fogeys like myself would need plenty of help reading the menu. B Bestie had, per SOP, arranged for personalized menus to be printed for us. Unfortunately, the majority of the text came in 4-point font. No, I'm not kidding. It was literally fucking 4-point font. Which wouldn't be easy to read in broad daylight, never mind in a dining room darkened for ambiance like this one. B Bestie protested by pointing out that the font in the regular menu is bigger. This is true, but going from a 4-point to 6-point font helps practically no one. I still have to squint and take off my bifocals to get a closer look. amd suddenly reminded of the talk given by fellow speaker Kim Walker at TEDxVictoriaHarbour in 2012.

As usual, we started with some of the house Champagne...

Billecart Salmon Pic, MyOrigin 191220 - we were told the base vintage was 2020 but the website says 2019... This had a lovely fragrance. Good balance on the palate, very easy to drink, but by no means bland or light. Finish was nice and long.

We started our meal with a trio of bites, although the first one was definitely a lot more than just "a bite"...

"Oyster" - the oyster from Huîtres Cadoret in Brittany was shucked and encased in a crunchy, edible shell along with a layer of caviar.

We've also got lardo cream in between. Gotta say that the oyster was fairly briny, which wasn't at all surprising. Worked well with the cream, though...

Squid tartlet - with melon, Thai basil, and sacaline(?) This was fairly smoky and frankly more acidic than expected, but for some reason also tasted a little like ham to me... I thought the overall combination was pretty nice. The texture of the squid was nice and soft, but still got some of that bounce.

Pistachio pie tee - ah yes... must do the pie tee... Inside we had diced smoked shrimp, strong citrus flavors from the finger lime, along with mint, pesto, and sea fennel.

Brioche with Tasmanian pepper

The butter was made with local milk and topped with some camellia pollen.

Vegetal dashi chawanmushi and caviar, teardrop peas, ebi shrimp and peanut praliné - yes, a very pretty dish... I LOVE tear drop peas because they are so, sooo tender and just really sweet. I didn't think the caviar was needed, but it was used sparingly so it was fine. Provided some umami contrast with the peas.

Digging down will get you the vegetal "chawanmushi (茶碗蒸し)" with the custard made of roasted soy beans and kelp. What really bothered me, though, was the "peanut praliné" at the bottom, which really did not work well with whatever shrimp (the flavors reminded me of Chinese dried shrimp 蝦米) they put in there. It was somewhat of a WTF moment for me...

Don't get me wrong, I'm a guy who likes having peanut butter in his savory food. People who know me well enough know just how much I love the sandwich at Yue Hing (裕興) - arguably my favorite in the world. I also love going to Burger King in Taiwan so I could get peanut butter on my beef burgers. But this... was just a prime example of chefs who insist on making things more complicated than they need to be. Why couldn't they have just given us everything from the custard up and skipped everything below? That would have been so, sooo simple yet fucking delicious. No, I'm not as diplomatic as Your Highness, whose social media post basically said the same thing without pointing out the flaws of this dish. I really, really wanted to scream in anguish.

via GIPHY

Lapsang Souchong clarification - B Bestie didn't pass on my request to the sommelier, so I still got poured this non-alcoholic drink to go with the dish. I took one whiff and a tiny sip and... instantly had the same reaction as Blaine and Antoine above. I took a second whiff - without sipping - just to try to decipher what made up the aroma that I didn't care for. Then it hit me. It smelled exactly like the pods that the peas came out of. No, this didn't smell like the peas themselves - just the green and vegetal pods. Maybe the chef wanted to showcase the sustainability of the restaurant by making use of the pods - like the way Goldfinger did - but I think I'd much prefer to eat them than to smell it in my drink.

Les Berlingots ASAP, pasta parcels filled with goat cheese, green tomato consommé flavoured with chrysanthemum and marigold - these days I wonder whether one could dine at a Pic restaurant without having the chef's berlingots. The sauce was made with green tomatoes packing a strong dose of acidity. Intense herbal flavors pierced through it all. The toasted amaranth seeds on the Japanese cherry tomatoes were really, really lovely - both texture-wise and flavor-wise.

The pasta was introduced as having been filled with "ashy goat cheese"... so was that Sainte-Maure, Selles-sur-Cher, or something else? Whatever it was, I loved the flavors, and that creamy acidity matched so well with the high acidity in the sauce.

2023 François Cotat Sancerre Monts Damnés - this was soooo fresh, full of green apples and a little bit of vanilla from oak. Sweet and fragrant on the nose. Lovely wine, and I thought it paired very well with the fruity acidity in the dish.

