Luca Ecari
Google
I had a great deal of expectations around this place, delighting my wife’s and my palate to a culinary experience and an otherworldly gastronomic journey. I opted for the 8 course menu (160€ pp) and the add-on wine matching service (70€ pp) to make sure we could get the most out of this place. Let’s start in order with the atmosphere and first impact: sophisticated as you would expect with a non fully successful mix of (too few) traditional elements and (too many) aseptic modernist touches, starting with the caged Rubik’s cube in the middle of the dining table which ends up being no more than a weird though colorful finishing in an otherwise quite dully colored ambiance. Tastes are tastes, and this is my own assessment. The service is not at the level I expect from a Michelin star restaurant: an unobserving eye might mistake the presence of numerous attendants as the maximum sign of luxury and service, though no number of waiters and waitresses can make up for attentiveness, orientation to details and sense of care. While we had 3 people following us throughout the evolution of our experience, none of this called for us to feel like we were ‘personally’ followed and cared for - the human touch didn’t go over the basics of what a waiter does in many other places other than a starred restaurant. Their uniforms, furthermore, were not always clean, showing several signs from the foods they came in contact with. Don’t get me wrong, nothing outrageously disturbing… and yet something you notice at a Michelin star restaurant. Beyond this, the engagement throughout our menu felt like a basic school exercise. Executed routinely, without extremes. To give a sense of what I mean: all the courses received a very basic, didactic explanation, without any articulation of what lies beyond just the ingredients, articulating how they were prepared and what they and the whole course should represent. Again, this is something I expect at a Michelin star restaurant: it is not just about enjoying the ingredients in your plate; it is as well about entertaining your senses with the visual and verbal induction into the history of those ingredients and the care and the thought and love they received until they were skillfully crafted just for you. The food was all very good of course (pending some very personal palate) but not showing anything really out of the schemes of plates already seen (to be clear, don’t expect full re-elaboration of recipes). But all very skillfully executed. I appreciated the wine matching service though even here I would have wanted to receive a more engaging experience. Saying things like ‘mineral’ ‘leather’ ‘cherries’ etc. is not enough. ESPECIALLY in a place like this you need to embrace the unknown, the untold and whatever lies behind a wine. Also, whereas all wines where undoubtedly of good quality, none of them was a rare or unknown find (not to talk about the price, as I would not expect a 20€ bottle to be used for this service… but it was). To sum it all up: a very well executed and very technical school exercise, though alas not an above and beyond experience that makes you relish at every step of the way asking for more. That ‘more’ was behind the corner but didn’t fully get to it.