Highlights: garfish stuffed with pork
URL: http://www.pearlrestaurant.com.au/
Physical: 631–633 Church Street Richmond, Victoria (near Church St Bridge)
I really like websites like eatability. I like amateur reviews. I like it when people pan La Luna because, you know, it turns out that it takes maybe 40 minutes to cook a 1 kilo steak, rest it and serve it. I fucking love it when I hear that Jacques Reymond or whoever's venison carpaccio is 'a bit rare' for someone's liking.
People, I feel, tend to expect too much. An award--a hat or two--and a high price tag and a nice reputation and such doesn't mean, realistically, that everything is going to be perfect. If you're in a group of 10, there's always going to be one or two dishes that just aren't as nice as the rest. Maybe they'll make some mistake and send your table the wrong thing or they'll forget something. Cooks and waiters are people too.
So. My philosophy. If I go out, whether I pay $10 or $100, I expect it to be a good experience, yes. I expect the food to taste alright and the servers to, pretty much, ask me for what I want. I like it when the food is really nice. I like it when the service is like some invisible helping hand, appearing at just the right moments to ask if everything is okay or to top up your drinks, not bringing out the next course until you're ready, generally being informative and funny and nice and sociable even to social retards like me. I love all that.
I go out to have a nice time. Again, whether I pay $10 or $100, I want to enjoy myself. I don't want to whinge. If 10% of a meal isn't that good--the cheese souffle, the tartare, the waiter who got a bit offended when I said I didn't want wine--it's not the end of the world. I focus on the 90% that was good. I don't go out to complain. I don't go out and take notes on all the shitty things so I can have a little tantrum on eatability.
And this brings me to Pearl. Pearl is not a bad place. Obviously. Pearl has been well regarded for a good ten years now. Shit, the fact that it's been open for ten years is in itself a pretty good sign. It's won hats and other awards. I'll tell you right up that Pearl isn't bad. And there's the rub. It's not bad. But I'm not sure if I like it.
Tonight I went to Pearl with 7 friends. I loved, right away, the feel of the place. It was clean. Classy. Cool. Perfect, I think, for a get together. Service was a little slow but this was not a bad thing in any way, shape or form. If you go out and you're paying a lot, you don't want--at least, I don't--to be rushed through or to have restaurant staff in your face all the time. I'm there to talk to my friends. You don't pay $30-50 just for the steak or trout or duck: you pay for the ingredients and labour and all that, yes, but you also pay to sit somewhere nice in what is hopefully nice company.
The problem was the food. I was happy with everything I ordered, but I was one of two people on the table who felt that way: and only one of us, I'd say, is the sort who'd complain.
The garfish stuffed with pork was a really nice dish. It was well presented--a whole fish, mostly boned out, stuffed with pork mince served atop a fruity sauce. A simple dish presented simply. The fish was sliced into cross sections and the head--meaning you got the most delicious meat--and tail were intact. An all time and forever favourite? Perhaps not. But an altogether pleasant dish.
Next up was a whole rainbow trout with, again, a sauce reduced to sticky richness and a salad of Asian herbs. The trout was pretty good--amazing, no, but I liked it--and there was a lot of it. Almost to the point of being too much. If I bought this dish in the market, I'd share between myself and my girlfriend at home. that said, it wasn't some ugly arse dinosaur serving: it was presented really well. It was visually and aromatically striking. Some nice coconut rice appeared for me but not for a friend who ordered the same dish.
I was debating choosing the pork ribs instead of the trout and I'm glad I didn't. They were apparently dry. The lamb, too, came out cold. The witlof that came with the quail apparently wasn't nice at all. Again, I put this out there, I think it's downright stupid to expect perfection from any place, but this level of quality--or lack thereof--wasn't encouraging. That said, the Pearl team tried to put things right. The cold lamb, which was the only dish complained about, was taken off the bill and, when desserts came, we were presented with two complimentary plates of petit fours. Credit where credit is due: fuck ups are acknowledged and handled well.
The side I shared with someone else, the chips with mushroom salt, wasn't my idea of a good time. In fact, it was the only thing I personally disliked. The chips just seemed a bit ... sad. Like maybe they'd been sitting under a heat lamp for a long time. Chips only stay crisp for a very short amount of time, no matter how good the recipe is, whether they're handcut or frozen mass-produced potato products. You really need to prepare them and get them out to the table straight away.
Dessert, finally, was ... okay. I ordered the passionfruit and chocolate mousse and, yeah, it was alright. Pretty much what you'd expect: a light chocolate mousse, a passionfruit mousse that wasn't really acidic like fresh passionfruit (which I like), but fairly mild. It wasn't too heavy or rich after a very substantial main course, which I guess was the idea.
A friend of mine ordered nothing but desserts, going through all but one of them (the banana fritter), and only really got into the gingerbread and rubarb pudding.
Overall I'm not sure how to conclude this. I really wanted to like Pearl. I wanted to go in, spend what my budget allowed and have a good time. I figured some things wouldn't be amazing--again, the kitchen and front of house teams are just people--but that I'd be able to say hey, 80 or 90% of the experience was good, that I had reasonable (at least) food in reasonable company and that was that. Anything else being a bonus.
My food, at least, was reasonable. I'm not going to get hung up on the chips. Fuck the chips. The garfish was simple and nifty and did basically everything right. I like that this place let me get a whole fish and to dig the meat out of the head. I liked that whoever was in charge of portion control made it basically impossible to argue that you didn't get enough good: every main on the table but especially the trout was avaliable in abundance. The general consensus was that the food was okay.
Do I feel ripped off? No. I had a nice night, a couple of nice dishes, a couple of glasses of a nice wine from what seemed like a pretty good list.
Would I go back to this place? Well, no
No comments:
Post a Comment