A taste of Burgundy...

This visit happened at Bistro Du Vin because I was informed by a little bird that the consultant chef Maria Goncalves from Burgundy was to be in this weekend and that she would be whipping up some of her own food which was off the regular menu. I got interested and got table for lunch in the weekend.

We started off with a zucchini minestrone with prawns and poached eggs and a pasta and broccoli in skate wing broth. 

The former was different from the commonly seen minestrone from the lack of tomatoes in the soup. The flavours in the light vegetable broth came mostly from the bits of bacon which accented it with savoury smokiness. Upping the ante for this soup were a couple of crunchy textured prawns and a wobbly poached egg. 

The pasta in skate wing broth was also delicious. Soup based pastas aren't generally a thing for me. This one surpassed what I had expected. Robust and flavourful with bits garlic, highlights of poached tomatoes and some spiciness from red chilli. As if accentuate how much we had enjoyed this, we had to ask for extra bread to mop the plate dry with.

After a warm up from the delicious soups, came the braised veal knuckle with ratatouille and a roasted duck breast with foie gras and truffles sauce. 

The former looked to me much like an osso buco rather than a veal knuckle, complete with the boned in middle that contained that precious scrap of oesophagus clogging marrow. The meat was expectedly, "fall off the bone" tender that one could just attack with a mere fork. 

Well done also were the thinly sliced tender roasted duck breast, medium done and lying in a pool of very fragrant truffle sauce. The accompanying slices of foie gras weren't as impressive as I would have liked, but the highlight was the nicely done duck in the sauce. Would be really great if this ever turned up on the regular menu.

This dessert was known as Poires Belle Hélène. A spiced poached pear with vanilla bean ice cream, slathered with melted dark chocolate and shaved almond flakes. I liked that the fruit still retained a little hint of crunch in the texture and the rest of the dessert tasted pretty much as it looked. In a good way that is.