Next we were shown a little pot, where we had matsutake (松茸) underneath a blanket of kelp.

Matsutake from Yunnan, embraced with abalone and kombu confit, gyokuro and Douglas pine - apparently the shrooms had been cooked in gyokuro (玉露) and pine butter. Mushroom dashi came with smoked pine oil, which explains why this was so smoky... and also my inability to taste any gyokuro whatsoever.

Served à la Hasselback with thin slices of abalone inserted into some of the gaps. I thought they meshed very well together.

Hanatomoe Extended Aging Koshu (花巴 本醸造 長期熟成古酒), 1988, released 2024 - seimaibuai of 70%. This was very fragrant, very savory, with beautiful notes of soy sauce, plus a little nuttiness thanks to oxidation. Absolutely perfect pairing with the mushroom.

Japanese kinmedai, cooked on charcoal, sabayon flavoured with fresh bay leaves and pink peppercorn - always happy to see splendid alfonsino on my plate, and great when cooked on charcoal. The flavors were a little deeper thanks to some aging. Once can hardly go wrong with haricots verts.

2022 Cos Zibbibo in Pithos - pretty fragrant with some interesting spices on the nose. Definitely a little oxidized but not too bad.

Charolais beef fillet, suffused with miso, coffee, caraway, eggplant poudré with pine buds - this came with a condiment made with smoky eggplant layered with some pine buds on top.

I remember being so excited when I saw others posting about having Charolais here, and imagined beef that is full of, you know, beefy flavors. What we got had a lot more marbling than I wanted from French cattle. I wanted it leaner, and BLEU. This piece of beef was a little overcooked on the underside, although the problem was clearly worse at the two ends of this strip. The center remained a little more tender, and that was OK.

This was the second time the kitchen has overcooked the meat course. What's up with that?!

2016 Rostaing Côte-Rôtie Ampodium - this was pretty young and soooo fragrant, so floral with a hint of violet, and plenty of cedar. So full of life at this stage, and I would love to revisit in another 5 or 10 years.

Le millefeuille, coffee chantilly, meadowsweet sobacha caramel and tuille - we had different types of tuille - some made with sobacha (蕎麦茶) - stuck to the ginger-and-coffee chantilly. This looked very, very pretty.

We've got coffee cremeux, caramel infused with both meadowsweet and sobacha, but of course... no one could taste the sobacha because it is just too damn light, delicate and - nay - BLAND. I could, at least, taste the candied ginger at the bottom. A really tasty dessert, and almost my favorite course tonight.

Jean-François Ganevat Vieux Macvin du Jura - apparently aged for 8 years. This smelled not like wine but Chinese white tea, with a slight hint of raisins. Very fragrant in the mouth, with a light sweetness, some acidity, and a nice and herbal finish that just lingered on. Such a beautiful wine!

"Hazelnut" - I definitely tasted the curry in the chocolate.

Madeleine with Buddha's hand - got candied chunks of Buddha's hand (佛手柑) inside.

An interesting evening that led to lively discussions at the table, and it wasn't just about the food being served. Was this an unhappy meal? Not by any means. Many of the dishes were delicious, apart from that first course where I wanted to wring someone's neck for ruining what could have been a perfectly beautiful dish. So what do I have to complain about?!

Look, no one has to remind me how famous and well-respected Anne-Sophie Pic is, how many stars her restaurants collectively hold. The third generation in a line of world-famous chefs. Compared to her highness, I'm a fucking nobody. The "沒有出息的小蟲" from that David Tao song, or "the pus that infects the mucus that cruds up the fungus that feeds on the pond scum". She doesn't have to listen to whatever I have to say, and I'm very certain she won't - because she doesn't even know I exist. BUT...

I see the chef describing the vision for the dishes - and I'm sure they're all amazing to her and her team - but for many of us they are just too complicated, with too many elements. When there are so many elements in a dish, a significant percentage of them inevitably get lost - because for most of us, our palates just aren't that sophisitcated. We're not all Supertasters, and I'm already under the delusion that I'm in the upper quartile when it comes to identifying flavors. When you put subtle flavors together with ingredients that pack a punch, most of us only notice the flavors that are grabbing us by the collar and bitchslapping us in the face. None of us tasted the gyokuro or the sobacha tonight, and it seemed a waste to try to force those Asian ingredients into the mix.

But hey, the meal was still decent - unlike this disastrous meal in London a few years ago. Claude Bosi is a chef who knows fuck all about Asian flavors, whose cooking I will never, ever want to experience again.

Grateful to the restaurant for the hospitality, and happy that they switched me to wines for the pairing. Just the glass of Ganevat at the end was enough to make this a happy meal.