Assaggio

- Alex 2 Comments

 

 

date of visit: Thurs 5 July 2012

I have ummed and ahhed about writing this review. I visited Assaggio as part of a large group (there were 12 of us) which dines out fortnightly on a Thursday. This was my first time dining with most of the people and I always feel a bit self conscious reviewing someone else’s choice of venue. I also think that very often a large group is an unfair test of a restaurant.

However, last night Assaggio was awarded Restaurant of the Year in the Restaurant and Catering (SA) Awards for Excellence. This pushed me into putting down a few thoughts, because, frankly, my meal didn’t represent the best meal of the year (or, indeed, the best value meal of the year). And a bit of balanced consumer criticism never goes astray.

There are some things about Assaggio which I rate very highly. A dedicated vegetarian menu is available at all times – which is a definite plus because too many places offer just a token vegetarian offering*. The interior has plenty of soft surfaces so that, even though the tables are somewhat snug, there is none of the clatter that you endure at so many restaurants and cafés. Décor is smart and there is a wide window to peep into the kitchen.

Service was reasonably smooth but certainly not flawless: there was the occasional hiccup or delay with various requests (noted because one of those requests was my glass of wine!). A distinct incongruity was the fact that, when serving plates, the staff wore white gloves. The restaurant is simply not that smart. I’m actually struggling to recall going to any other restaurant where waiting staff served wearing gloves …

Food and wine wise, things certainly didn’t live up to their price tag. I ordered a glass of the Felton Road Chardonnay, which was around $15. Felton Road is a well known and tidy NZ producer and while I’m not overly familiar with the wine I have a sneaking suspicion that the bottle had been open a day or two too long. The punter ordering wine by the glass needs to be aware that this can be a problem, as does the restaurateur. If the wine is pricey enough that you’re going to keep on serving it when it’s a little past its prime you need to take it off your ‘by the glass’ list. Very often I’d query a glass in this kind of condition but, in a large group of people, most of whom I don’t know, I preferred to keep my mouth shut and let the evening keep on moving.

For entrée, I ordered the stuffed zucchini flowers. They were stuffed with a spinach, gorgonzola, ricotta and pine nut mousse. The gorgonzola wasn’t particularly strong so if you’re someone who’s not a big fan of blue cheese, don’t let that put you off. Unfortunately, while the filling was fine, the delicate flowers were swamped by a heavy breadcrumb crust, so that the dish became more about that crust than about the flowers or mousse. At $19 a serve this was a disappointing to say the least.

Main course wise I think I chose poorly. Or rather, I lacked imagination because I opted for the guitar string saffron pasta, served with blue swimmer crab and a tomato and shellfish sauce. There was nothing wrong with this dish and, price wise, it was on a par with the shellfish pasta I’d had at the Highway Hotel a week earlier. But at a restaurant that’s winning Best Restaurant gongs? I’d expect it to eclipse a pub pasta by a long way.

When we got to dessert I was, genuinely, quite full – so at least portion sizes aren’t a problem at Assaggio. I ordered the nougat. At $9 a serve I wasn’t sure what I was going to get. Oh – a piece of nougat, perhaps 3 cm long and 1 cm square (I’m being generous). I wasn’t the only person to order the nougat and I wasn’t the only person whose eyes popped out of their head at the combination of miserliness and cost!

After including my coffee, my share of the bill (and we did actually split the bill along individual lines because there’d been quite a disparity in ordering) came to $80. That’s the same as I paid at Press where I’d had more interesting food and considerably more to drink!

My impression was that Assaggio was nice but overpriced for what it was. And since that meal I’ve chatted to quite a few people, to see if my experience was a one off. Uniformly, opinion has been the same: “nice”, “good”, “too expensive”, “other places I’d go first”.

Is it enough for the “Best Restaurant” in South Australia to be “good” or “nice”? I don’t think so when there are so many restaurants where you can find “exciting” and “excellent”.

* Incidentally, Assaggio also offers a gluten free menu, although no one at our table made use of that.

Assaggio Ristorante on Urbanspoon

Rogan Josh

- Alex 1 Comment

Rogan josh spice mix

Ages ago I won a copy of Just Add Spice, by Lyndey Milan and Ian Hemphill. I have actually made a couple of things from it, including an excellent fish dish, but not blogged them. So today we redress that with the book’s take on rogan josh.

Rogan josh is a Kashmiri dish which is typically made with lamb but I’m sure this dish would work just fine with any other meat of your choice.

Just Add Spice has a lot of emphasis on making your own spice mixes, which I wish I found in more recipes. I always like to compare recipes for dishes such as this and while googling came across too many that gave lists of ingredients that included “jar of Rogan Josh curry paste”. Sigh.

If you can spare yourself the 5 minutes (or so) to make a spice mix it’s an invaluable thing to have in your culinary drawer. There are plenty of times when making a curry needs to be a quick exercise and if you have a decent homemade curry powder you save yourself a ton of time (and money).

Having said that, in this case the recipe gives you just the measurements you need for the finished dish but you can always double or triple up. The other thing about this spice mix recipe is that you don’t need to toast the spices at all. It’s just a case of measuring them out straight into the grinder and off you go.

Don’t be too pernickety about measuring things out here – you’re working with rough ratios and we’re not baking. So, into your grinder measure out: 2½ tsp coriander seeds, 2 tsp cumin sees, 1 tsp paprika, ½ tsp each of chilli powder, ground ginger and turmeric and ¼ tsp each of fennel seeds, nutmeg, cardamom seeds (from green cardamom) and cloves.

Measuring out nutmeg is a bit of a pain so I just grated what looked like roughly the right. Cardamom seeds – well, yes, if you only have pods there is a bit of bother here. You’ll need to get the seeds out of about 5 pods. The pods are easy enough to break into: a firm whack with the back of a solid knife will do the trick.

