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Here’s the deal:
I picked up an aged steak, a ribeye, and got some nice marks on it using a grill pan. I also reduced an entire bottle of cabernet, and at the end, mounted a bit of butter into it. Then, I sautéed some chantarelles with garlic.
What else was there? Oh yeah, fresh crumbles of aged parmesan cheese. This was a real winner. Seared ribeye, cut thin, with cabernet reduction drizzle with parmesan and chantarelles.
If you’ve made risotto before, it’s the same basic idea here. Start with a mixture of fat and your onions… cook them down until they begin to take on a caramel color. Add chopped shiitake stems and garlic. Then, add the rice, stirring in the fat for 5 minutes before adding liquid.
The first liquid added is a 1/4 cup of white wine, just about any one will do. Then, layer on the flavor with alternating additions of chicken, then mushroom stock. At one point we also added water so it wasn’t too rich.
Near the middle of the cooking we added chopped sun-dried tomatoes, and then added the mushrooms. We had, by weight, about 70% lobster mushrooms and 30% shiitakes. With 5 minutes remaining, add the shredded pork. This kind of dissolved throughout the risotto and enhanced the flavor with the “meatiness” of the concoction. It’s very likely in-authentic, but it was delicious.
Towards the end, round it off with a touch of cream and a fresh sprinkle of marjoram.
If you had it on hand, and wanted to really go a step beyond, shaved parmesan cheese would have been delightful on top, served tableside.
We started the meal with something else in the Italian spirit, ripe sweet tomatoes, microbasil, and fresh cheese with prosciutto di parma.
Dress the cheese and tomatoes with salt and pepper, the whole lot with a syrupy balsamic and your best EVOO.
We recently decided to try the new Japanese steakhouse west of Short Pump Mall, along Broad Street, adjacent to the new Ethan Allen furniture store.
They offer a more traditional dining area “for sushi” orders, and the larger part of their dining room is available for Teppan table dining. The fold-out fan style menus feature different proteins that can be ordered (steak, chicken, combinations of meat and seafood) that determine your dinner price. The cook comes out, fires-up the hot grill, and does a little fancy noisemaking and saucing to prepare the meal. You get fried rice, the protein, and some vegetables. It was all very typical, I have to say, nothing different from the other places in town that have been doing this already (Osaka, Kabuto, etc.).
The prices were unreasonably high. I paid $27 for my steak dinner, for supposedly “filet mignon.” The waitress repeated it like a French chef as she wrote it down, but what came out and got sizzled before my eyes was hardly “filet mignon.” It didn’t taste like filet mignon. The tableside dinners come with some type of soup (broth with 3 mushroom slices, wow!) and a bad-looking ginger-dressing salad (the lettuce was not iceberg, but was not good).
The meal was fine, I guess, but very pedestrian. Our total bill was $67.00 before tip, which included one sushi roll we ate as an appetizer. This was disappointing. The tuna on top had no flavor and looked to be an unnatural red color (neon, really). The roll was bathed in some sickly sweet sauce. Yuck. There’s nothing I can imagine more un-Japanese. Again, it appears this place is run by Chinese.
We won’t be back. A pack of girls out for a birthday dinner (probably in the 5th grade) had a great time behind us. If you want to impress the kids, this place will suffice. But for any type of fine or authentic dining, choose elsewhere.
All I heard on the way home was: “For that money, we could have eaten at Dd33!” Indeed.
Today I visited (for the first time) the fun at Brown’s Island at the 2008 Richmond Folk Music Festival.
I came across this tasting-menu review of Bo Innovation, a Hong Kong restaurant. I’m intrigued.
It sounds like an Asian version of molecular gastronomy. I’d really like to try some of this!