Vichu's House

Char's View
So every year for the past four years, Vichu has a tradition of inviting his closet friends over for a feast specially prepared by him. I had the honor of attending last year and this year. Let me just say, his cooking is amazing and it really boggles me that this guy doesn't have his own restaurant yet!

I also want to take this time to insert a disclaimer. Most of you will continue to read this review and think, "Man! Who does this girl think she is? Her friend has prepared this amazing 5-course meal when you usually eat Ramen for dinner and YOU have the nerve to critique HIS food. You'll never get invited again." I was asked to write this review and one day soon, you'll read a review of my cooking from Vichu. So all is fair on The Foodie Trail.

Our amuse bouche for the evening started off with a salmon tartare and red onion creme fraiche on a black poppy seed tuille. (I helped with the creme fraiche and the tuille) which I must say were both excellent. The salmon tartare was fresh and minced to perfection and the whole amuse bouche was a savory melt in your mouth kick-off to the meal. We then moved on to two different soup-in-a-soups. (Vichu had a fancy name for this that now I can neither recall or spell.) But basically, he had prepared two different soups which he gelatinized. After putting a couple of cubes of the gelatinized soup in little finger bowls, he poured a Japanese broth over them to create a whole new soup. The first was a beet soup (a reprise from last year's dinner.) I don't normally like beets (brings me back to my days of studying abroad in Sydney where the Aussies love to put beets on everything) but once the Japanese soup was poured on top, the two flavors surprisingly had a great chemistry together. The second soup was a cauliflower curry which again had a wonderful flavor when blended with the Japanese broth. I would have to say that the third course was my favorite of the whole evening. Vichu had overcome his anxiety of boiling the live Boston lobsters and created a butter poached lobster with a papaya slaw. Presentation of this dish made me proud as he placed a beautiful, narrow rectangle plate before us. One end had a ring of the papaya slaw which had just enough lime juice to make the side a perfect blend of sourness, sweetness and spicyness and when paired with the neatly piled lobster on the other end, made me want to say that that was a perfect ending in and of itself. But having the Asian M.O. of not wasting any part of those poor lobsters, he used the claw meat to create lobster roll sliders. This was simple enough, he blended the lobster meat with home made aioli and celery and placed the mixture on French cheese puffs. I think I could have eaten like a dozen all on my own. Next was our palette cleanser, a sangria of sorts. I believe it was red wine gelatin with an Orangina sorbet on top. I was a little skeptical and the red wine hadn't quite gelled properly but it was sweet and really did reflect a good Sangria. Our fourth course, was a beautiful braised ox tail and gnocchi. Of course, Vichu made gnocchi from scratch. I expected the ox tail to fall off the bone but instead it was a little tough. (I, however, will take the blame for that seeing as was in charge of searing the ox tail before it was put in to braise. I have my mother's genes and might have overcooked them prior to the braising step.) I also think the dish could have benefitted to have the onions chopped smaller rather than the large strips to help aid the texture of the dish and it could have used less sauce or a good loaf of beautiful bread to sop it up with. The dessert I'm sad to say was a bit disappointing. We had a grapefruit sorbet which was just a bit too tart for my taste and finished it up with an earl gray ice cream which is always amazing when Vichu makes it but just doesn't go well on the palette after having grapefruit.

All in all, Vichu is an amazing chef and deserves 3 Michelin stars in my book! And as for the rest of you, you'll just have to wait until you get invited to this annual dinner!

Vichu's View
Dinner at Scott’s is an annual dinner party where I invite all my favorite people and torture them with my cooking. Luckily someone always steps up and does the bartending, which goes a long way in proving the adage “with enough alcohol anything is palatable”. I would like to take this opportunity to thanks my friends for still being my friends, and for stepping up and eating the food even though a lot of the concepts border on culinary disasters…

Dinner at Scott’s IV: The Gathering

The Amuse-Salmon Ice Cream: The idea was simple, recreate a dish I enjoyed many years earlier at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry. A cornet of black sesame tuile with a red onion crème fraiche filling, topped off with salmon tartare made to look like an ice cream cone. Simple right? Oh not so… It came out as a tuile disk with the fixin’s placed on top and thanks to Charlene and her excellent plating skills the dish looked really good despite my overcooking the tuiles and not being able to make them into cornets. The taste of the dish was pretty close, but I think I might have miscalculated how much oil to put in the salmon tartare and tasted a bit oily, but overall I think I got 10% of it right.

