Last month I made the time to go to Pierre Gagnaire, said to be the best French restaurant in the country. I’d wanted to go for ages, but its opening hours never gave me a chance, until I heard a rumour that they’d started doing Saturday lunch and finally managed to get a booking. Honestly, this visit is the main reason my posting has been so slow lately. The dish names are so complicated -_- that writing it up felt like hard labour, and I just couldn’t bring myself to start.
But while I was dawdling, a Naver power blogger called Cosmos had the same menu as me and posted about it.
http://blog.naver.com/kosmose7/90096329382
http://blog.naver.com/kosmose7/90093344324
I didn’t even take a photo of the menu, so how grateful am I! Let me say up front that the dish names come from the pages above. The impressions, though, are entirely my own.
The basic place setting
Minimal, in keeping with the interior. Maybe because I booked early, they gave us a window table with a great view. Thanks to that there was plenty of light, which made taking photos easy. As always I’d turned up loaded down with gear, and they brought out an extra chair for it; the service was as good as any top restaurant abroad.
The menu I chose that day was a lunch called L’Esprit de Pierre Gagnaire, at around 190,000 won.
Amuse-bouche
From top to bottom…
A stick filled with chestnut cream and orange purée
A meringue filled with lemon and red wine cream.
Carrot, tuna and chorizo ground up and spread at the bottom,
topped with a chestnut sablé, tuna and salad
Tomato bouillon whipped into a mousse, topped with broccoli powder and basil
Rocket cake and sablé au sel
Every one of these is a treat both to look at and to eat. A satisfying start to an expensive course.
Butter
This was above average too, but compared with Echire it falls a bit short…
Sparkling water
You can’t drink your way through the course in the middle of the day, so I started with a light glass of water… Of course, even water here isn’t cheap.
Bread
The bread on top was good, so I had a refill later. The others weren’t anything special.
Cresson and cucumber granité, apricot paste
Here comes the full-on molecular cuisine. It’s a strange taste, but I wouldn’t say it’s bad… The reason I love French food is that it’s full of the chef’s ideas and creativity, and this place does show off some of that nicely.
Langoustine, watermelon cubes with soju, mascarpone, orange powder.
The watermelon with the prawn adds a crisp crunch to the bouncy texture. Taste-wise it passes. But the ingredients felt far too ordinary. Neither prawn nor watermelon is exactly expensive.
Cod carpaccio, radicchio coulis, squid ink gnocchi, fennel.
It tastes exactly like you’d imagine from the ingredients and the method. Nothing beyond that, though.
Aubergine purée with herbs and spices in a bowl, topped with a biscotto with Gorgonzola
Maybe because I love both aubergine and Gorgonzola, I really liked this one. Pretty presentation too.
Saffron emulsion and mussels, crowned with a corn espuma
There are mussels at the bottom, so think of it as a rich mussel soup with corn.
A glass of Chablis
With a course this good, how could I not order wine? I had a good look through the wine list; it wasn’t especially overpriced, but they don’t carry cheap wines, so the price range was a bit much. So I just ordered an inexpensive glass.
Wine by the glass
The ‘inexpensive’ one was 35,000 won a glass, I think…
Duck with cumin
The main is duck. It was well cooked, but maybe because it was imported frozen meat, it didn’t taste particularly special. My friend grumbled that we should have ordered the steak… I’m not usually big on steak (I’m sick of it by now), but with duck at this level we’d have been better off just ordering the steak. The price difference isn’t much either.
Duck leg and foie gras chopped and shaped with pistachios, topped with plum, romaine and red onion
This one was decent. Their willingness to try all sorts of things with duck is really admirable.
Tuna marinated in tomato, topped with rosemary
Refreshing. It seems to be a palate cleanser after the heavy main and before dessert. The order of dishes is spot on, as you’d expect from a top restaurant.
Sweet potato and coconut ice cream, topped with duck skin
The ice cream was good, but why on earth put duck skin on it? It had a slightly fishy, gamey note that didn’t go with the ice cream at all. Without that it might have been fine…
Now for the proper desserts. As always, so I could take loads of photos ^_^ we ordered one Pierre Gagnaire dessert and one soufflé dessert. The soufflé dessert first…
Pont-l’Évêque Chantilly cream surrounded by brown cubes of caramelised toast, green Aomori apple sorbet in the middle, julienned apple on top
I love desserts like this! Warm toast and cool apple sorbet! Gagnaire is the master of dessert, so a dessert this good is only to be expected.
Soufflé
Nicely risen into a star shape
You pour the syrup in and eat.
But… I just don’t get what makes a soufflé delicious! Maybe I’m not a soufflé person, but if there’s a place somewhere doing truly amazing soufflés, I’d love to go and have my prejudice shattered.
Bright red raspberry nougatine, raspberry sorbet
A dessert that looks intense, and tastes to match.
Champagne granité
Plain, yet tasty.
From here on it’s the Pierre Gagnaire dessert.
Caramelised peach covered with almond sugar nougatine, topped with apricot sorbet and yogurt sorbet
Just so-so. Not bad.
Raspberry dessert. Vanilla panna cotta topped with raspberry coulis, raspberry foam, raspberry cream, raspberry meringue and crushed raspberries
A dessert women would probably love. It looks pretty, but the taste isn’t as original as it is pretty.
Chocolate & vanilla parfait, avocado & lime purée, banana.
Opening it up, there was chocolate cake and banana parfait inside. A rather ordinary combination in a way, but it tastes good. The gold leaf on top is luxurious, but I don’t really care about decoration that has nothing to do with the taste… That said, it would work well for something like a proposal -_-
The main desserts are done, so it’s time for the petits fours.
Petits fours: cassis macaron, olive parfait, sugar-coated caramel passion fruit
They’re as tasty as they are cute. Now it’s time for tea, a leisurely chat about the food and talk about this and that. Being able to enjoy precious time like this is what makes a high-end French restaurant worthwhile. I think that day we talked about stocks…
Japanese ume plum jelly at the bottom, with a juice of passion fruit, kiwi, lime, mint, celery, green pepper and more poured over
It’s meant to be some kind of health juice, I guess… the taste was a bit iffy… Molecular cuisine or not, this is going a bit far…
Chocolates
They brought a whole case of them. I really loved these. They may well have been the most satisfying thing of the whole course that day. I only had one, but the quality was every bit as good as La Maison du Chocolat. Who knew there was chocolate of this quality in Korea… If I could have bought them separately, I might have taken a box home.
Herbal tea
Finishing with herbal tea… We must have been eating for about three hours, and whatever I thought of the food, it was a really enjoyable time. Korea ought to have at least one world-class restaurant. When you need a luxurious space like this for work or personal occasions, it’s a real relief not to have to fly all the way to Tokyo (or Hong Kong). Still, even allowing for the particular situation in Korea, it’s a shame the food falls short of restaurants of a similar level in Tokyo. Not using premium ingredients bothers me in particular. Most restaurants of this style make a very thin margin on the food and a huge one on the wine; maybe that strategy just doesn’t work in Korea… Going on taste alone I wouldn’t go back, but you never know, and if someone says they want to go, I might end up there again…
On the way out…
Sorry, the white balance is a mess… Anyway, I hope more restaurants of this level open in Korea, so competition heats up and the standard of food rises.