Even I, who eat nothing but Korean food whenever I’m back in Korea, go looking for French or Italian when I feel like wine now and then. Collecting wine is my hobby, and if I don’t drink some from time to time my cellar is going to burst. I hardly ever drink alone, so at times like this I have to call a meetup and get people to drink it with me. This time we opened three bottles at Bien Être, a French place near Seongsu Bridge that apparently opened recently. The corkage isn’t exactly cheap, but oh well..
This place has already appeared on food blogs all over, so I won’t go into detail. I will say that Bien Être is a rather unusual name for a French restaurant. I got a little curious whether they knew what it meant when they picked it, but it was a group gathering that day, so I held back from asking.
Champagne
I remember it being Veuve Clicquot. There are no cheap wines on this place’s list, and the wines aren’t priced low either. French restaurants do make their money on wine rather than food, that’s true, but if you’re going to charge high prices you need a proper sommelier and flawless service. I couldn’t really understand a bistro going with that concept. Well.. the food is on the cheap side for Korea, so I suppose I should cut them some slack. (Though the downside is that the wine prices cancel that out..)
The third wine I opened..
I took a shot before chilling it. MR.K is a rare dessert wine from Sine Qua Non, a cult winery in the US. VIN DE GLACE means ice wine. Sine Qua Non is adored by RP (Robert Parker), so wine lovers will have heard of it plenty, but I suspect few people know that a limited-production, ultra-rare wine like this exists. (Something like 500 bottles a year, I think..) I’d never heard of it either before I got hold of a bottle. My impression after drinking it: a top-class wine worthy of Sine Qua Non’s reputation, with rich fruit aromas and a truly intense sweetness. It wasn’t fully mature yet, but it was at least Beerenauslese (BA) level or above. People who like sweet things would really love this style, but it’s not a character that people who dislike sweetness could learn to love. Only a few of the people at this gathering liked it. I was one of them, of course ^_^
Starter
I can’t really remember the name of the dish, but someone else’s blog has a detailed description. For me it was nothing out of the ordinary, but I’m not sure it will go down well in Korea. This style is certainly Gagnaire-like and takes a lot of fiddly work, but to draw out the flavour of the ingredients perfectly, choosing them is also very hard. But.. when I tasted it, the flavours weren’t all that delicate. Each ingredient should stay alive without masking the others’ strengths, and that style doesn’t quite fit the concept of a bistro. At a grande maison, maybe…
Bread
Salty. Overall I got the feeling this place is working hard to serve French food the way it’s done in France, but I’m not sure that’s actually the right call. Taste is culture too, and copying another country’s food isn’t automatically what makes it cool. Food in this style needs a really heavy wine, whereas in Korea and Japan the image of French food is closer to a light, fresh Burgundy.
What was this again..
Pretty much every dish was on the salty side, so it was a bit hard going without wine. Around this point we finished the first bottle, a Vosne-Romanée ’05, and opened the second, a Paleo ’03. We had three bottles for eight people, and that turned out about right, maybe a touch short.. The one real pity with a big meetup is that you can’t enjoy watching the wine slowly open up as you drink. Unless you talk to the restaurant in advance and have them decant, it’s hard to drink the wine at the right moment. Otherwise I’d have to drop out of the conversation and focus on serving the wine, but I was the host that day, so I couldn’t. So I have some regrets about the wine.
The Paleo ’03 is a Drops of God wine, so I figured it needed no explanation and didn’t even take a photo. It tasted very good. Even so, it felt a little overpowered by the food..
This was pumpkin soup, I think..
Most bloggers diligently photograph the menu and so on, but I just can’t do that.. -_-;; I doubt I’ll ever become a popular blogger, so I’ll keep running this for sharing information with a few people I know.
A dish that looks like something special
It takes a huge amount of effort to make a plate like this. Sauce is the lifeblood of French cooking, and every dish has a different one. Sometimes a single plate uses several sauces.. That’s why I think if you want to eat French food properly, you have to go to a big restaurant. It’s just too hard for a bistro to prepare everything one by one. This place did prepare things well, at a grande-maison level for a bistro, but it couldn’t quite get the flavours or the timing of the courses perfect. Rather than for celebrating a special occasion, it seems a good place to go to find out what kind of food a first-rate restaurant serves…
Was this the foie gras?
Well.. personally I’d be happier if they left out dishes that are nothing special, but I don’t suppose most people share my view.
This looks like a quiche..
At first the dishes came out quite stylish, but past the halfway point we got home-style cooking. I suppose this kind of dish is what makes it a bistro. Then again, maybe I’ve got so used to Japanese-style French food that classic French cooking just doesn’t move me much.
Cheese platter
The cheese was in very good condition. It’s not easy to put together and serve cheese this good. But.. why does the cheese come out at this point? Because it’s French? Actually, in a French course the cheese is served after the main and before dessert so that you finish the rest of your red wine (and, ideally, order a dessert wine too). Eating dessert with red wine just isn’t right. But this place gave us far too much cheese. They should cut and bring just as much as you ask for, enough to go with the red wine you have left. If you’d already finished the red wine, how on earth are you supposed to eat the cheese.. (Surely not as a snack..)
Soufflé
They say it’s hard to make it rise, and I just thought, I see. The taste was sort of everyman..
The vinegar I brought along.
It’s vinegar aged in oak barrels. I was told it makes a good gift, so I bought it, but the taste was just so-so..
Was this ice cream…
This was ordinary too.. They say desserts are this place’s strength, but I wonder if it’s just that there are a lot of them. You can see the effort that went into making them, but that alone can’t satisfy the palate.
Baked sweets served with tea
I was really pleased with these, and if they sold them wrapped separately I’d have wanted to take some home. They’re so sweet that most of the group gave up after one bite, but this level of sweetness works for someone like me.
In fact, the average adult man can’t really perceive sweetness properly. His sense of sweetness has dulled, so anything reasonably sweet just becomes ‘sweet!’. Children and women, on the other hand, sense sweetness keenly and take real pleasure in it. A clear example is the main characters of the manga Antique Bakery: being a gourmet who pursues flavour doesn’t mean blindly seeking out sweet things.
Whether someone likes sweet things depends on how their sensory organs are made; it’s not something effort or education can change. If your body won’t take it, there’s nothing you can do. So if you have someone nearby who likes sweet things and will go around eating with you, you’re lucky.
I hope I can organise another gathering like this and get together again. These days I’m so busy it feels like I work 24 hours a day, but once things calm down a bit..