Archive
Berlin: Tim Raue (Oct. 2013)
Author: Victor
Exec Chef: Tim Raue
Website: http://www.tim-raue.com/index.php?task=restaurant§ion=aktuelles&lang=en
October 29, 2013
I wanted to try a great restaurant while in Berlin, so I looked around Chowhound a bit. The name Tim Raue came up a lot, so I checked out the menu, was intrigued, and promptly made reservations!
The restaurant was only about half-full, and even online I was able to make dinner reservations for all of the days I was in Berlin. Maybe people just don’t eat at fancy restaurants on weekdays in Berlin… It makes me a little sad, because with the quality of the food this restaurant would be full on a Tuesday night in NYC (or HK haha).
There are three options: you can order a la carte, the seasonal tasting menu (4-6 courses), or the “unique” menu (their fancy one). I went with the “unique” one because I wanted to see the best they had to offer. The items I was particularly excited to try included the partridge and Peking duck, but the langoustine ended up surprising me—it was very well cooked, and the concept was perfectly executed.
The meal had hints of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, AND Vietnamese cooking. It’s pretty bizarre… Somehow, though, Chef Raue makes it all work well!
Copenhagen: Geranium (Oct. 2013)
Author: Victor
Exec Chef: Rasmus Kofoed
Website: http://geranium.dk/#/en/restaurant/welcome/
October 25, 2013
I’m kind of posting out of order here. I have some past meals from Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Copenhagen that I should be covering, but I already have this post ready… so I’m just going to publish it! (I don’t know how long the Noma posts are going to take…)
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Geranium’s a name I hear get mentioned alongside Noma a lot when people talk about the best restaurant in Copenhagen, and after eating there I can see why. The flavor and ingredient combinations are exciting and very technically precise. Also, the plating is gorgeous—the presentation of each course was very beautiful. I can see why some people believe that Geranium is as good as Noma. Chef Rasmus Kofoed is a vegetarian, and that seemed to shine through in this meal. It wasn’t very protein-heavy at all, and in a lot of ways it was just as, if not more, vegetable-focused as Noma was.
Geranium reservations are a LOT easier to get than Noma ones. You have to make your reservation three months in advance at a specific time for Noma, while I made my Geranium reservations on the same week. We went for lunch, though, and I’m not sure how easy dinner reservations are to make—during our lunch, the restaurant actually wasn’t even full. There’s slightly more food for dinner, but apparently the lunch tasting menu is close enough. (I mainly chose lunch because of the lighting. Pictures of food during dinner for my iPhone are always terrible haha.)
The restaurant’s on the eighth floor, and it has a beautiful view of the surrounding area. There’s a lot of green to look at, and eating in the fall allowed us to see a wide range of vibrant colors. The view actually reminded me a lot of Per Se’s view of Columbus Circle and Central Park.
The service here felt a lot more formal than Noma’s. Everyone in Noma seemed super happy and laidback, while the staff at Geranium exuded more of a formal dining aura—kind of what I’m used to at Per Se in NYC. The staff is still really nice, though, and they’re still more laidback than, for instance, waiters at the stricter French restaurants in NYC or Europe.
You get two options of tasting menus for lunch, a longer 3-hour tasting or a shorter 2-hour tasting. Naturally, we went for the longer version. Lunch was a mix of canapés to be eaten with our hands and individual courses. There wasn’t necessarily a strict transition from canapés to actual courses, but the closest to an actual “transition” would be when they give out the bread.
Tokyo: Ginza Kyubey (Sep. 2013)
Author: Victor
Owner: Yosuke Imada
Website: http://www.kyubey.jp/index_e.html
Date: September 18, 2013
A day after eating at Yasuda’s Tokyo restaurant, we were ready to eat our first high-end sushi meal in Tokyo! My friend made reservations at Kyubey’s honten (main branch) in Ginza a while back in anticipation for this trip, and all of us were pretty excited to try this out. People generally seem to have a list of five to six top sushi places in Tokyo, and Ginza Kyubey gets mentioned quite a few times. It seems to be a Japanese institution, given its history.
There are several different Kyubey branches around Tokyo, and they’re all supposed to be similar to each other. (Of course, we chose the main branch because we figured that, if there were a difference after all, the main branch would be the best.) Kyubey is supposed to be the easiest of the top sushi places to get a reservation at—it’s very foreigner-friendly, and the restaurants are big enough so that they don’t run out of room as quickly as the others.
When we entered, the owner, Yosuke Imada, greeted us with a smile. Apparently, he is famous for greeting every customer, even chatting with each for a while. The first thing I noticed about the restaurant was how big it seemed to be. There was an elevator to direct people to different floors. I learned that the restaurant consists of five floors, and each floor has one or two sushi bars. The restaurant was filled when we went for good reason—the food was excellent. We were seated on the fifth floor and given the menus.
There’s the normal omakase option and four types of set courses, from Shigaraki (around 15,750 JPY) to Rosanjin (around 31,500 JPY). We ordered the Rosanjin, as we wanted to try a good variety of what they had to offer. (This would actually prove to not be enough food for us—we ended up ordering more pieces of sushi after, and I’m glad we did. Rosanjin only came with eight pieces of sushi, and we wanted to try more!
Monte
Victor
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Happy Noms 