The second course was little neck clams broiled with a bit of olive oil, lemon juice and salt, topped with some proscuitto. Sounds good doesn’t it? Well if you execute it right this dish is out of this world, clams don’t usually need a whole lot to make them good but on the same note they don’t need very much to make them bad either! These clams were a bit dull on the palette - under seasoned, and a bit overcooked, wow so only 3 out of 3 wrong with this dish. Next time I’ll add more lemon and salt and take out some of the olive oil.

I got these Little Necks from the James Hook Company in Boston. They were the hardest clams I’ve ever shucked because of how fresh and feisty they were! Opening each one was like fighting to get a chastity belt off a nun!

The third course was by far my most experimental. The idea was simple, create a neutral but tasty soup base (in this case I chose Dashi) to which you could add different flavoring cubes (concentrated and gelatinized soups cut into cubes) to and create a unique mouthful of soup with each spoonful. I choose beet and curried cauliflower as my flavoring agents, but a wide array of flavoring could have been used. I would have plated it with a small bowl of hot soup placed on a small platter with colourful flavoring cubes arranged beautifully beside the bowl and a Chinese soupspoon placed on the end. The diner could then mix and match the flavor cubes however they liked in the soupspoon and then add some hot soup base and watch and taste a new creation blossom before your eyes. Pretty cool idea huh? But alas failure! The flavoring cubes were so soft I had trouble getting them unmolded into a soup bowl, let alone placing them on a plate and having people try and pick them up. Somewhere out there a perfect ratio of gelatin to concentrated soup (holding the cubes together just enough to handle while still melting enough to dissolved almost instantly when hot soup is added) exists I just need to find it. Next time I will use a vegetable consume rather than dashi (the dashi was a bit strong for what I wanted).

Fourth course part I was my interpretation of a Lobster roll. I replaced the roll with a Gougeres and made a standard New England lobster roll filling. The Gougeres came out a bit soft on the outside but overall quite tasty (not floury, but eggy and cheesy). The filling, however, needs work… the butter poached claw meat was a bit overcooked and the mayonnaise was too thick and too overpowering in taste. I think if I dilute the mayo a bit more this might not be a bad dish.

Fourth course part II butter poached lobster tail on a papaya salad with tom yum sauce. This course was going to be a deconstruction and refinement of a Tom Yum Soup with lobster instead of shrimp, with sauce rather than a soup. Well I mucked up the sauce pretty badly so I didn’t serve it. Next time I have to start the sauce waaaay earlier. The lobster tails were overcooked and a bit rubbery but poaching in butter idea is here to stay. I like the overall taste of the butter poached lobsters but need to improve the execution. The papaya salad was pretty much how I wanted it, minus the slightly ripe papaya, which ended up being a really funny color when you add the cilantro lime marinade to it. But I think if I can find a truly unripe papaya the color won’t be so disconcerting. It’s supposed to be green and adding more green to green is fine, but adding green to slightly yellow and orange papaya makes it just an odd color.

Next time I’ll also plate the two lobster dishes side by side on a plate with potato chips and I think the presentation will be complete.

The palate cleanser was a deconstruction of my favorite sangria recipe. I made a red wine gelee to which I added Orangina slush at the last minute. However, I didn’t add enough gelatin to the red wine gelee so it was still liquid and when mixed with the Orangina slush creating a really repulsive looking liquid. Oh lordy food should never be a muddy brown. The overall taste, however, was close to what I wanted, but I just couldn’t get over the look of dish.

The main course was a simple oxtail ragu with gnocchi, which next time I will take more time to prepare. The oxtail wasn’t braised anywhere near long enough so the meat was tough and not meltingly soft as it should have been. The gnocchi itself was as it should have been (Thanks Denise), and the sauce was a bit on the greasy side. I’ve made this dish before and it didn’t end up being quite so unfinished and haphazard. Better execution next time and it’ll become the dish I remember so fondly.

Dessert was Earl Grey ice cream, which is one of my favorite ice creams and came out almost as I like it. I’ll steep the tea a bit less next time and take out some of the bitter edge.

Dessert Part II Grapefruit gelee topped with a Guwertraminer gelee, More patience in the execution I think it’ll turn out looking right. I was too hasty in pouring the Guwertraminer gelee on the grapefruit gelee causing the mixture to intermix rather than layer. I didn’t get to taste the concoction and I hope it turned out okay. I tasted them separately but not together. Note to self learn to count next time and make enough dishes for all your guests.