Provenance (Beechworth) 01/2019

The entrance to this highly regarded regional restaurant, which has featured in the AGFG for almost a decade, and is currently rated 30th by Gourmet Magazine in Australia's top 100 restaurant, is through an impressive very large wooden door down the side of this former bank building.

Spread over a number of rooms it retains something of the grandeur of the original building with  a combination of wide square doorways,

20 ft ceilings, with rosettes 

and large arched windows.

 Table are bare with simple settings.
The chef offers á la carte or a tasting menu. $125 for six courses with some extras available. Matched wines add $75 or $125 for premium wines. They have an extensive wine list with a good range of sake which fits their Japanese influenced menu.
I was pleased to see a glossary of sake terms included in the wine menu.

The wine menu is extensive with some concentration on the region but I elected to have sake which was beautifully presented.

 A very much to my taste house made sourdough bread was served early with a cold smoked creamed butter. If you like that sort of thing this was out of this world. My mouth waters thinking of it.

 I skipped the optional starter of home made silken tofu dish with cucumber, ginger and kiriboshi but added a garfish with its grilled bones.

 Just a mouth full, full of taste and crunch.
First course was slow cooked carrots, lavender infused buttermilk, pumpkin seed crumble, pumpkin seed oil.

 The carrots were firm, the pumpkin seeds crunchy but it was hard to distinguish the lavender flavour.
Sashimi, ponzu, wasabi leaf pickle, cold pressed sunflower oil followed.

 The kingfish was as it always is with an interesting contrast with the citrus tasting sauce and the sweetish pickles.
Smoked wallaby tartar, Japanese fish sauce and egg yolk dressing, cured mullet roe

was a benign sort of dish, pleasant and inoffensive as long as you find raw meat to your taste. It was well balances so nothing dominated.
 Free range duck, beetroot, pickled cherry (which had then been dehydrated), umeboshi

was another very appealing dish however a small fly managed to get into the sauce. I moved it to the side of the plate and called the waiter. He quickly removed it and offered to replate the dish. I said it was Ok so he didn't do anything more. I believe that, in any quality establishment that would have been unacceptable and the dish would have been removed without allowing the customer to continue with it.
Tri Tip, silverbeet, Café de Tokyo butter, presumably the chef's joke, a variation on Café de Paris butter

 

was exceptionally tasty although it had quite a lot of gristle in the meat.

I skipped the optional cheese dish and went on to dessert.
Leaves from the garden, raspberries on a cream base behind sheets of meringue.

 A pleasant dessert.
This was another of those unique meals. I suppose in a way every meal is unique but some are more so. As such the are hard to compare to other unique meals. The dishes were very interesting. They were not over the top with a myriad of ingredients. The hero of each dish was made more interesting by its accompaniments, never dominated by them. I very much doubt, as good as it was, that it belongs in the top 100 restaurants in Australia but it certainly is a very good restaurant.

Score: 17.25 /20

L'Hotel (Paris) 01 /2013

This charming small restaurant in the Rue Beaux-Art is in the hotel where Oscar Wilde lived in Paris for the last six years of his life.

   

The restaurant is reached by passing through three small dark lounges. The room is
 small but quite lavish
                                                                 but the columns are not marble and it creates a faux impression.

.                                                               . As we have discovered at several fine restaurants here the toilets are some way away and are often reached via narrow winding staircases. It is easy to bet confused in trying to find the way back to the eating area!
                                                                                                                                                                                        Seating is on fairly low satin covered chairs with cushions and prettily upholstered lounges. making them comfortable.

Tables are white clothed with napkins and good quality cutlery.                                                                     Three waiters adequately looked after the patrons.

They have a set price lunch which is very reasonable for three courses about $75, or an a la carte menu for those who want more choices. Wine can easily more than double the bill. Before the first course the chef sent out an extremely fine amuse bouche a light parsnip puree over some tiny cubes of potato. Superb.

This was followed by a set of four tastes: A small cube of smoked salmon, a truffle cream filled pipe of biscuit, a small cheese bread and a cone of fenestrated chips. This was also a delectable little entrée.

The first course was a choice pate or scallops. The pate de foie gras was pan seared pressed and came with pink grape fruit and milk bread. The acidity set it off the pate beautifully.                                                                The scallops, from Normandie, were presented with artichoke, artichoke mousse and thin slices of apple and had a lemon butter sauce. Ever so slightly over seared for my personal taste the dish otherwise was a creation of gentle flavours with each part making a contribution that blended to make the whole so much better than its parts.

Mains were fish or fowl. The two broad strips of roasted Bresse chicken breast were accompanied by potatoes, bacon and artichokes again making a superior dish.

The fish was cod, cooked in the skin was as good as it could possibly be. The skin was crisp and the fish delicate. It came with sweet onion and a shell fish broth. The taste and feeling of it lingers on, it was so very very good.

A cheese plate was thin slices of yellow comte with a fine slice of jellied pear and grated truffle. Little as it was the truffle aroma was very powerful. The pear and cheese were excellent.                                                           Dessert was elaborate: Chantilly noisettes, pate de marron (Chestnut), marron biscuits, flowers, lemon cress and gold leaf! This was beautifully presented and delicious, almost too pretty to eat.

Finally we had coffee and petit fours.

This meal, at a one star restaurant, cost one tenth of our New Years Eve dinner had we not added an expensive bottle of champagne and was better balanced, less elaborate, and the better for that too, and far better value for a really good meal, about what a three course meal would set you back at a decent suburban Melbourne bistro. Definitely somewhere very nice to go for lunch in Paris

Score 16.5/20