Grind everything up into a powder. This makes approximately 2 tbsp.

Although this supposedly makes enough for this recipe I found I had some leftover which I used up next time I needed to jazz up some meat.  Of course, it would work perfectly well for vegetarian dishes too!

For the rogan josh itself, take approximately 1kg of diced lamb (we used leg) and marinate it in a mix of plain yoghurt and the spice blend. The recipe calls for 500g of yoghurt but, based on my experience, this will be way too much. Tread carefully with your yoghurt!

You only need to marinate it for about 15 minutes so don’t feel you have to start this recipe a day in advance.

On the stove, heat ⅓ cup of mustard oil in a heavy casserole which will be OK in the oven. When it’s hot, add some chopped onions (I used 3 – I suggest you use some judgement depending on how much you like onion!) and cook until golden. Add 5 or 6 cloves of crushed/chop garlic and then the lamb and yoghurt mix.

Give it a stir, then add ½ tin of chopped tomatoes and bring to a simmer. The place in a preheated oven and leave it to do its thing.

The book says to have the oven at 100°C (80°C fan) and to cook for 2 hours. This temperature is just waaaaaaaaay too low. After two hours the meat was barely cooked through, the sauce hadn’t even begun to thicken up and dinner was starting to look a long way off.

When cooking meat slowly like this you don’t want to hit a boil – you want things to stay just under a simmer. And I guess that is why the recipe suggests putting the curry in the oven on such a low heat. Next time I’d just cook this on the stove because it’s much easier to keep an eye on how quickly things are moving, and it’s also much easier to take the lid off to allow for sauce thickening up. If you do want to use the oven I think I’d be starting things off at around 150°C and seeing how they progress.

When the lamb is cooked and tender serve with rice, garnished with coriander.

On first eating this dish I thought it was really dull – the yoghurt really seemed to have washed out the flavours of the spices. However, the next day it was much tastier, so I suspect the problem lay in the fact that the oven cooking had been at such a low heat the flavours (and sauce) had had no opportunity to concentrate. I may have also been too generous with the yoghurt marinade.

I later used the leftover spice mix in something else and it was perfectly tasty so I can’t lay the blame there.

The spice mix I will definitely make again but as a whole, this curry recipe doesn’t really cut the mustard.

Pizza e Mozzarella

- Alex 2 Comments

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date of visit: Wed 25 July 2012

It seems like pizza is a bit of an in-thing at the moment in Adelaide. Not that long ago Etica opened (I’m yet to get there) and hot on its heels is Pizza e Mozzarella on Pirie Street.

I was lucky enough to have a work lunch coming up and even more lucky that I seem to be the most food obsessed person on my team (wait, maybe even the whole floor). So when opinions were being canvassed for where we should eat I was jumping up and down suggesting Pizza e Mozzarella (on the basis that “I haven’t been there before!”).

My enthusiasm worked and a group of 14 of us trooped off for lunch. Pizza e Mozzarella is strictly a lunch venue – dinner is offered on a Friday though and it is closed on weekends. Given what I saw on a Wednesday lunch I’d also say that bookings should be considered essential.

As we were such a large group we had one of the banquet menus. We opted for the $30 a head option which was antipasto and pizza. We started with bread (very good bread, I might add – chewy and full of flavour) and prosciutto and this was followed by large platters of antipasto containing all kinds of goodies. Most of it was really delicious but there were a couple of things that let the side down. The marinated aubergine was gorgeous, the pickled green tomatoes were really lovely and the involtini, served warm, made a good counterpoint to all the vegetable treats. The pressed pork terrine type thing (yep – that’s technical Italian food talk!) was disappointing: it didn’t work cold and the pork pieces were quite large so it seemed quite sinewy and gristly. The tortilla (a bit out of place anyway?) was also a bit dull. The little tiny pickled fish (looking over the menu I suspect they were pickled whitebait but they were wee – much smaller than you’d expect whitebait to be) were really good though and something I haven’t had before.

Antipasto mostly demolished a selection of pizzas started coming out. Looking over the pizza menu it appears we had at least one of everything bar the seafood pizza. The pizzas are all very rough and ready in appearance and, like most actual Italian pizzas I’ve had, are not laden with toppings. The dough was thin on the bases but quite thick at the crust. Eating with a knife and fork was quite tricky so most of us just resorted to fingers. The only sensible way to eat pizza anyway, if you ask me! The toppings are simple, tried and true combinations which is no bad thing. I particularly enjoyed the capricciosa (artichoke, ham, anchovy and olive) and around the table there didn’t seem to be any complaints.

The banquet doesn’t include dessert but our table ordered one dessert pizza (an idea I really don’t get). I was quite grateful I was far too full to even consider trying it!

We came out spending just under $50 a head (that included beers and a few bottles of wine). One thing I didn’t like was the fact that we asked for tap water and were told that there was a $1 per person donation to charity for tap water orders. That seems to be a bit iffy to me. That little niggle aside, the service was good: efficient, friendly, helpful. A big tick is a more interesting than average wine list which includes a decent range of Italian reds and whites. I was also quite impressed overhearing some sensible wine advice being offered by the waiting staff.

Décor wise, Pizza e Mozzarella is definitely hitting the trendy/funky mark. It’s a bright, airy, multilevel venue with Riedel glassware complemented by very retro crockery (think stoneware plates and 1950s op-shop water jugs) – and, naturally, an open kitchen.

I’d go back to Pizza e Mozzarella in a flash. If you’re ordering à la carte you could easily spend under the $50 a head mark that we hit. Perhaps not the cheapest pizza you’ll eat but definitely a solid all round experience.

Pizza e Mozzarella Bar on Urbanspoon